Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
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.
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room.
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
The snow kept falling, patient as a creditor.