The lamps along the outer corridor had burned down to their last inch of oil. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
“Do you know what the worst part is?” she asked. “I would have said yes. You never bothered to ask.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
There is a difference between a debt and a leash, and the difference is usually paperwork. The junior disciples had begun taking bets, which was its own kind of forecast.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. It was not a complicated arrangement, which was precisely what made it dangerous.
“Half the sect thinks you are dead,” she said. “The useful half.”
“You are early,” she said, without looking up. “That is either respect or nerves.”
“Say the number out loud,” the old man said. “Things you refuse to say out loud tend to get expensive.”
The technique took eleven breaths. He had, by his own estimate, about seven. Every question she asked had a cheaper answer waiting behind it, and she refused all of them.
“It is not a rescue,” he corrected. “A rescue implies someone is going back.”
The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own. There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them.
He understood, then, that he had been the message and not the messenger. Nothing about the wound was fatal, which suggested the intent had been a message.
Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it. She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working.
The door closed. Somewhere below, a ledger was quietly amended.