Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.