By the time the argument reached the courtyard, half of it had already been decided. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
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.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
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.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.