Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.