"Left hand," said Chan-i.
He had been at it since the fourth watch. There were two lamps and a bucket and the particular smell of nineteen days and a great deal of salt, and Hong Yeohwa sat on a stool against the far wall of the cold room with her back straight and had not made a sound in five hours.
Elder Mo stood at the foot of the table. Doha stood at the head. Grandmother Ok had been carried down at first light and was in the chair, and Doha had not once seen her come to a reading before.
"Left hand's callused across the fingers, not the palm. Sword-and-shield, or sword-and-forearm, one of the escort styles. Snowlight teaches Falling Snow at that rank—"
"Second form," said Hong Yeohwa from the wall.
"Second form. Thank you." Chan-i did not look up. "Right hand, standard sword callus. Nineteen years old, four or five years of daily drill, competent. Shoulders even. Nothing torn."
He worked down.
"Wound," he said, and the room got a little quieter. "Entry at the back, left of the spine, between the eighth and ninth. It's a thrust. Spear or a heavy pike, wide head, and it went through and out under the collarbone, so it came up — sharply up. That means whoever put it in him was lower than he was or he was on a slope."
"He was in a millrace," said Elder Mo.
"He was put in a millrace." Chan-i's hands stopped moving. "Elder. Look at the edges."
Elder Mo came around the table. He looked for a long time.
"Ah," he said, with real distaste.
"What?" said Hong Yeohwa.
Nobody answered her. Doha watched Chan-i decide something.
"Madam," Chan-i said, "your brother was not killed by a spear."
Hong Yeohwa's hands came apart in her lap.
"The wound was made after," said Chan-i. "There's no — the tissue doesn't. When a living body is opened, it reacts, it draws, everything around the hole tries to close it, and it's obvious for about a year afterward if you know what you're looking at. This didn't react. Someone drove a spear through your brother between an hour and three hours after he stopped being alive."
"Then what killed him?"
Chan-i turned Hong Ji-an's head with two hands, gently, the way he did everything, and pushed the hair up from the base of the skull.
There was a mark there. It was very small.
"A needle," he said. "Or a nail. Something narrow, going up into the join, which kills instantly and doesn't bleed much and leaves a hole you can cover with your thumb."
"Why," said Hong Yeohwa, and her voice was not level any more, "would somebody kill him quietly and then make it loud?"
"Because," said Grandmother Ok, from the chair, "they wanted him found by a county clerk who would write bandits, and not by us."
"Doha," said Elder Mo. "Hear him."
Doha had been waiting for it for five hours and had spent every one of them getting his face right.
He put both hands on the edge of the table.
"There's two," he said.
The room did not react the way he expected. Chan-i's head came up fast. Elder Mo went completely still. Grandmother Ok closed her eyes, briefly, like a woman confirming a bill she had already added up.
"Describe them," said Grandmother Ok. "Small one first."
"It's a block. Left forearm, coming up and across, here—" Doha showed it. "It's not even a technique, it's just what he did. He was turning around and getting his arm up when the needle went in. It's thin. It's the thinnest thing I've ever felt and I've only felt two, so that means nothing, but it feels like it's—" He hunted for it. "It feels like it would go on its own. In a year. It's barely anything."
"That is correct and it is remarkable that you know it," said Grandmother Ok. "A reflex isn't an intention. It doesn't have twenty years behind it. Left alone, in a dry grave, that boy would have untied himself by the time his sister had grey in her hair, and no one would ever have known there was a knot in him at all."
"And the other one?" said Elder Mo.
Doha took his hands off the table.
"The other one isn't his," he said.