By twilight, the city had turned itself into a throat. You could hear it decide whether to swallow or sing.
I sought the narrow garden after the day had spent itself cruelly. The crooked pine, the old wall, the lamps that lean toward me as if the flame wished to gossip. I did not come for comfort. I came because a blade returns to its whetstone even when it is tired of being edged.
Wu Shuang was already there, barefoot in the gravel, robe plain enough to let a queen hide in it. She had arranged stones in a pattern the eye almost recognized and then didn't. The lamps near her leaned, then remembered not to.
"You move like someone who just taught a city to hold its breath," she said without turning.
"Cities breathe on their own," I said. "Men only decide whether to listen."
She half-smiled. "You don't lie as much as you used to."
"Practice," I said.
We stood a while with the kind of silence that changes the shape of a path. The day had put knives in my pockets; I let them stop shouting.
"Huailing sends more than letters," she said at last. "There are choruses in the night between their drums. If you stand at a certain place on the east wall and close your eyes, you can hear it teach the air to forget which direction means forward."
"How do you know that?" I asked.
She tilted her head, hair slipping like ink. "Because I was taught to hear it. Because I am what happens when you teach a room to be a throat."
"You are a weapon," I said. "Wu Jin knew that when he pulled you home."
She did not flinch as much as the lamplight did. "He knew I am something that teaches sums to change value when you aren't watching." She glanced down at the stones she had arranged. "He isn't wrong. But weapons don't wake themselves. Someone's hand has to decide sleep is a waste of time."
"And you?" I asked. "Do you wake at a hand? Or at a tide?"
Her eyes met mine with the patience of cold water. "Brother, I wake when remembering is over."
"The Lord Protector sold you," I said. The sentence didn't want to be said; I said it anyway. "To keep the balance of the realm."
She considered that word—balance—as if it were a small, stupid animal she had to decide whether to feed. "Men call it balance when they have already accepted which side they will let drown." She crouched, pressed one finger into the gravel, and drew a spiral that pretended to be a circle until it took a breath. "He traded a child for a quiet border. He hoped the South would accept the arithmetic and not look for a proof." She rose. "The South prefers proofs."
"Do they want you back?" I asked.
"They never had me," she said. "They had a voice they could rehearse in a different throat. Now the throat is yours." She nodded at my chest. "It suits you."
The silence under my ribs surged, not unkind, not kind—recognition without greeting. The lamps leaned farther, then pretended they hadn't.
"Wu Kang's word is the kind that does not negotiate," I said. "He named it god."
"Protector," she said, not deriding it, just describing the mess a word makes when it forgets it had other meanings. "He will march because marching is what that god eats."
"Let him," I said.
"Where?" she asked. "To your gate? To your throat? To your brother?"
"Let him march to where the map lies to him first," I said. "I will meet him there."
She smiled then, the first honest one I had seen come all the way to her eyes. It made her younger and made the garden older. "Then teach the map to be a better liar than his grief."
A horn sounded twice from the western parapet—steady the first time, broken the second. I turned; she did not. You could not tell whether the bell that answered was near or far.
Shen Yue found me before the echoes learned to stop. Her sleeves were knotted high; her hair bound not for ceremony but for blood. "The river gates are braced," she said. "Wedges set. The foundry carts have learned a new religion and will stop to pray when ordered. We found a crack in the east wall that pretended to be a seam; Liao Yun taught it to be ashamed."
"Good," I said. I say it when there is nothing useful to add that won't betray that I'm counting griefs.
Wu Jin came out of the stone like men do when they walk too softly. "Envoys set out an hour ago," he said. "All silk, no promises. Their spines are straight; their necks are bare." He looked between the two of us—the soldier and the tide—and smiled like a lantern that had decided to survive the night. "I admire a city that learns two languages at once."
"Make sure the envoys do not improvise poetry," I said. "Huailing doesn't deserve to hear their metaphors before their deaths."
"Now you lie," he murmured, amused. "You love a good metaphor. You married one."
He left before I decided whether to answer.
The sky edged itself into iron. The crows still clung to the high tiles as if they had invented the concept of staying. In the distance, someone dropped a spear; the sound made too much noise, which told me the man who had dropped it would live.
We were three steps from the northern hall when the scout arrived. He fell more than knelt, dust gritted into his knees, one hand clamped to his ribs where a line of red argued with the concept of inside. His breath came in saws. The guards tried to pull him gently to form; he refused form with a soldier's impoliteness.
"From Huailing," he rasped. "From the willow ford."
"Speak," I said.
He did, though the words made his mouth white. "Golden Dragon banners on the road," he said. "No feint. No parade. Ladders mated to wagons. Oxen yoked to rams. Drums that teach feet how to forget the difference between forward and falling." He swallowed blood. "They march."
The garden went quiet although we were no longer in the garden. Even the cracked bell remembered itself and held.
Shen Yue's hand found the hilt that never trembles. "Then we begin," she said.
"We already began," I told her. I looked toward the east where the road from Huailing learned to be a throat. "Now we let the numbers learn they were always counting bodies."