The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
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.
The corridor smelled of iron filings and old incense — a workshop's smell, not a temple's. Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not.
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.
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.
He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
She did not look back at the gate, which is how everyone knew she intended to return.