We rode before dawn toward a place the maps pretended not to know.
Mist lay in the paddies like monks who had forgotten to rise. Reeds stood with their heads bowed, not to wind but to attention. The track bent twice around old graves whose names had peeled off their stones and then forgot to be a road at all. When the crows found us, they followed—not hungry, not bold—merely dutiful, as if some office had assigned them to witness.
Shen Yue rode at my right with her hair bound so tightly the knot looked like law. General Sun kept the rear with twenty riders who had never retreated in daylight. Wu Jin took the middle, where men place a seal they do not wish to chip. He wore traveling silk in gray that swallowed light; it made him look like a signature without the name.
"Do you mean to parley," Shen Yue asked, "or to summon?"
"A parley is a summons," I said, "to one who does not know the language."
Wu Jin's smile was courteous and empty. "Then let us hope we are not summoned by mistake."
The ruined temple rose from the reeds like the last ribs of a thing that had learned to drown without complaint. Its gate was a mouth missing teeth; its roof had collapsed inward long ago, boards laid across the nave like a palanquin no one dared carry. The carvings along the lintel were eyeless gods—faces smoothed by rain to the memory of faces. Spirals, too, cut small as coins, and so many that the stone was more line than wall.
I dismounted and the lamps in our hands leaned, that now-familiar courtesy the fire offered me without asking whether I liked it.
"This place is wrong," Sun said softly. He said it the way a man notes weather he will fight in anyway.
"It is old," Wu Jin corrected. "Age and wrongness converse more often than truth admits."
We set our men in a shallow crescent, points of a script meant to be read quickly if needed. The temple's floor was tilting stone, slick with reed dew. Someone—some time—had offered burnt salt at the altar; the white crust gleamed like frost. The silence under my ribs lifted its head and listened with the manners of a guest.
They came at the hour when the mist begins to consider mercy.
Three monks in gray. An ox with white hair, pulling a low cart laden with a coffer wrapped in mourning silk. Six spearmen in lacquer black; their standards were white, unpainted, the cloth heavy as if soaked in something that did not dry. Behind them walked a man whose robe was not priestly and not martial. A court envoy, then. Or the shape of one.
The envoy bowed with the exact depth required to honor a house and insult a son. "I come with words from the Emperor," he said. His voice was a brushstroke that chose not to touch paper. "He remembers the roof. He asks whether it still stands."
I did not answer. Breath gathered around the temple's mouth and refused to leave.
The envoy gestured. One monk came forward with a parcel the size of a man's heart, banded in reed-cord dyed with river-iron. He knelt and lifted it to me in both hands, head bent. The other two monks did not move; their eyes were all reflection. Torches burned in them and did not make them bright.
I took the parcel and the cord twitched, as if it remembered having been part of something that grew. Inside, wrapped in thin silk that clung like old skin, lay a seal—Imperial—cracked clean through the dragon's spine.
Shen Yue inhaled and swallowed the sound. Sun's jaw notched tighter. Wu Jin's fingers folded once at his sleeve, smoothing an irritation that did not belong to the cloth.
"The Emperor lives," the envoy said. "He mourns. He invites this roof to kneel—to share mourning, to share grace."
"Where is he," I asked.
"In the South," said the envoy. "Where bells do not reach and rivers learn new roads."
The water in the paddies behind the temple leaned, the width of a reed. The lamps bent a hair closer to my chest. The silence under my ribs uncoiled, pleased, as if an cousin had sent a letter.
"Rivers do not learn," General Sun said. His voice was iron correcting itself. "They are taught."
The envoy pretended not to hear. "He dreams of a roof without knives. He bids you lay down your Winter. In exchange, he sends amity, grain, and—" the envoy tilted his head—"forgetting."
Shen Yue's hand found the hilt of her sword, then left it, ashamed. "He offers pardon," she said, as if naming a god and waiting for thunder.
The envoy smiled with the small kindness of a man who feeds stray dogs on the street but not at his door. "Pardon is for acts. This is larger than acts. This is a return."
The crack in the seal widened the width of a hair. The silk wrapping trembled with a breath it had not earned.
"Speak plainly," I said. "Will he march."
"He will walk," said the envoy. "We will carry him."
The torches in the monks' hands showed long tongues for a blink and then remembered modesty. The ox stamped once; the hoofprint filled slowly, as if the earth had forgotten how to drink.
Wu Jin bowed slightly. "If the Emperor walks, we walk toward him. If he rests, we rest at his gate. These are old courtesies."
"Old courtesies have teeth," Shen Yue murmured, not for them.
"Your courtesies do not interest me," I told the envoy. "Your Emperor interests me. Show me his words. Not your prayer, not your breath."
The envoy lifted his sleeve. Inside the lining, sewn as if into skin, lay a slip of silk narrow as a finger, ink thin as veins. I did not step forward; the wind, which did not blow, brought it to me. The strokes were close and clean. The hand was Imperial. The sentence was short:
Remember the roof. Come gently.
The silence under my ribs laughed without sound. The lamp flames bent until they found almost-prayer.