The North received my sister with a silence that tasted of iron.
No banners, no drums—only a lacquered coffin moving through a city that had learned to watch and not weep. The northern ministers stood beneath slate eaves, sleeves neat, faces shut; their eyes did the speaking. In those looks I read their measure of us: an Emperor who bowed, a clan that ate its own, a realm called Liang that had cut itself into two ribs and was surprised to feel the heart stutter.
Liang has been divided so long the maps have forgotten how to show a single color. A river they call the Boundary cleaves the land like a page torn and stitched with reeds. North keeps the seal and the drill grounds. South keeps the harbors and the fat fields. Between them, market truces and quiet ambushes, marriages made like treaties and treaties kept like knives. Men swear they do not remember who drew the first line. Men lie.
The Emperor walked behind the bier, head bent, hands folded in the careful emptiness they teach a puppet. Meek again. Obedient again. I remembered, and did not forget, the moment in the Hall when his one word had cracked the bone of the court. But the North does not believe a summer storm is a season. They watched him with the hungry politeness of hawks who smell a wound beneath fur.
I kept my place at his left. The bells did not ring so much as grind—stone on stone, the sound of a gate that had forgotten how to open.
Wu Kang followed at a distance, armor bright, man inside it dimmed. His stride had the stiffness of a bow pulled too long. His eyes did not leave the coffin. He had been a blade. Grief had made him a shard.
Wu Jin came last. Hands hidden in his sleeves, gaze lowered. He mourned the way a banker counts: everything that leaves the ledger must be offset by something entered.
The rites were brief. The North prefers economy to theater. A wife of Heaven should have swayed a city; she received the measured nod of an accountant closing an account that no longer paid.
When the bier had been carried through the rear gate to the furnace house, the court broke apart like frost under a heel. The smell of rain stayed in the air without falling. I turned toward the ancestral shrine and found my father waiting where the flagstones meet the shadow of the old pine.
"Prince," he said.
"Father."
His armor drank the light; his shadow lay long, like a spear thrown but not yet fallen. "She was your sister."
"She was judged."
"She was mine." The words were flat, but in them lived a salt that did not come from tears. He had taken a daughter and built a bridge with her. He had walked that bridge a long time. No man likes to discover the far bank is mud.
We stood. The brazier at the shrine's corner lifted its smoke straight and steady. Then it quivered, a thread plucked by a finger no eye could see. He noticed. The old reflex woke in him like a wolf smelling ash.
"You carry silence like a blade," he said, voice low. "Not duty. Not loyalty. Hunger. Will you feed it our house? The North? Liang?"
"If the North calls," I said, "I answer. If the South tests the line, I answer. But not as your hand."
"As what then?"
The answer had no shape, only weight. The brazier's flame leaned toward me, thin as a pen stroke. He held my eyes long enough to prove he still could. Then he looked away first.
Wu Kang kept his distance and his sword sheathed until grief and courage crossed paths wrong inside him. He came to me near the withered pines, where the wind writes on needles and the needles refuse to listen.
"She believed in you," he said. His voice had worn through. "Even when she cursed you, she said you would rise. She thought you would save her."
"She did not need saving," I said. "She needed sight."
His hand tightened on the hilt until bone stood under skin. I did not shift. He did not draw. "She was my roof," he whispered, as if telling a foreigner a word that has no translation. "Now the rain has no place to go."
"You have a sword," I said.
"It does not keep your kind of weather out."
He turned his face away as a man turns from a well when he has seen something in the water that was not his reflection.