Ziyan woke to the scent of cedar and old iron.
A single lamp guttered in the corner, haloing a low room lined with carpenter's tools. The pallet beneath her hips was clean. A bowl of broth steamed on the floor. She sat up too quickly; the world tilted, then steadied.
"Drink before you argue," a voice said from the shadow.
The scarf came away. The night stepped back like a curtain.
"Feiyan," Ziyan breathed.
Her friend—her knife and laughter, her other self—had cut her hair shorter. A new scar grazed her jaw, pale as a question. She stood with the same unteachable ease, weight on the outside blade of her feet, hands empty but never unarmed.
"You pulled me from their arrows," Ziyan said, throat tight. "And led me through veins I did not know this city had."
"It remembers me," Feiyan said. "I have left enough blood in its gutters."
Silence mapped the space between them, familiar and suddenly foreign. Ziyan lifted the bowl, tasted broth. Salt, bone, a little ginger. Home and not-home.
"What game are you playing?" she asked at last. "The man by the river said he once carried messages for my grandfather. When his scarf fell tonight, his face was yours."
Feiyan smiled without teeth. "Sometimes there are two shadows in one alley. Sometimes men see only the one they fear. I found you first. That is the only truth that matters."
"You'll stay." Ziyan made it half-declaration, half-prayer.
"I won't," Feiyan said.
The bowl went cold in Ziyan's hands.
"You will say it is safer," Ziyan murmured. "You will say the mark on my palm pulls watchers and knives, and that if we remain tied, the rope will strangle us both."
Feiyan came closer, crouched until their faces shared the same poor lamp. Her eyes held warmth and winter in equal measures.
"I will say," she whispered, "that the path you carry is a road, and mine is a blade."
Ziyan's laugh cracked. "And when roads and blades meet?"
"Empires change," Feiyan said softly. "Or girls die."
She reached into her sleeve, drew out a strip of blue silk twisted with two other threads. She looped it once around Ziyan's wrist, just above the lotus mark that did not fade anymore.
"Education. Home. Debt," Feiyan said, naming the colors without looking away. "Your enemies read these. Your friends will learn to. Tie your letters to this and half the city will open its door before it remembers to be afraid."
Ziyan gripped the silk. "You are not my enemy."
"Not today," Feiyan said. "Not until I must be."
Ziyan searched her friend's face for the map she used to know. She found mountains where once there had been fields.
"Where will you go?"
"Where knives are taught to sing." Feiyan stood. "There is a man in the north who trains women to be ghosts and kings to be superstitious. He owes me a lesson and a debt."
"The court will say you deserted me," Ziyan said.
"The court will say what it is paid to say." Feiyan reached out, thumb brushed the drying cut on Ziyan's cheek, the touch as careful as childhood in a world that had outlawed it. "Keep your head up, Princess. If you bend now, it is not to bow—it is to draw breath for the next climb."
"And when it is time?" Ziyan asked.
"You will not need to call me," Feiyan said. "I will feel the Empire change its grip."
She pulled the scarf back up. For a heartbeat, the lamp drew her shadow long enough to look like a road. Then the door whispered, the night received her, and Ziyan was alone with cedar, iron, and a broth gone thin.
She did not sleep. Dawn slid a grey finger under the shutter and found her still sitting, fingers on the blue silk at her wrist. When she finally moved, it was to slide open a small chest in the corner of the room.
Inside, wrapped in plain cloth, lay a child's hairpin carved with two sparrows.
Lian'er's.
Ziyan cupped it, and the room ceased pretending to be strong.
"Be safe," she said into the wood. "Be bored. Grow."
Far from the capital's teeth, in a valley where winter came slower and left more gently, a farmhouse wore snow like a shawl. Smoke climbed from its mouth in a straight, untroubled line.
Inside, a woman with wheat on her sleeves stirred porridge and hummed. On the sleeping platform, a small girl sat cross-legged, elbows on knees, watching a tree through the paper window.
Two sparrows argued on a bare branch with an importance only the young and the free possess. Lian'er extended the hairpin she'd been given—another carved sparrow, twin to the one Ziyan kept—and whispered in triumph when the birds startled and took to the air.
"Quiet, sprout," the woman said, smiling without turning. "The hills carry sound like gossip."
Lian'er pressed her mouth shut with both hands, eyes laughing. She knew only that the city had become unkind and that she was to be a cloud for a while. Clouds, she had been told, do not get caught. They watch. They wait. They travel when no one is looking.
When the porridge was ready, the woman set two bowls and a third empty one on the low table. She bowed her head a fraction toward the emptiness.
"For the road," she said simply.
Lian'er copied her, solemn as the sparrows were loud.
By dusk, the city had eaten two more rumors and spat four more edicts. Soldiers rolled up banners and unrolled accusations with equal ceremony. Teahouses learned to pour silence between cups.
Minister Li returned to the front hall, where the snow had been swept away again by hands he did not thank. He stood at the threshold and let the cold find all the places he had armored too late.
Luo appeared, breath pluming. "The boys went. The copies are placed."
Minister Li nodded. "Good. Now send a note to the cousin who thinks himself the Emperor's knife. Invite him to tea. Tell him I am an old man ready to confess my secrets."
"My lord," Luo said carefully, "are you?"
Minister Li smiled, and for a moment the scholar he had once been warmed the room the way books do when touched. "No. But I am ready to make him think I am."
He turned back toward the study. On the desk, the old lotus seal slept under new ink.
"Daughter," he said to no one, voice thin in the big room, "you fall like a snow that refuses to vanish. Very well. Let us see if winter learns humility."
On a ridge north of the city, where pines held their green like a vow, a woman in a grey scarf watched the road until it began to look back. Wind worried her sleeve; she let it.
"Our bond is not broken," Feiyan told the cold. "It is a string drawn tight."
She set her hand on the hilt that had made her a rumor and smiled once, for an audience of crows.
"When the right war arrives," she said, "we will play it."
She vanished into the trees. The crows argued, then followed.
Night returned to the capital with the precision of a court functionary. A courier, cheeks raw, stumbled through the southern gate with a scroll bound in iron thread. He did not read its words; he had carried them too far to still care what they said.
In the morning, they would hang in every ward:
By Imperial Will: all known associates of the traitor Li Ziyan are to be questioned and watched. Houses that harbor her will be stripped; tongues that praise her will be measured.
Before the ink dried on the first copy, a boy in the eastern quarter slid an anonymous ledger page under a guildmaster's door. In the northern offices, a censor woke sweating from a dream he'd had every winter for twenty years and found an old debt staring back at him from the floor.
The river took all of it into its black mouth without judgment.
Ash lifted from roofs like reluctant birds.
And somewhere behind a carpenter's shop, a girl tied blue silk tighter around her wrist and began to write.