The letter arrived folded twice, sealed once, and addressed to a name she had retired. In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate.
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. Whatever had walked through the outer array had not bothered to close it behind itself.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. He counted the guards twice, got two different numbers, and decided the second one was a lie.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
Someone had gone to considerable trouble to make the scene look like carelessness. She read the report twice, then burned it, then wrote down the three sentences worth keeping.
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards. They had rehearsed the lie so many times that the truth felt like the improvisation.
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
The contract's ninth clause was written in a hand that did not match the other eight. A merchant with nothing to sell is a merchant with something to hide.
The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
He put the cup down, and that was the end of the negotiation.