I walk where I swore not to go: into the colonnade outside the Lotus Hall, hood low, a soldier's step from older years returning unbidden. Two guards see me and correct their eyes to look at the floor. Even hiding, I am too visible.
I do not enter. I listen. Wu Jin's breath counts like a drill-master's behind the doors. Paper whispers. The soft strike of a seal set down rather than dropped: restraint learned from a man who believed in eating last.
"An," Shen Yue murmurs, warning and plea both. "He is not your enemy."
"He is a crown."
"And you?"
"A knife someone else sharpened," I say, and the truth of it galls me more than any insult she might have used.
I leave a page where only a desperate man will find it: a list of names that buy his city one more day if he spends them badly. He will hate me for it. He will use it. He will call it his decision. We are all being fed the same meal, served on different plates.
On the way back, a boy runs past with a bell-clapper in his hand, laughing at stealing something no one would miss because no one has heard a bell finish a sentence in weeks. "Give it back," Shen Yue calls, and he does, because her voice still knows how to speak to children.
"What happens when it rings?" she asks me when the boy is gone.
"We stop choosing," I say. "We do what we were always going to do."
"And until then?"
"We pretend we thought of it first."
The bridge inside me approves, patient as a ledger. I hate it for applauding, and myself for hearing the applause.
The Zhou envoy returned to his pavilion and wrote by a cold lamp.
— Hei Commander agrees to corridor.
— Lord Protector speaks in arrangements, not threats.
— He intends delay. Delay favors him.
— Two sons moving toward collision. One under crown, one under city.
— Southern Regency waits for a bell unknown to us.
At the bottom he added, as a private note to his Emperor rather than to the ministers who would pretend to read:
If the Lord Protector is arranging this, he is not arranging it for his sons. He is arranging it despite them.
He lifted the sheet to the light and watched the ink thin. He considered writing the line that mattered—We may be marching where he already counted our steps—and did not, because the Emperor did not appreciate poetry unless it was winning.
He sealed the letter, and as he pressed the stamp, the lamp flickered and went out with a sigh like a tired horse. In the darkness he said, not to anyone, "Who rings a bell that isn't hung?" and found no comfort in the neatness of the question.
At Hei Fort the Lord Protector descended into the old magazine where the river sound changed from surface to root. A mason waited by a wall that did not face outside.
"You have the stone I asked for," the old man said.
"Yes," the mason said. "From the east quarry. It remembers weight."
"Good," the old man said, and set his palm to the cool face. "We will teach it a name," he said.
"What name?" the mason asked.
"A debt," he said.
He turned, climbed, breathed the air of men again, and looked north where the false light hovered over Ling An like a patient disease.
"Not yet," he told the world that still pretended it had choices. "Soon."
And the snow that was not snow kept falling, keeping its shape as if it had been carved in the air by a hand that did not tremble.