The Blind Swordmaster Took In His Own Assassin novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Servant at the Gate
Ra-on walked into the blind swordmaster's villa to kill him, and the man caught his wrist without turning his head.
The bamboo gate of Quiet Crane Villa had no bar across it.
Ra-on stood in the rain and looked at that for a long time.
In eleven years of killing for the Gray Heron Hall, no target had ever left a door open for him.
He tried the gate with one finger.
It swung inward and creaked.
His contract said the target lived alone with one boy.
His contract said the target was blind.
It did not say the man left his gate unbarred, in the rain, for anyone to walk through.
Ra-on put on the face he used for servants, meek and tired, and went in.
A thin boy was sweeping water off the porch with a broom much too big for him.
He had a stubborn cowlick and a patched practice shirt, and he stared at Ra-on.
"Are you lost?" the boy asked.
"Hungry," Ra-on said.
He let his voice crack on it, because hunger is the easiest lie in the world, and it was mostly true.
"I can cook, haul water and split wood."
"I'll work for rice."
The boy opened his mouth to answer.
"Let him in, Dong-ju," said a voice from the dark of the hall.
It was a warm voice, a little rough, and it did not sound like a man who was dying of anything.
"You'll catch cold standing there, whoever you are."
The man who came out into the lamplight had no shoes on.
He was tall and lean, in an undyed indigo robe with the sleeves rolled up, and his wavy dark hair hung loose past his shoulders.
A pale thin scar ran across both of his closed eyes and down the bridge of his nose.
This was Mok Ryeo-won, the Crane of Haeram.
He had been the champion of the Alliance's Sword Gathering four years running, and then, for two years, nothing.
The Hall kept a whole room of stories about him, and none of them said he would greet a stranger so kindly.
He could not look at Ra-on, of course.
He turned his face a little toward the rain on Ra-on's shoulders.
"You walk like a man carrying three knives," Ryeo-won said.
Ra-on's stomach dropped.
"Four," he said.
He had learned long ago that the best lie is the one that sounds like a joke.
"One is for the rice."
Ryeo-won laughed.
It was an easy laugh, and it startled Ra-on.
"A cook with four knives," Ryeo-won said.
"Dong-ju, find him a dry shirt and a bed in the loft above the kitchen."
"The last servant left because I burned the rice."
"He left because you named a chicken after him," the boy said.
"He left because the chicken was better company," said Ryeo-won.
Ra-on stood there dripping and hated how easy this was.
The Hall had given him thirty days, counted from the night the black crow brought his orders.
Twenty-nine were left.
He ate a bowl of cold millet at the kitchen table while the boy watched him.
"What do I call you?" the boy asked.
"Mu-seok," said Ra-on.
It was the name of a dead man's horse, and it came out smooth as butter.
He counted exits while the boy talked.
There were two doors and one window, and a plum tree outside the loft that would hold his weight.
There was no bar on the gate and no guard but a nineteen-year-old with a broom.
The Blind Swordmaster slept with his door open, Dong-ju said proudly, as if it were a skill.
Ra-on waited until the villa went quiet and the rain thinned to a drip.
Then he took the knife from his calf and went down the ladder in his bare feet.
Ryeo-won's room was at the end of the porch.
The sliding door stood open a hand's width.
Inside, a long shape lay under a quilt on a mat on the floor, breathing slowly.
A sword stood on a rack in the corner, wrapped in cloth, and a thick skin of dust lay over the cloth.
Ra-on noticed the dust and thought nothing of it.
He crossed the room without a sound, as he had crossed a hundred rooms.
He knelt and set the point of the knife against the pulse under Ryeo-won's jaw.
He leaned.
A hand came up out of the quilt and closed around his wrist.
Ryeo-won did not open his eyes, and he did not sit up.
Ra-on had not felt the air move.
The fingers were long and warm, and the thumb settled on the inside of Ra-on's wrist, right where the blood beat.
Ryeo-won lay there and counted him for a few seconds.
"Your heart is slow," he said, in a voice thick with sleep.
"That's odd, for a thief."
The knife had not moved a hair's breadth.
Ra-on could not push it in.
He had braced for a fight, a shout, a hidden blade.
He had not braced for a man who simply held him, so gently it felt like being lent something.
"Lower it," Ryeo-won said, "and sit down."
"You're shaking."
Ra-on was not shaking.
He looked down, and he was.
Ryeo-won let go, and Ra-on slid the knife away, and neither of them said a word about it.
"There's nothing here worth stealing," Ryeo-won said.
"Nothing but the boy, and the boy is asleep."
"I wasn't," Ra-on began, and stopped.
"Whoever sent you," said the Blind Swordmaster, smiling with his eyes closed, "picked a bad week."
"Stay anyway."
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