Zhou's envoy walks the northern avenue in a robe like clean snow and counts tents with his eyes. Behind him come men who call themselves scholars and say they are measuring tremors in the city's breath. One kneels and presses his ear to a stone and faints with a smile on his face. The envoy writes at dusk by careful lantern-light: Aid received. King cooperative. Phenomenon intensifying. Send more physicians. He does not mention the shadow he saw at noon—his own—stepping out of time with him to look down into a well, then turning to smile in a mouth he did not own.
The Southern regency sends prayers north like arrows husked in silk. Their priests bless swords until the edges weep. They reforge banners with words that glow when moonlight touches them. A girl in their first rank, not yet scarred, hears a laugh from beneath the road and does not speak during the entire march for fear any word might be hers twice.
Maps bleed in Ling An after midnight. Ink wriggles and pools and runs to the corners of the room as if seeking shade. The clerk on watch swears, scoops it up, smears it back, writes the rivers again, and wakes in the morning to find each stream flowing toward the palace whether the land will allow it or not.
Wu Jin reads these maps and nods, because when reality is impolite you answer it in the same tone. He dictates edicts that sound like mercy but function like rationing. He signs a writ to break three storehouses and uses that writ to hang two hoarders and spare a third because mercy must be seen to be selective to be believed. He invites the Zhou envoy to a banquet with thin wine and twice-boiled meat. "We will accept your engineers," he says, "and your physicians. As for the priests—send the kind that know how to count."
When the envoy smiles with his knife, Wu Jin smiles with the sheath.
"I'll need a list of your counting priests by morning," he adds, and the envoy bows, amused and a little colder. Men who fence with paper always think they have felt a blade until a real one takes their measure.
By noon, the courtyard outside the Hall of Judgments is full of people who have begun to call me Your Majesty. They do not know which throne they've meant; it doesn't matter. They bring me problems as if I were a temple: a bride who forgot which house was hers, a boy who woke up speaking a dead language, a butcher whose knives turned to river-pebbles in the night. I say as little as I can. When I must speak, I tell them to hold fast to a name that someone else can repeat back to them. It is poor medicine. It's the only kind I trust not to eat what it heals.
Toward dusk a horn wails at the western gate, the low note men use when they drag a burden too heavy to name. The captain goes pale and then professional. A rider comes through at a walk because the horse will not be commanded faster. The man is burned along one arm as if he had leaned too close to a god and been corrected. He dismounts without grace and drags something wrapped in cloth that clinks.
He kneels in the Lotus Hall without being told, breath scraping in his throat. The bundle opens under the captain's hand—iron links, charred, still smelling of altar-smoke. Bound to them is a small lacquered tablet the color of old blood with a pattern burned into it, the seal of the Southern regency cracked down its middle.
The messenger does not bow to Wu Jin. He looks at the floor and addresses the air instead, as if the thing he had come to see were lower than any throne. "The South sends greetings," he says hoarsely, each word an effort not to cough. "To His Highness of the He Lian Dynasty."
Murmurs ripple; a minister half-stands, relief and triumph like light on his face. Wu Jin does not move.
The messenger lifts his head. His eyes are emptied of opinion. "Not him," he says, as if correcting a child. "The other one. The one beneath the city."
The room forgets to breathe. Even the banners seem to wait for permission.
Wu Shuang closes her eyes and opens them again in the same motion. "How far?" she asks, and no one knows if she means the South's armies or my shadow.
"Far enough," the messenger whispers, because he is trying to be brave and has decided the bravest thing is to say what he cannot endure to hear. He turns his face toward the floor. Blood drips from his burned hand. Each drop lands and does not spread; it sits, a red bead that refuses to be a stain.
I feel it before the bell. A thread pulls under the city like a muscle flexing. The palace knows the note and so do I. The bell strikes once. It is enough. The sound ladders down through floors into the places where names collect when they forget their owners.
Shen Yue finds me at the practice yard. "Don't come," she says, which means come as yourself or don't come at all. She holds my gaze the way a man holds a bridge with too few ropes.
I stand. I am heavier than I was this morning. Weight has learned me. I say her name to make sure I can. The bridge inside me answers with a sound like ice remembering it is weak under the foot.
In the hall, as the echo dies, Wu Jin says without turning, "Close the outer gates. Open the inner ones." He speaks to no one and everyone. "Let the South in far enough to see. Let Zhou count what it cannot number."
"And him?" a minister dares.
Wu Jin's hand rests on the arm of the throne as if on a hilt. "If he walks up from the floor," he says, "you will not ask me whom to bow to. You will remember what I told you today."
The messenger sways. The chain clinks once. Somewhere below, something inhales. I hear it. I answer it by refusing to answer. For the first time all day, the ache under my breastbone quiets.
I put my palm to the wall. "I am still here," I say, for myself and for anyone who has learned to live on borrowed breath. The plaster hums like a throat.
Outside, the banners are motionless. Somewhere above them, what has no banner moves anyway. The city, being honest, says nothing at all.