The Hall of Clear Judgement held its breath.
Cloudlight sifted through the tall lattices, thin as rice-paper skin stretched over bone. No drums. No musicians. Only the scrape of silk and the quiet settle of officials who knew that mercy, in this palace, often wore a sharper edge than law.
Li Ziyan stood alone on the jade inlay. She had not braided her hair in triumph nor loosened it in despair—only bound it with a plain pin of iron. Snow from the courtyard clung to the hem of her violet robe and refused to melt.
Prince Ning sat beneath the shadow of the phoenix screen. His sash was crimson, his gaze cool as rain caught in stone. To his flanks, a half-ring of ministers: Lord Gao of the Southern Bureau with his measured scorn; Grand Secretariat Zhou masking unease with courtesy; two censors who pretended they had no mouths when power spoke. The Emperor was absent. The Empress sent no fan.
"Minister Li Ziyan," Ning said at last, the syllables even. "You were asked a simple question last night: where did the woman called Lianhua go."
Ziyan lifted her chin. "I opened the door and let her leave."
A murmur rippled, then stilled. The words were not excuse nor shield—only fact.
Ning's eyes did not shift. "You knowingly loosed an alleged spy of Xia from imperial custody."
"I loosed a person I could not yet condemn," Ziyan replied. "And kept the net tied to her ankle thread."
That drew the faintest quirk from someone behind a sleeve. It did not move Ning.
"You have this court in the hollow between two teeth," he said softly. "If we bite, we grind you and lose the tooth besides. If we do not, we taste blood anyway."
Ziyan bowed. Not low. Not insolent. Just enough to accept the shape of the trap around her. "Then decide how long you wish to taste iron."
A long, quiet beat. Then Ning rose.
"Judgment," he said, voice carrying to the rafters. "Li Ziyan is relieved, for one season, of all discretionary seals belonging to the Vice Ministry of Rites. Her petitions must bear countersignature. She will remain within the Eastern Bureau and Temple District unless summoned. She will answer to any inquiry without delay. She will not be chained."
Lord Gao half-rose, outraged. "Your Highness—"
Ning did not look at him. "Lord Gao may sit."
The older man subsided, pale about the mouth.
"For Sergeant Li Qiang," Ning continued, glancing once toward the rear where the soldier waited in the shadows, "no further sanction. The court remembers debts." His gaze returned to Ziyan. "As for your… charity. Should the thread you speak of break, you will be held as the hand that cut it."
Ziyan held the stare. "I understand."
Ning's lids lowered, not quite a blink. "Live carefully, Minister Li. Some storms are better endured than ended too soon."
No more than that. No smile. No threat named. Only a line spoken as if to the air.
He turned away. The censors rose in flurry; officials followed, grateful to have a posture to copy. As the hall emptied, Ziyan felt the gaze she did not turn to meet—Li Wenxu, her father, seated with the seniors. He did not incline his head. He did not frown. He was the stillness water seeks and drowns in.
Snow squeaked beneath her soles as she left the hall.
Wind off the canal drove needles through the alleyways that led to the Scholars' Quarter. The teahouse crouched where it always had, eaves shouldering winter as if it were just another customer to be tolerated. Inside, warmth gathered low and close: steam ghosting from teapots, the blunt comfort of worn wood, the familiar creak of the back stair.
Li Qiang rose from the corner as she entered. He had left his armor folded in a chest days ago; tonight he wore gray so dark it drank the room. Snow had melted in his hair and left it damp.
He searched her face, said nothing—and then, seeing that her expression would not hold much longer, said everything with the smallest bow and a hand that moved a seat an inch closer to the brazier.
Wei came in from the kitchen a heartbeat later, a cloak thrown over travel-stained clothes, the wind still clinging to his shoulders. He set a pot of ginger tea down and did not meet her eyes at first, as if the old habit of surviving by never seeing what mattered most had returned to him like pain in a healed bone.
No one spoke until the coals popped.
"They took the seals," Ziyan said, voice low. "Not the name." She let out a breath that might have been a laugh if it had been kinder. "Prince Ning binds the hands and leaves the mouth. A neat trick. He wants me to talk—and be heard."
Wei rubbed a thumb along the rim of his cup. "It's how you test which birds sing when the cage door shifts."
Li Qiang's jaw worked once. "What did you tell him of Lianhua?"
"The truth," she said. "That I opened the door."
Silence expanded, then settled.
Ziyan's fingers closed around the hot porcelain until heat licked her palm. She forced the words through the tightness in her throat. "She came to me, once, with a story of a family crushed by our nobles. A story that fit the shape of my hope too well." Her mouth tugged, painful. "Hope is a clever thief. It takes your judgment before you notice the weight missing."
Wei's eyes lifted, at last. "You still kept her alive."
"I do not know if that was kindness or stubbornness," Ziyan said. "I know only this: my phoenix shows me who can strike, not who will. I thought my heart could read the rest. It cannot."
The admission hung there—a small, raw thing in a room that knew her by the edges of steel.
Li Qiang moved first. He poured more tea, unasked, as if the act itself could knot a cut thread. "Your heart reads what blades cannot. That is why I follow you," he said simply.
Wei's mouth tipped, wry. "And why enemies try to make you stop."
Ziyan took the cup but did not drink. The words of the hall returned, colder the second time: Some storms are better endured than ended too soon.
"What if I do not endure?" she asked, almost to herself. "What if I am only… tired?"
Li Qiang reached across the brazier, palm up, waiting without demand. After a long breath she set her wrist in his hand, just enough to feel the steady weight of another life where her pulse ran thin. The contact lasted a heartbeat, two, then she eased back before the warmth could turn confusing.
Wei cleared his throat, brittle. "Jinrui's men still watch the river gates. If Lianhua moves with Xia's couriers, we'll know. If she moves with ours, we'll know sooner."
"She will not move like a courier," Ziyan said. "She will move like a daughter returning to a house that once gave her shelter." Her eyes went distant. "Lord Gao has many houses."
Wei's gaze sharpened. "You think Gao holds her leash?"
"I think Gao holds a knife and believes himself surgeon," she said. "Whether he cuts for Xia or for his own mirror, I do not yet know."
A gust pressed sleet against the shutters. Somewhere in the district a gong sounded the changing watch.
Ziyan drew the brazier poker through the coals; sparks rose and died. "Li Wenxu is a colder river. He built a channel beneath all this long before we learned to swim. Yufei hides from him, not from Xia. If I drag that river to the sun now, it will flood the court."
Wei's expression flickered; guilt moved through it like a fish beneath ice. "He met me once, before you knew me. Offered me work. Said Qi needed foreign eyes willing to look where its own would not. When I began to see more than he wanted, he told me to… blink. Your father's mercy is not the kind that leaves you able to write later."
Li Qiang shot him a look that was not kind. Wei didn't flinch.
Ziyan let her eyes fall closed. Behind the lids, fire swam—visions she could not command, only suffer. Boots on wet stone. A fan lifting. Lianhua's back as it slipped into rain. The Emperor's seal pressed into wax. And over it all, a voice that did not belong to any one mouth: Choose which fire to light.
A rap sounded at the door downstairs. Three knocks, a pause, a single knuckle—Prince Ning's courier pattern. Wei vanished into the kitchen's shadows without being told. Li Qiang moved to the stair and stood one tread lower than Ziyan, so that whoever entered would see her first.
The eunuch stepped in, steam clinging to him like a second robe. He bowed, held out an ebony tube. "From His Highness."
Ziyan broke the seal. Inside lay a single strip of silk, written in a hand that left no dust behind.
You will answer, in the Hall of Autumn Lattice, at the second bell. A spy was taken, and disturbances follow. We will speak of the river and the bridge.