They packed lightly: parchment, oilcloth, dry rice cakes, two small waterskins, a coil of cord, a pouch of dull coins that could stand in for more interesting ones. Ziyan tucked Lian'er's sparrow hairpin into her inner sleeve; the little bird watched out with a carved eye as if keeping tally of hopes.
Feiyan cut her hair again, one neat pass of a knife, dark strands falling like a short rain. She bound it in a cord the color of nothing and pulled a plain hat low. "The less we look like the story people want to tell," she said, "the longer we can be our own."
They left the carpenter's shop at a time of day with no proper name, when even bells hesitate to claim it. Wei took the scrolls, then shook his head and pushed them back into Ziyan's hands. "If I carry them and fall," he said gruffly, "they die in a ditch. If you carry them and fall, the ditch will learn to sit up and listen."
"You will stay," Ziyan said.
Wei blinked. "I—what?"
"You and Li Qiang cannot both leave with me. If all threads run south, Zhang will only need one knife to cut the cloth. You two keep eyes here. Find the one ear that still wants to hear. Learn which mouths are hungry for the taste of his ruin."
Li Qiang did not argue. "We will meet you in Nan Shu when the season changes," he said. "Or when a different road brings us to the same gate."
Wei scowled, then, unexpectedly, laughed once. "Bring back a southern wind," he told Ziyan. "This one has been chewing my bones."
They embraced as soldiers do: short, hard, honest. Feiyan watched the doorway's rectangle of dim light and said nothing. When they separated, the shop felt smaller, as if some scaffolding had been taken down and the house had remembered it was only wood.
The southern gate was a scar in the wall, low and broad, used by carts that preferred the road to the river. In better winters it bustled with traders from towns that were not yet stories. Today it breathed guardedly. Two squads stood beneath the portcullis, their spears held with the casual threat of men who expected to be obeyed. Complaint lines of the poor bulged in the cold.
"Plain," Feiyan said, and became it: shoulders slumped into the posture of someone used to saying yes; her blade hidden in a basket that smelled of ginger and straw. Ziyan let her back remember the weight of a peddler's frame. She tied a half-veil across her face and held the scroll-bundle like sticks for a cooking fire.
They joined the line. The guards took their time. They liked to. Each bundle was untied with a boredom that pretended it wasn't fear. A woman with eggs was sent away because the guard disliked the face of her husband. A man with a sick child learned that illness without a permit is treason.
When it was their turn, the nearest spear-point tapped Feiyan's basket. She lifted the lid. Straw. Ginger. A knife's handle disguised as a pestle. The guard squinted, found his own reflection in Feiyan's night-black gaze, and looked down quickly to hide the thing it made him think of.
"And you?" he asked Ziyan, indifferent, already convinced.
"Laundry rags," Ziyan said, voice roughened to a servant's winter. "For an inn south of the gate. They don't like their guests to smell of the capital."
The guard laughed. "No one does, these days." He prodded the bundle. Oilcloth yielded like a patient stomach. Blue silk did not show itself.
Another guard wandered over with supervisor's boredom and wolf's curiosity. He had the look of someone who noticed too much and liked it. "Lift the cloth," he said.
Ziyan did. A top layer of rags, genuinely soiled, lay beneath. The stink rose with authority. The guard flinched and, from pride, did not step back. "Fine. Go. And tell your inn to pay the tax next time for fresh ash. The city is not a charity."
They passed under the gate with steps that confessed nothing. Beyond, the road opened like a sentence wanting its verb. Snow lay thinner here; the fields remembered that earth is a promise if you let it be tired.
When they were far enough to let their breath lengthen, Feiyan said, "You are better at lying than you used to be."
"I am worse at needing to," Ziyan answered.