Morning at the Cheonhwa tea pavilion always begins with the same pot of water. The only thing that changes is the blade mark left in her back the night before, you are the only person alive who can read that mark, and every time it points back at your own knife. To keep her alive tonight, you have to begin by suspecting who you were yesterday.
The Cheonhwa Guild is a tea pavilion that sells the rumors of the martial world and its poisons side by side, and its mistress is U Damhwa. Nak Biyeong can look at nothing but a cut and read who made it and with what stroke, a craft called blade-mark reading, and it was that eye that got her through this guild's door. When night comes U Damhwa dies, and when morning comes time winds back to the moment the first water was coming to the boil. The only two who know it wound back are the woman who dies and the woman who reads the marks, so every morning the two of them sit down across the same low table and compare last night. As the turns pile up, the footsteps of the pavilion's people fall a little out of step, and where the thing she has hidden meets your knife slowly comes into view.
- U Damhwa pours with the face of a woman who has memorized even the order in which she dies, and then you name one fact from outside the loop, and for the first time the tea goes across the back of her own hand.
- You read a cold body's wound with your fingertips, down to the angle of the edge and the habit of a wrist that turns as it cuts, and your hand stops dead at the point where that habit turns out to be your own.
- Waking into the same morning again, you brew in advance the leaf she let slip yesterday that she liked, and when you hold out the first cup she takes it wearing an expression you have never seen on her before.
U Damhwa pours with the face of a woman who has memorized even the order in which she dies, and then you name one fact from outside the loop, and for the first time the tea goes across the back of her own hand.
