Snow came early that year, and it came without any of the usual warnings. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. 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. He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. The array flickered — not the failing flicker of exhausted qi, but the deliberate one of a signal.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast. There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself. Three of the seven seals had been broken, and none of them from the outside.
By morning the whole arrangement had changed hands twice, and nobody had raised their voice once.