Rain had been falling for six days, and the river had opinions about it. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Outside, the market went on shouting about fish, entirely unbothered by the end of an era.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness.
They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
“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.”
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. 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 had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.