Wu Shuang began to haunt the edges of our councils.
She did not arrive with trumpets or apologies. She was suddenly there where shadow pooled against the carved screens. Pale robe, plain belt, hair unadorned. If the South had gilded her, they scraped the gold away before sending her back. Or perhaps the thing she had learned there did not trust gold.
Ministers looked away first, then back, like sparrows deciding whether the hawk was a statue. Lamps near her hiccuped once—an extinguished cough suppressed. Draft, a man might say. I have learned not to argue with my senses when they choose my safety.
"Cousin," she said to me the first time our eyes met in the hall. The word was true. It did not touch her pupils.
Shen Yue watched her openly, the only one who did. Even her discipline trembled once and then stood up straighter for having admitted it. Liao Yun kept his distance, which is another way of saying he was closer than most.
Wu Jin did not pretend not to look. He measured her with the same clerk's gaze he uses on barrels and men. He argued for her rescue when even I questioned the cost. He said it would be leverage. He did not say over whom.
She spoke rarely. When she did, generals shifted as if a draft had learned to speak.
"You cannot hold a river with fists," she said when we mapped the ford. "You can only teach it to love your banks."
"The west gate of Huailing yawns like a mouth left open in sleep," she murmured when gates were counted. "Who sleeps there? Who dreams?"
Regarding the foundry road, she asked, "Have you watched iron cool? It forgets the shape it loved to make itself useful."
Her voice was not a riddle's. Riddles want answers. Her words wanted tides. I have stood on winter cliffs and felt the sea explain why men bow to emptiness. That was the taste of her sentences.
By twilight, plans hardened enough to put on paper. Carts that looked like prayer would depart at first bell, their wheels greased with secrets. An envoy with a beard ancient enough to be mistaken for wisdom would be brushed and robed to lecture Huailing's gatekeepers until they opened the inner mouth out of courtesy. The foundry road would learn that piety takes time iron cannot spare.
I went to the shrine to burn incense for a mother whose face the court has learned not to name. The brazier welcomed the sandalwood; the smoke did not. It rose, then leaned toward me like a listener who had decided we were friends.
Wu Shuang stood there already, shoes off, toes pale against the cold stone. She had traced spirals in the ash with a patience too careful to be nerves.
"You pray," I said. It tasted odd in my mouth.
"I remember," she answered.
"For what?"
She turned. Her face was still. Her eyes—people say "dark" when they mean to be kind. Her eyes were not dark. They were deep, and the bottom was not water.
"For when remembering is over," she said.
Silence moved under my ribs. It did not feel like an ally or an enemy. It felt like the sea noticing the shore again.
"Why did the South release you?" I asked.
She watched the drifting ash. "Have you kept a bird too long in a small cage?" she asked softly. "Sometimes it learns to sing the room. The day you open the door, it does not fly. It listens. It decides."
"Did you decide?"
"That would be neat," she said. "Men like neatness. It lets them bury their dead on time."
"Wu Jin wanted you rescued." I let the statement hang with the weight of questions I no longer ask aloud.
She did not speak for so long that one of her spirals forgot to be a circle and loosened into a line.
"He knows this house," she said at last. "He knows blood is a rope no one admits to holding. He wonders whether I am rope or neck."
"Which are you?"
She smiled without teeth. "If I am rope, I burn. If I am neck, I break. If I am neither, perhaps I am a tide."
She stepped past me then, near enough that the smoke tilted toward her and then back as if embarrassed. As she passed, the old prayer bell beside the door gave a small note that no hand had asked for.
"Brother," she said, and the word fit the ear like something that had been waiting, "when the tide rises at Huailing, do you know which of us will drown?"
I watched her leave with bare feet and a shadow that did not agree with her body. The silence in me answered—a single pulse, as if a heart had remembered its work too late.
Outside, the Boundary held a true line. The South kept their boats tied like obedient dogs. Huailing lit torches enough to make night ask permission.
Shen Yue found me before the bell forgot its sound. "Liao Yun has the first carts masked," she said. "The old envoy chews his beard and swears no one can stop him from lecturing a gate until it yawns. Our friends at the foundry have remembered new devotions."
"Good," I said.
"She unsettles them," Shen Yue added after a breath. "Not with what she does. With how the air behaves around her."
"She unsettles you," I said.
Shen Yue's eyes were clean steel. "No. She makes me choose which fear to keep."
"And?"
"I keep the one with your name on it."
We stood while the smoke made up its mind whom to lean toward. In the east, Huailing's torchline thickened like a scar. In the south, no banners moved.
"Tomorrow," she said, "we begin."
"We began a long time ago," I said. "Tomorrow we count."
The bells tolled once. Not for death. Not for birth. For measure.
The tide held where it was.
For now.