By afternoon, the courtyards were louder than prayers. Blacksmiths spat sparks until the air tasted of pennies. Boys who had been men in their dreams the night before became men without noticing. The training ground sang with wood striking wood, then wood striking bone. In the east, Huailing was a rumor; here, it began to be a destination.
They came to me with more numbers than omens. I took each and ate it without chewing. Cold is a better fuel than certainty.
Near dusk, I found the quiet the day had stolen: a narrow garden with a crooked pine where the inner wall remembered to be old. There, the lamps always leaned slightly toward me, as if the flame wished to speak privately.
Wu Shuang waited, bare feet in gravel, robe plain enough to hide a queen or a beggar. She did not look up when I entered; instead she traced circles in the dust with a twig stripped of bark. The motions were too patient to be idle. I have seen surgeons peel orange skins whole and understood more about cruelty than fruit.
"I have time for three lies and one truth," I said.
She smiled without lifting her face. "Then do the lies first. Truth tastes better after you rinse the mouth."
"Why did the South release you?"
She laid the twig down and answered as if telling me the color of the sky. "Because Father sold me."
The gravel did not move. The pine did not creak. Only something below the world shifted—like a boat turning quietly in its sleep.
"He needed quiet," she continued, "and the South needed a weight to put on their scales. They asked for coin; he offered blood. Blood balances more cleanly. It does not ring like silver; it sinks."
"You were a child," I said. The words were foolish; I let them die quickly.
"Children are good coins," she replied. "They spend themselves slowly."
She told me then, without hurry and without pain in the voice, how the South had welcomed her with kindness precise as mathematics. How the halls where she slept were clean, and the bowls where she ate were red. How the priests did not beat or starve—how they counted. Meals, breaths, steps from door to door. How they taught her to sit inside ash-circles until the notion of outside became an impolite word. How the chanting began like a friend's habit and ended like a room without doors. How she dreamed of rivers taught to flow backward, and woke with her pillow wet with salt that would not admit to being tears.
"The South did not free me," she said. "They unlatched the door when it served their arithmetic. Because they knew you would carry me back."
The lamps leaned. The silence under my ribs pressed closer as if something had recognized its own scent.
"Wu Jin insisted on your rescue," I said, hearing another door unlatch in my head.
"He did." She finally looked at me. "He knows this house. He knows that blood binds better than law. He wanted a rope." Her lips softened at the edges. "He did not ask whether the rope had learned to move."
"You are not rope," I said.
"No," she agreed gently. "I am a tide."
She shifted one bare foot, and the circles she had drawn in the dust wavered, became ovals, became something my eye wanted to name and could not. The garden felt larger than it was. The sky leaned as if listening.
"What did they make of you?" I asked. "Name it."
"A question," she said. "A vessel that learned its own thirst." Her voice went softer. "A weapon, if someone decides to be its hand."
"And who is that someone?" My own words came out quieter than I intended.
She did not answer. She reached into her sleeve and set on the stone a reed whistle the color of a bruise. "In the South," she said, "we sang through these when the rooms were too clean." She did not raise it to her mouth. She only looked at it until the garden forgot it was a whistle and remembered it was a wound.
"Wu Jin wants you because you change the balance," I said. It was not a revelation; it was a verdict arriving late. "Not because you are blood. Because you are gravity."
"Wu Jin wants whatever wins," she replied. "Sometimes that is blood. Sometimes it is hunger. Sometimes it is a sister who does not blink."
"And I?" I asked.
She tilted her head, and for a heartbeat the old girl I had never met peered out through the woman the South had measured. "You want the roof to hold," she said. "Even if a sea moves in below it."
We stood with that between us—a sentence built of stone and water. Somewhere far off a horn sounded twice; the second note broke. Liao Yun's drills answered it with wood that had learned to be bone.
"Wu Kang will not parley," I said.
"No," she agreed. "He has tasted a word and decided it is a god."
"Which word?"
"Protector," she said. "He thinks it means 'permission.'"
The garden darkened without the sun's consent. The lamps bent again, obedient to a wind that did not touch the leaves.
"When he marches," she asked, "will you meet him at Huailing or let him come to your gate?"
"Both," I said. "He will find us too close and too far in the same hour."
She seemed pleased, or perhaps the night arranged itself to look like pleasure. "Then we will see which arithmetic the day obeys."
She took a step backward. The twig-markings uncoiled as if relieved. When she passed the threshold, the old prayer bell throbbed a sound too small to claim itself.
"Brother," she said, the word fitting neatly into a wound, "the tide will not choose between us. It will decide which shore to erase first."
When she had gone, I let the silence under my ribs flood and ebb once, measuring the edges of my bones. Then I returned to the hall that had remembered it was a barracks.
Shen Yue was there, sleeves tied high, hair bound for war the way some women bind it for weddings. "The river gates answer," she said. "The granary counts shame us less. Liao Yun has salted the ditches and found three priests willing to pray loudly over empty wagons."
"Good," I said. It is a poor word for a nation's throat, but it moves the day forward.
She searched my face for omens and found none. That is a kindness she often commits against herself.
"The ultimatum?" she asked.
"It said we must wear chains to breakfast or die before supper," I said. "We will eat what we bring."
We walked the corridor where the lamps behaved. Beyond the wall, Ling An sounded like a city remembering it owned knives. Farther still, Huailing gathered its torches into a necklace to show the night where the throat would be cut. The Boundary remained a line honest as hunger; the South's banners refused to flutter, which is a way of saying they waited to enjoy the wind.
The bells tolled—not for prayer, not for harvest. Once, twice, thrice. Counting.
War preparations are only numbers until someone decides which sum is a body.