In the ten days between the letter and Lady Min Soyon's arrival, I became very good at pretending I was not preparing for war.
Not a real war. I was not, in this life, in any danger from Min Soyon. She had made no threats, issued no ultimatums, done nothing but send a polite note with a vaguely intriguing postscript. A reasonable person would have treated it as exactly what it presented itself to be: a social call from a powerful woman with possible professional overlap.
I was not a reasonable person. I was a person with nine lifetimes of evidence that powerful women bearing interesting information almost always wanted something expensive in return.
So I prepared.
The first thing I did was go back to the archive.
