The banner with the white strip came at noon, carried by a man whose horse stumbled as if tired of standing. The field did not quiet for him; it only leaned its noise to one side. Ladders scraped, rams knocked, the drums kept time for men who had forgotten that hearts could provide their own.
Shen Yue rode to meet the envoy, her hair tied back tight, her face gray with ash. She brought him to me without a word. The man's lips were split from thirst. He held a letter as carefully as a priest carries a bone.
"From Commander Wu Kang," he rasped.
I opened it. The words had been written with a hand that shook and then refused to shake. Surrender, it said. Mercy for the city, it begged. It named me brother in the old way, the way we used when there were still trees between our houses and the crows had not learned our names.
"Accept it," Shen Yue said, her voice low but hard. Behind her, a trebuchet loosed and something far away broke. "Take the gate. Spare the people."
The thing inside me did not argue. It did not need to. The counters on my inner table were already arranged: the trenches belly-deep in corpses, our ladders splintered as quick as they were raised, the cannon—cheap iron mouths—chewing men from both sides and calling it duty. The day's ledger was against me by a column and a half. Even our wolves grow thin when the winter is long.
"Send word," I said. "We accept."
The envoy began to weep with relief. He bowed so low his forehead marked the mud. I took back the letter and folded it into squares until it remembered being a leaf. Then I handed it to Shen Yue.
"Escort him," I said. "Tell them to open the south gate as agreed. Tell them I will enter with a single cohort. No torches. No shouting."
Shen Yue did not immediately move. Her dark eyes lingered on me, reading for a word I had not spoken, then she nodded sharply and wheeled her horse. The hooves hissed against the damp ground as she vanished toward the gate.
When the south gate swung inward, it did so like a tired jaw. The hinge screamed once and decided to behave. We went in—my cohort and I—between walls that were not ours and ground that pretended to be neutral. The air changed its temperature. The city had a smell like cold iron and old stew.
Wu Kang waited for me in the yard beyond the gate. He had chosen a place with no banners and too much sky. His bandaged arm lay in a sling the color of clean snow that had seen a battlefield once. His hair was tied in a knot that admitted pain but refused concession.
We faced each other at a distance any archer would have called a joke. Men stood behind us in two dark crescents, spears down, eyes up. The wind turned over the ashes in the granary ruins and could not decide where to lay them.
"Brother," Wu Kang said.
The word found my bones like a key in a lock whose teeth no longer matched.
"Wu Kang," I said.
"You accepted," he nodded. "Good. The city… there has been enough." He glanced past my shoulder at the ladders stacked like ribs. "Your men have bled."
"Yours more," I said.
He smiled with half his mouth. "Yes. Mine more."
For a moment we stood with the same posture we had used when we were boys forced to sit through winter ceremonies: shoulders square, hands hidden, eyes straight. The years between fell away long enough to show me a version of us without knives.
"What changed you?" he asked, and the question was neat, as if he had been saving it for a day when the sky would listen. "You were always quiet, not cruel. You disappeared to read under eaves. You liked rain because it made everyone else quiet too. Now you break cities as if they were cups in a careless house."
"I do not know," I said, and it was the true answer and the worst one. "But the North requires a shape. I fit it. The Lord Protector coughs in rooms no one enters. Someone must stand where the wind is strongest."
"So you decided it was your turn to be made of stone."
"I did not decide. I was weighed."
"By what?"
"The same scales that weigh winter," I said. The thing inside me stirred, pleased to be named without naming.
He breathed once, a deep rope-sawing breath, and let it out without a sermon. "Then hear me, stone: I ask terms for Huailing. Spare the houses. Spare the families of my garrison. Punish me, punish my officers, but leave the city with a face."
"You sent the Emperor away," I said.
He blinked. "Is this our bargain? Palaces in exchange for shadows?"
"Where is he?"
Wu Kang's good hand flexed as if it remembered better days. "I do not have him."
"You had him."
"I had a man with a crown. He left. Or he was taken by those who like crowns more than men." He laughed again with half a mouth. "What do you want, Wu An? A confession that makes this cleaner? It is all mud."
"I want direction."