There was a particular quality to the silence in that room — the kind that costs money. He had been told the family was in decline. Decline, apparently, still ran to four courtyards.
In the capital, a favour is a currency with a floating exchange rate. The old instructor used to say that a technique you cannot explain is a technique you do not own.
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.
“Whatever you are about to do,” the guard said, “please do it somewhere that is not my shift.”
She had spent four years learning to be unremarkable, and it was about to stop working. The estate was smaller than the rumours, and better defended than the maps.
The blade was old, badly balanced, and the only honest thing in the room. Three days of travel had rubbed the edges off the plan without improving it.
There were two ways out of the valley, and someone had spent real money closing one of them. What he wanted was simple. What he was willing to trade for it was the interesting part.
Money moves quietly in a city like this; grudges do not. 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.”
“There is a word for people who bargain with things like that,” the priest said. “The word is briefly.”
“I am not asking you to trust me,” he said. “I am asking you to be practical.”
The bell rang a third time. This time, everyone was listening.