Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
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.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
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.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
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.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.