The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era. The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.