A courier woke me with the quiet you only learn among men who keep secrets for pay. He put a bundle in my hands and did not wait for thanks. Inside: a training ribbon, frayed to threads. A single character stitched in a child's careful hand, crooked with pride.
先.
First.
Under it, a note in a script I recognized before my eyes did: the hard, clean strokes of a man who believes in rooms with only one door.
When you raise the blade, your left hand must accept that your right will be blamed. Do not apologize. The world eats. So will you.
I closed my eyes and saw almond petals on packed dirt and a boy who wanted knives because he thought they belonged to men who did not cry. I hated that boy for a full breath. Then I hated the man who wrote him this comfort.
Shen Yue watched me read. She did not ask to see. She has learned which silences I can keep without bleeding out.
"He is writing to you with every mouth in this city," she said. "You're just the only one who hears his handwriting."
"Then we go somewhere he cannot write," I said.
"Where?"
"Under the road Zhou is soothing."
"You mean the pass."
"I mean the ribs of the mountain," I said. "Let's see if their songs can keep it from coughing."
She smiled without joy. "That sounds like him too."
"Everything here does," I said, and hated that it was true.
The southern camp waited and moved at once. The Regent stood under a banner patched so many times it had become faith. She read the last message from the north—no seal, only a fingerprint in soot—and folded it until the words aligned with the fold and disappeared.
"Three days," she told her generals. "Then we march."
"And the bell?" one asked.
"It will ring when it chooses," she said. "We are not children to crowd a rope."
A priest approached with a bowl that should have held water and held only quiet. "Highness," he said. "We prayed. The river answered with a plan of a tower with no stairs."
"Then someone is building something he doesn't want us inside," she said.
"What should we build?"
"Patience," she said, and smiled like a wound learning to scab.
Night. The city decided to keep time again. Footsteps matched, breath synchronized, the kind of unity that makes soldiers believe in drums and butcher's blocks. Bells did not ring. They did not need to. Everyone heard a clock whose hands were not made of metal.
I walked the practice yard and said my name until it stuck. I added others: Shen Yue's; my sister's. I tried my father's and bit my tongue hard enough to taste old iron.
"Not yet," I told the dark, and the dark agreed in the way good liars do—by not speaking.
On the wall, someone had written four characters and then scrubbed them with sand. I could still read the strokes.
吃与被吃.
Eat, or be eaten.
Children learn this first. Kings pretend to learn it last. Fathers teach it and forget to say they're sorry.
I turned away before the wood began to remember my breath.
In the Lotus Hall, Wu Jin dreamed standing up for the first time in his life.
He dreamed the old dining table in Liang, long as a road, polished to a river. He stood at the head and looked down and saw two empty seats. One was his. One was his brother's. His father walked behind him and set two bowls in place. "Sit," the old man said, not unkind. "The soup will cool."
"What is it?" Wu Jin asked.
"Mandate," the old man said. "Seasoned for boys."
"Will it burn?" Wu Jin asked, already reaching.
"Only at first," the old man said.
Wu Jin woke with his hand closed around nothing. He looked down. His palm bore the clean crescent of a familiar seal, pressed there by dreaming. He pressed the same crescent into warm wax on an edict before dawn and did not read which order he had signed until later.
It was the one he would have chosen. It tasted of someone else's mouth.
He did not spit it out.
He swallowed.
And the city kept breathing as if it had been told it could continue.
South of Hei Fort the tower rose one more course. The mason laid stone as if counting a prayer he did not believe in and still expected to work. The Lord Protector stood below and did not look up. He listened to the weight as if weight could be taught to ring.
"Soon," he told no one and the whole world. "Soon."
The river held its breath to hear better. The mountain hummed because it had been flattered by so much song. Zhou's engineers slept with measures under their pillows like charms against being wrong. The Regent traced routes with her finger and blessed none. Wu Shuang tied a ribbon around a bell-clapper and did not hang it anywhere. Shen Yue sharpened a blade that would never cut the right throat enough.
And I, beneath it all, counted from one to ten until a boy stopped wanting to cry.
On nine, the bridge purred.
On ten, I decided that when the bell finally rang, I would pretend I had not been waiting for it my whole life.