In the late hour, when honest people rest because they can and the other kind because they must, she left the city's warmth for its edge. The refugee camp had sunk into that exhausted murmur that is the mercy of bodies still living. She stood beneath a bare tree and felt the weight of what she could not promise. Li Qiang's presence near her shoulder did what words would not. Yufei returned with a scrap of news: one of the cart drivers had seen Xia cavalry refuse to cross a small bridge outside River-Fen hamlet because a dead man lay under it with a needle of gold through his tongue. Wei rubbed his jaw, thinking of the envoy.
"Someone cleans their stories for them," he said, not quite to her. "Someone makes sure they leave the right rumors."
"Then rumors are a road," Ziyan murmured. "We can walk them too."
The night seemed to turn a page.
A eunuch in Ning's colors reached the teahouse before the second watch, hair damp and patience gone thin with cold. He offered the ebony tube with both hands and eyes lowered to memory. Ziyan broke the seal. Two characters in that hand that left no dust: Willow Bridge.
Li Qiang did not ask if she would go. Wei wrapped a scarf around his throat and made himself into the kind of shadow that never fell on the person who needed it. Yufei checked the short pry-bar he had not returned to any painter's shelf.
The city emptied behind them into frost. Willow Bridge lay dark as a closed book across the canal. The spot where An Xiu had fallen still remembered; water there took moonlight differently. The three stepped to the crown. Snow lay unbroken—until it wasn't.
Someone waited at the far rail, cloak plain, stance military in the way that lets even stillness be a weapon.
"You asked for me," Ziyan said, stopping two paces short.
"I asked for your eyes," the figure answered, voice low and neither young nor old. "The court will tell you his death was a Xia quarrel that followed him into your house. It was not."
Wei shifted, and the cloak tilted just enough to warn that the owner had counted the men at Ziyan's flanks before speaking.
"An Xiu carried a curse," the figure said. "Not on him. In the cords sealing his papers. Those cords came from your own presses. From a warehouse the Southern Bureau pretends not to rent."
Lord Gao's shadow stretched longer across the river than even his mouth did in the halls. Ziyan kept her face smooth, but her breath slowed.
"And the men who burned shrines?" she asked softly.
The figure's laugh held no warmth. "War is a door. When it opens, every rat believes he was invited. Some of them wear your colors."
Wei's hand tightened against the stone. Li Qiang's eyes had not left the stranger's wrists.
"You are not Xia," Ziyan said. "And not mine."
"I am someone who does not enjoy drowning," the figure replied. "And the river rises."
They reached into the cloak and set something on the bridge rail—a small square of wood wrapped in greasy silk. The wax on its edge was impressed with a dragon pared thin by use: Xia's seal, and yet not. The cord that looped it was dyed the faded blue used by Qi's education stores for winter announcements.
"Take it," the figure said. "Or throw it away. Either way, you will find more of these if you look where your father taught his clerks to hide handwriting."
Yufei had already leaned forward, breath caught, the old cipher he had sworn to forget waking like a tooth in cold.
"And why help me?" Ziyan asked.
"Because if you drown, they will build the next bridge with your bones," the figure said. "And I prefer old stones."
They were gone before she could speak again, achievement of a step taught more by habit than gifts. Wei moved to follow; Ziyan's hand at his sleeve stopped him.
She turned the greasy silk to the light. The cord held three threads twisted together. One bled blue into her fingers.
"Education blue," Yufei whispered.
"Home," Li Qiang said, the word carrying the weight of a shield and a wound.
Ziyan closed her fist around the square and looked down at the black water. Far to the west, a dull red lifted against the clouds—the border burning again, or just the city remembering the cost of its candles.
She had thought the bead proved a house. Now the bridge said the river itself might be false.
At first bell she was back in the teahouse, a brazier at her knees and maps spread to the corners. Two letters left under her brush: one for Ning, composed as if it had been written with his pen; one for the Censorate, plain as bread and twice as filling. She placed the greasy square between them, then moved it aside. Not yet.
"Play both sides," Wei said softly, reading what she had not said aloud.
"I am done playing," Ziyan answered, surprising herself with the steel in it. "I am cutting."
Li Qiang's mouth did not move, but his shoulders eased as if some weight he had planned to take from her could now be left in her hands.
Yufei tied the cord of the almost-true packet with the knot she alone used and looked at the line of the map where the border became a suggestion. "They will not forgive you," he said.
"They do not know how," she answered. "Forgiveness is a skill. Our court never learned it."
Before the second bell, Prince Ning's hand came again: the Hall of Autumn Lattice at dawn. Bring ledgers touching the Southern Academies. The words looked like an invitation and felt like a trap. Ziyan tucked two knots and left one untied.
The city slept badly. Somewhere a woman woke screaming and apologized to the dark. Somewhere a man counted coins and decided he could live without his neighbor's ox. In the Education annex the furnace cooled and the clerks pretended the smoke had been honesty leaving the stacks.
Ziyan lay with her eyes open until the window grew the grey that means choices will be counted in other people's mouths. She rose before the bell, dressed without color, and slid the greasy square into her sleeve.
On the way to the hall, she paused at Willow Bridge and touched the rail where the stranger's hand had been. The wood was cold. The river did not care.
"Let's see," she said into the air that had not promised her anything, "which bank believes it owns the water."
Snow began again, small and deliberate. She walked toward the cranes, toward Ning's stillness and her father's winter. Behind her, in the waking streets, the refugees' cooking smoke lifted like prayers that did not need altars to be heard. And far beyond, at the edge where Qi tried to hold the land with words, the red on the clouds brightened into morning.