Dawn came with smoke braided into it. Scouts slid out of the pines like stitches pulled and rethreaded, horses blowing steam, eyes turned inward with what they'd brought.
"Three villages burned for their granaries," Huo reported, voice as spare as his saddle. "Wagons moving south under heavy guard. The survivors follow the road because there is nowhere else for it to go."
They came by twos and tens, soot making everyone kin: women with flour in their hair that would not come out in one washing, old men whose backs remembered fields better than beds, boys trying to be small enough to be forgotten. A clerk walked among them carrying a ledger wrapped in oilcloth as if salvation might be written on the fourth page; his coat had once been good, his shoes had ideas above their station. When he heard Ziyan speak to the quartermaster—"Take the children to the hot stones, keep the bowls steady"—he turned, steadied himself with both hands on his book, and bowed until the movement found a name.
"Lady," he said, not daring a title and getting the only one that mattered right. "Forgive the forwardness. I copied the tax ledgers in Ye Cheng for Minister Li. Your father's hand taught my brush not to waste ink. I know your voice."
Ziyan's breath thinned but did not break. "Do you?"
"The way it starts soft and arrives hard," he said, and closed his eyes a moment because remembering unbroken streets requires an effort that is not breathing. "The capital is—" He groped, then found the word the city had been forced to learn. "—under rule. Soldiers wearing the Regent's crest sewn over the Emperor's. The markets are quiet because silence is easier to inventory. Men are taken for questions, and the questions do not stop when the answers do."
Feiyan listened, face unreadable. When the clerk had been given a bowl and a place near the kiln, she drew a folded parchment from her boot and passed it to Ziyan. "This can no longer be a weight I carry alone," she said, which was as close to apology as she could make herself come.
Ziyan read. The bounty on Minister Li's head was written in a hand without hatred. That made it heavier. Dead or alive, it instructed; prices listed like measurements for cloth.
"They have already written my father's epitaph," Ziyan said, quiet enough that the jar's hum could have mistaken the words for its own. "I will choose how it reads."
Ren stood a pace away, hearing what leaders are not meant to say to anyone. He did not intrude upon the sentence. He gave orders to his men about sharpening spears and forgetting pride before it stuck in their throats.
They did not linger. Smoke chose the sky; they chose the road. The banner's blue braid lifted and fell as if counting. Frost made orchards loud underfoot. Signboards in empty towns had been painted over three times: once with Xia's colors, once with Zhang's, once with nothing. Signboards without names do not creak differently, but people notice.
"When names wear out," Ren said, riding beside her with the tired precision of a scholar who had learned how to ride pain, "new ones grow teeth."
"Then let's give this road teeth," Ziyan answered.
Feiyan ranged ahead with two quiet men and came back with the plan in her eyes. "There is a city that forgot its name," she said. "Walls still stand where they mean to. Bridge on the north gate sagging, but not yet confessing. Square large enough to hold twelve wagons, maybe more. Crows full and happy."
"Ambush," Wei said, satisfied the way a craftsman is when offered a familiar joint to cut.
Shuye looked at the old bridge and loved it the way potters love a cracked bowl that insists on being useful. "She'll take jars," he said. "Not deep. Just tucked where wood meets old iron and resentment."
They went to work as if time had paid them in coin too heavy to refuse. Han positioned his riders in the collapsed temple's court, among headless stone lions who had stopped pretending not to mind. Ren's half-cohort took the broken east gate, shields tight, the set of men tasked with resisting until common sense arrived. Li Qiang chose the alley with the least polite corners and showed his men how to make a wall out of the fact that a man exists. Wei found a staircase with opinions about gravity and laid three spears across it like a new grammar.