Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.