Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside. The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.