Scouts returned before the lamps remembered dawn, boots mud-bitten, faces tight with news that had learned how to bruise.
Wu Kang had abandoned the Eastern Palace. In the night he led his loyalists east to Huailing, a city once Father's bulwark on the grain road, now drowned in banners black with grief. The Emperor rode with him, not as sovereign but as captive; the heralds on Huailing's walls had been hauled down and replaced with plain streamers that did not move even when the wind insisted.
"Outer wards are manned by men I do not know," the first scout said. "If they ever wore the North's crest, they wear mourning over it now."
"New laws at the gate," the second added, spitting the taste from his mouth. "No petitioners, no supplicants. Food tallies at spearpoint. The Emperor eats in the old audience hall. No eyes on him but those sworn to Huailing."
The Lord Protector called council before incense could wake. He sat in the northern hall leaning on iron more than breath. Sickness had not left him, but it had learned manners when he chose to speak. Generals filed in with river dust in their seams; ministers came softer, as if the floor might forgive them if they stepped politely enough.
Shen Yue took her place at my right, Liao Yun a pace behind. Wu Jin stood already within Father's shadow, hands folded like a prayer that had learned to count.
"The South watches," Father said, voice scraped but whole. "Their envoys do not blink. Their boats do not cast off. If we split our flank to chase our own, they will cross the Boundary and call it tending a neighbor's fire."
"Then strike Huailing before he beds in," growled the general of the river forts. "The city sits astride the grain road—if he holds it, he starves us faster than the South."
"And if we march," another countered, "we bare the Boundary. The South has always coveted Huailing. They will not wait if we open the gate for them."
They argued with iron in their throats—numbers, fords that drown horses in spring, roads that remember which orders were written in ink and which in blood. I let them. Silence is a whetstone men cut themselves on if you hold it long enough.
Wu Jin's voice slid into the seam between breaths. "Call him grieving," he said smoothly. "Call him misguided. Do not name him traitor. If the South hears that word, they will crown themselves our judge."
Shen Yue's gaze narrowed, but she kept her tongue folded. Liao Yun's fingers rested near his sword, a reminder that steel remains a language.
I stepped forward.
"Wu Kang did not stumble," I said. "He took the Emperor from his bed and set him in Huailing like a jar to catch the rain. While we debate the shape of his hand, he writes decrees in our sovereign's ink. He will give the North a new spine before we saddle a horse."
The general of the river forts looked to Father; Father looked to me; the room looked anywhere that wasn't truth.
"You propose?" Father asked.
"Three knives," I said. "First, cut his supply west of Huailing—turn one grain road into three prayers that never arrive. Second, bleed the foundry traffic that feeds his walls, not with raids but with devotions that steal time—inspection, blessing, inventory that takes a day to count to ten. Third, send a mediation envoy old enough to be admitted and ornamental enough to be ignored. Not to plead. To count doors."
A murmur, approval wrestling with superstition. Wu Jin watched me the way a scribe watches a character that can be read as wolf or roof depending on the stroke you finish last.
"And the word 'traitor'?" he asked mildly.
I held his gaze. "Truth is a blade with two edges. Speak it when you mean to cut."
Father nodded, as if the roof had agreed to hold a little longer. "Draft orders," he said to the generals. "Quietly. I want carts that look like prayer and prayer that smells like oil."
The hall became a body relearning how to walk without falling. Runners were made from scribes; commands were made from courtesy.
By noon the reports were thick as congealed blood. Wu Kang gathered not only the Eastern Palace's guards but officers who owed him wounds and men who owed him songs. Old veterans who had marched under his banner when his temper still mistook itself for honor. Knife-sleeve captains who had fed on his scorn and found it nourishing. He spoke to them not of law, not of Heaven, but of a name carved wrong.
"For Liang," his messengers said. "For the stone she deserved." Grief had learned to wear armor; rage had found a schedule.
The South sent nothing but markets and courtesies. Their truce-masters opened stalls at the crossing towns, weighing with their eyes how many sacks of salt it takes to distract a city from a stolen crown. Envoys burned incense in two temples and one tavern and listened harder than they prayed. The Boundary kept its honest line. For now.