The thing under my ribs turned once, lazy, not hungry. The lamp above us bent until the flame's tongue seemed to stretch toward my shoulder. Shen Yue's eyes tracked it and then returned to mine. She had the look of a woman who has decided which part of her heart she can afford to keep.
Across the city, omens practiced. Wells bubbled as if fish had learned to speak beneath the cobbles. Black carp surfaced in the lotus ponds, rolled, and lay quiet without wounds. A novice monk bit his own tongue in his sleep and woke whispering bell-notes that came from under stone. The tiger on my banner bled a line of ink, slow as marrow, down the seam where a seamstress had taken pain to align the stripes. General Sun sent a note in his own hand: Half the men refuse the same roof twice. The other half polish armor as if shine could teach iron to learn.
We waited badly through the last two hours before dawn. Waiting teaches a man which thoughts are lies; it does not teach him to be grateful for the lesson. The southern hum thickened. The marshes exhaled a sweetness that made teeth feel thin. The eunuchs walked with bare feet, not to be quiet, but because the floors themselves had begun to prefer skin.
At graylight the fog rolled in from the north—wrong direction, wrong taste. It climbed the wall and forgot to fall. Zhou's riders who had thought themselves stone slid back into the pass like ink retreating from a brush. They did not bow to our watchers. Watching had ended for them.
I mounted without herald or drum. Liao Yun's replacement standard-bearer—Sun's own man—held the tiger high. The cloth was stiff, as if it had slept in frost. General Sun took his place to my left, shield strapped, the kind of calm on his face that a man makes when he has already written his children's names on the back of his saddle. Shen Yue took the right with the economy of a blade laid on a table you trust.
We moved through streets that had forgotten to echo. Women watched from behind screens with eyes that did not blink. An old man set down a bowl and bowed his head not to us, not even to the banner—only to the thought that a house might still be a house when morning turned to measurement. Above, the lamps along the eaves bowed as one, as if a signal had run through their small bodies of light: Stand straight for others. Bend for him.
At the South Gate, a eunuch waited with a scroll he did not dare open. The Lord Protector stood above in the crenel, helmet shadowing his eyes. He did not raise his hand. He did not need to. I felt his refusal like a weight on the spine.
"Do not strike first," he said. The wind did not carry it to me. The stone did.
I let my horse take three steps past the line where gate becomes world. Shen Yue's breath caught and then remembered duty. General Sun's knuckles whitened against leather. Behind us, drums found their cadence—the good kind, the one that says do not run; we planned for this. The city exhaled and realized it still had lungs.
Messengers met us at the old barley fields where the road narrows between two low rises that help a small army look larger. Their faces had the look men bring back from looking at numbers that do not care about names.
"The South forms three lines," one said. "White silk at the center, the inverted dragon at their head." He swallowed his own spit as if asking permission. "They number more than we counted yesterday."
"And their mouths?" General Sun asked.
"Busy," said the second messenger, not sure if he was permitted to scorn. "They call you usurper, my lord. They call the Lord Protector thief of Heaven. They say the Emperor has forgiven the South for forgetting the North. They say he will now forgive the North for forgetting itself."
"Forgiveness is a word that breaks its own neck when made to work," I said. "Let it."