General Sun did what generals do—he counted outcomes and minimized risk. When a crowd grew too angry, he let officers execute one man in a way that taught the rest not to try heroics. When an important merchant was taken, he allowed that one ledger to be kept public so that others could see there was a method to the pain, a logic. He measured the city's pulse and decided how much blood it would withstand.
Yet I could see the shadow along his mouth deepen. He is efficient, that man, but efficiency is not heart. He obeyed because the debt of his life sat in another man's hand. I do not begrudge him that. A man like Sun does not expect to be loved.
The public parade of Wu Kang had been intended as a stomach-turning lesson. I had ordered him shown in the market—bound, face uncovered, dragged past the houses that had once cheered for him. He smiled, still alive, because men who have eaten their last clean meal smile for different reasons. He spat when the crowd called him name; his lip split and the word bled on the dirt. They asked for the last of him to be made into a trophy. I said no. I prefer utility to spectacle. Keep him breathing. Keep him a relic of what the city had been.
That night, as the captains counted their losses and tallied new names, I walked alone through a street that smelled of iron and flour. The lamps leaned toward my boots; children hid under eaves and watched me pass with wide, small eyes. An old man stepped out and called my name — a voice cracked like oldest ink.
"Prince," he said, "have mercy."
He wore a cap of common wool. He had once sold me peaches when I was small and proud. His face knew me in a way the captains' pages did not.
I looked at him. There was such confidence in his plea — an old habit of the poor to hope for kindness.
"Mercy," I said softly, and the word was a stranger in my mouth. "Mercy is a long account. Tonight we balance it." I nodded to two guards. They took him gently. They did not return.
Shen Yue found me where the road narrowed and took hold of my sleeve with a force that was almost tenderness. "You will not make this a habit," she said. "You will not let the ledger be the only religion you keep."
"I will end it sooner," I said. "A short, terrible cleanliness is the mercy that spares the longer rot."
She did not answer then, but later, at her watch by the bound lanterns, I saw her press a hand to her mouth until the skin of her knuckles went pale. The sight of a soldier who loves you and fears you is its own kind of ruin.
By dawn the city was quieter. Many of the men we had taken were gone from the square. The captains had added names to the lists with the same care they had used to file reports. The granaries were sealed; the wells had drooped with new ropes and new locks. Priests no longer walked freely.
I walked the streets again. The thing under my ribs marked them, patient as a ledger. I felt less and less the difference between counting names and counting lives. Numbers make decisions easier. They also make you cold.
General Sun approached as I turned for Ling An. "You will march?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "We march on Huailing until no one can name a gate without remembering the names we taught them."
He bowed once, not to me, but to a future he preferred to be alive to spend. He did not smile.
Shen Yue's hand tightened on the hilt by my side. "Do not let it take everything," she whispered.
I thought of the old man with the peaches and of the child we had bound in the square. I thought of Wu Kang's smile and of the tides inside me. I thought of lists and ledgers and the way ink will not forgive.
"I will not stop," I said.
She looked at me then—not with the command of a captain, not with the courtesy of a courtier—but with the small, broken grief of a woman who has decided to follow a winter until the harvest fails.
We left Huailing behind like a wound. Behind us, the city learned a new arithmetic.
I do not know whether I have become the roof or the storm. I only know the numbers add up.