No threats. No pageantry. A time, a place, two images: river and bridge. The envoy from Xia had died at Willow Bridge. The river fed the docks where Wei once disappeared. Meaning braided with meaning until the rope could hang any neck it wished.
"Reply?" the eunuch murmured.
"I will come," Ziyan said.
When he had gone, the room seemed smaller.
Wei reemerged, face carefully empty. "He means to fix your story to his."
"Or drown me in it if it runs the wrong direction," she said. "Ning is the kind of man who stands on the bank until the current chooses which bank to eat."
Li Qiang tied her cloak, fingers deft and brief. "Then we choose first."
"No," Ziyan said, surprising even herself with the steadiness of it. "Not tonight. Tonight we tell the truth until it breaks on something harder. Let us see what he calls the river. Let us see which bridge he means."
They walked with her to the threshold. Snow had turned to needle rain. Ziyan paused, turned back, and for a fleeting instant the old life caught her—the one where she could speak and be understood without weighing every word against iron.
"Lianhua," she said, the name a thread between teeth. "If I meet her again, I do not know whether I will draw her in or cut her loose." She looked from Li Qiang to Wei. "I do not know who either of you were before me. I only know who you are when I am with you. That is all I have left to trust."
Li Qiang bowed, fist to palm. "Then we will be that."
Wei's smile was small, crooked. "And if we fail at being good men, we will at least be your men."
She almost laughed. It caught in her chest and hurt like a healing bone.
"Stay ready," she said, and stepped into the rain.
The Hall of Autumn Lattice lay quiet at the edge of the inner courts, screens carved with cranes and old poems. Prince Ning was already there, alone, hands behind his back, looking not at her but at the moon smeared like milk behind cloud.
"You came," he said, as if the snow itself had spoken.
"I was summoned."
"Hm." He glanced over. "Your father thinks in winters. You think in fires. Both are useful, if one lives long enough." He gestured to a low table. "Sit."
She did not. "You said a spy was taken."
"Two," he corrected. "One still breathing. One who tried not to be." His tone was almost idle. "Both spoke of a woman who walked out of your door and wore two names."
Ziyan's throat closed, opened. "Then you already know what I will say."
"I want to hear whether you say it," Ning replied.
So she told him—plainly, without ornaments: the hair ornament glint at the West Pavilion, the empty chest, the choice to open a door, the thread she believed she still held. She did not explain hope, or the shape of it; such things were not coin in this room.
When she finished, Ning's expression had not moved.
"Truth told is not the same as truth kept," he said. "But it is more useful than lies." He turned away again, as if listening to a court only he could hear. "You will continue your… quiet work. Your seals remain clipped. Your footsteps will be counted. You will send me what you do not send your father."
The last sentence fell like a leaf and made the sound of an axe.
Ziyan did not bow. "And if I refuse?"
"You will not," he said, and for a heartbeat the mask slipped, not with warmth, but something like weariness. "Some storms are better endured than ended too soon."
He left her with the cranes.
She walked back through a city that smelled of wet ash. By the time she reached the teahouse, the brazier had burned low. Li Qiang had set a cloak over the chair she favored. Wei had fallen asleep sitting up, a knife loosened in his hand, a man learning to rest in a house that would never belong to him.
She eased the cloak aside and sat. Her body found the angle it remembered from the years before titles, when grief and purpose were simpler things. She pressed her palms to her eyes until stars broke behind them.
The tears came then, quiet and without spectacle, the kind that admit nothing to the world but take everything from the chest. She counted them like beads. Lianhua's laugh. Yufei's hush. Li Wenxu's voice when it said survival and sounded like stone. Prince Ning's line about storms. The word stillness, which had once comforted and now accused.
When she could breathe again, she wiped her face and looked at what remained.
Two men. One soldier who had learned to be gentle. One spy who had learned to be loyal. Neither simple. Both dangerous. Both here.
"Tomorrow," she said into the coals. "We go on."
No one answered. They did not need to.
Outside, the rain hardened. Somewhere deep in the palace, a bell marked the hour with a tone too low for ceremony. Ziyan laid her cloak across her knees and listened as the storm pressed its forehead against the city and did not yet enter. She could feel the shape of Prince Ning's leash and the space it allowed for running.
Some storms are better endured than ended too soon, he had said.
She would endure. And when the time came—whether at river or bridge—she would choose which fire to light.