They walked without speaking for a time. The city sank behind them the way a dream does when you press the morning against it. Twice, patrol riders passed along the wall's shadow and did not look out. Once, a hawk stooped into the frozen ditch and rose with nothing, slower than dignity.
"Minister Li," Ziyan said into the cold, as if tasting a medicine's afterscent. "He will go. He will answer. He will choose the shape of survival he knows."
Feiyan adjusted the strap of her basket. "He has chosen it many times. He will keep choosing it until the floor under his feet changes its mind."
"Then we will change the floor."
"Stone is stubborn," Feiyan said mildly.
"So am I."
They reached the first milestone where the road swerved to avoid a copse of pines that had learned how to make wind sound like advice. Feiyan stopped there and tilted her head, listening to something Ziyan could not yet hear. "We will not take the main road. There is a cart path through the older orchards. Fewer eyes. More foxes."
"Foxes do not ask for permits," Ziyan said.
"They ask for hens," Feiyan replied. "We can pay in straw."
They left the road and its honest trampling and entered the thinner path where trees bowed and remembered spring. The city diminished to a rumor behind them. The world became bark and small noises and the ache of calves unfurling.
At the ridge where the last view of the southern gate could be had if one was sentimental, Ziyan turned. The towers stood like fingers counting backwards. Smoke from morning kitchens wrote lines over roofs she knew better than her own hand. Somewhere beneath that ink, Wei and Li Qiang were learning things in ways that did not leave marks yet.
"I will come back," she said softly, to towers that had never learned to answer. "And when I do, I will not be hunted."
Feiyan, who did not often grant words the honor of agreement, said, "No."
Ziyan looked at her.
"You will be the one who chooses who is hunted," Feiyan said.
They walked on. The noon stayed grey and refused to take a side. Once, on a rise where the wind tried to introduce itself, Feiyan paused with her head turned toward the east, like a hound that hears beyond hearing.
"Riders," she said. "Behind. Four. Not yet sure of us. They will be soon."
"Zhang's?"
"Or men who like to sell their eyes," Feiyan said. "Either kind bites."
They took to the orchards proper, feet finding old furrows, bodies learning again the grammar of hiding in movement. Ziyan tucked the bundle under her arm like a child she refused to let sleep. The jade ring pressed a cold circle into her thumb, a reminder that a conversation waited somewhere beyond this breath.
Snow began again, small and deliberate, as if to practice the art of erasing. The trees ahead thinned, and the land dropped by slow degrees toward the south where the river altered its mind and towns wore their roofs lower.
Feiyan broke into a run that was not hurried; it was simply long. Ziyan matched it. At the next rise, Feiyan flung out a hand and they slid into a shallow gully, breath smoking in tidy ghosts. Hoofbeats sounded where their footprints had been.
The riders did not turn their heads. They passed like sentences with no punctuation, meaning to be found later. When the last sound was a memory, Feiyan touched Ziyan's arm and they rose.
"Nan Shu," Ziyan said, as if naming a door in a house that had once been hers. "We will need a roof that leaks properly."
"I know one," Feiyan said. "And a woman who keeps bowls for people who have forgotten their names."
"Then we will borrow new ones," Ziyan said.
They reached the high shoulder of the road just as the sun contemplated learning how to be seen. Far ahead, where the land softened into older fields and the river's voice deepened, a thin pillar of smoke rose and braided itself into the sky. It smelled like cedar when the wind remembered.
Feiyan's hand closed on Ziyan's sleeve, firm and sudden. "Down," she hissed.
On the road below, turning from the east with a speed that confused their horses, a courier squad rode with iron-threaded scrolls. The lead rider's banner was small and heavy: the mark of summons — the kind that could strip a house bare or call a head to kneel.
The riders veered south.
Toward Nan Shu.
Ziyan's breath clouded. Her hand tightened around the bundle until the scrolls inside bent. "Then we must reach them first," she said.
Feiyan's mouth curved in something that was not quite a smile. "Then we run."
They slipped from the rise, vanishing into the orchard's long shadows. Behind them the road stayed bare, but the air felt as if it had begun to watch.