Dawn was a rumor at first. When it arrived, it embarrassed both sides into pausing. Zhang's vanguard drew back to the ditch with the sullen pride of men who have learned their prey has teeth. On the parapet, the defenders sagged against stone. Buckets came, then bread. Someone cried and apologized to no one for it. The gate still stood. The city still had a name.
The rider from Qi reached them at a stumbling gallop, dust caked to his lashes, horse froth-flecked. He did not dismount so much as fall. A guard caught him. Ziyan saw the seal and felt the message before it was spoken.
"From the capital," the courier rasped. "Gaoling has fallen. Xia banners at the river crossings. Three days—maybe two—and they will see our city roofs. The Emperor calls all riders home. We cannot send men to you. We cannot spare even prayer."
Silence found the wall again. This time it did not feel like a pause; it felt like a verdict. Lord Meng came up the stair as the words finished being heard, his fur damp with the cold sweat of a too-long night. He looked at the courier, the smoke, Ziyan.
"So," he said. "We are alone."
"You were always alone," Feiyan said, not unkindly. "Tonight just taught you the word."
"If Qi cannot send aid," an officer whispered, "we cannot hold two days. The people—my lord, the people—"
"Will live," someone snapped, and Ziyan realized it was her mouth. She turned to Meng, felt rage and pity collide and agree to take turns. "Open the gates and you save the walls. Close them and you save your name. Neither choice feeds children today. Both feed them later. Choose which hunger you want."
"Fine words," the captain said bitterly. "Do we eat them?"
Shuye, hands burned, held up a small earthen jar as if he were back in the shed and this were an argument about glazes. "We eat time," he said. "Trust me. I've fired worse clay than this city."
Lord Meng's shoulders sagged and straightened. He looked to Li Qiang, who gave him nothing but a soldier's measuring gaze; to Wei, who shrugged as if to say fighting was better than explaining; to Feiyan, who did not offer comfort because it is a currency best spent late. Finally he looked to Ziyan.
"If I hold," he said, "and die, will your road remember my name?"
"It will be the step others stand on," she said. "Or the stone they trip over if they choose badly."
"Then we hold," he said, and his mouth found a shape close to a smile. "And you go."
Every muscle in Ziyan's back argued. The jar at her knee was warm; the ledgers within felt like breathing things. The courier's message throbbed in the air: Qi could not come. Xia would. If she stayed, she would be a blade on a wall. If she left, she might become a fire in a hall.
Feiyan's hand found her sleeve, a touch that did not pull. "A road does not grieve at a fork," she said.
Wei scowled. "I would rather die on a wall than live with a question."
"You will do both if we are stupid," Li Qiang said, a dry kindness. "Go, Ziyan."
She swallowed the bitterness that wanted to be nobility and found it was only vanity in better clothes. "We go," she said. "But not empty."
Orders came quick as breath. Shuye left two crates of pitch at the east parapet and taught a boy with steady hands the rhythm of throwing. Wei reorganized the guard rotation with the brutality of someone who did not care about hurt feelings, only survival. Li Qiang set wedges in the gate braces and showed the carpenters where wood remembered strength. Feiyan walked the wall and chose six men who did not flutter under her gaze. They would be knives where a wall could not be.
Ziyan took Lord Meng's seal in her palm and pressed it into a packet of letters Shuye had written in the night with ink that still smelled of kiln smoke. Names of grain thieves. Names of cowards. Names of those who could be made to fear properly. She put the packet back into Meng's hand.
"Send these to houses that doubt their doubt," she said. "Use your name to make them remember theirs."
"Bring mine back with you," he said, and for a heartbeat he looked like a father asking a daughter to come home by lanternlight.
They left through the same postern that had betrayed them into safety. The yard had become a machine, the city a body that had remembered each organ's purpose. On the outer ditch, Zhang's engineers hauled new timber; on the hill beyond, riders shifted, impatient to see where courage ended and fatigue began.
Past the first rise, Ziyan reined in and looked back. Lucheng's walls were a hard line against a sky already thinking of evening. From here, the banners below looked like weeds. Smoke climbed, stubborn and straight.
"Zhang can take that gate if he dares," she said, more to the road than to her companions. "When I return, I will not ask permission at doors. I will change the hinges."
"A fine, threatening sentence," Shuye said, wiping soot from his cheek. "Let's survive to deliver it to someone who will be offended."
Wei spat into the frost. "North," he grunted. "To make the wind ours."
Li Qiang said nothing, only set his horse to a pace that could be kept for days. Feiyan tightened her cloak with a small, exact motion and turned her head as if hearing a drum most ears could not. "They will not follow yet," she judged. "They like to win at noon and tell stories at dinner. We will deny them both."
They moved at once, a small thing in a large field, carrying a jar that felt at that moment heavier than a city. Behind them, a horn blew from Lucheng's north wall—a defiant, ragged sound—and was answered by the crude braying of Zhang's pipes. Ahead, the sky cleared in a narrow seam, bright as a blade drawn from oil.
By noon they had put two ridges between themselves and the siege. By dusk, the noise had faded to a rumor that could be mistaken for wind if one wanted to be kind. The courier rode until his horse's heart reminded him to live; he fell back with thanks and shame, turning south toward a capital that needed every warning. The road tilted, and with it the work.
As night came, Ziyan felt the familiar twin weights settle: the jar at her side, the vow in her chest. She did not look back again. She did not ask forgiveness of the stones. The hunt had already chosen its path. And if Xia reached Qi's roofs before she reached Liang's halls, she would make sure there were no roofs left for Zhang to stand beneath without learning rain.
They rode until the stars stopped counting. The cold bit their ears and left. The horses' breath was the only fog that mattered. When they finally drew rein in a stand of pines that had learned discretion, Ziyan set her palm to the jar and felt its patient heat, an ember from a kiln that had refused to be frightened.
"Tomorrow," she said into the dark, "names become doors."
Feiyan's reply was the scrape of steel being checked and put away. Wei's was the soft thud of a spear butt finding earth. Li Qiang's was the silence of a guard line drawn. Shuye's was a low chuckle that promised mischief to any ladder that thought itself clever.
The wind turned then, almost imperceptibly—from the north, cold and honest. It lifted the edge of Ziyan's hood as if to look her in the face and then went on its way, decide-less as weather. She smiled without meaning to.
"Good," she said to the thing that carried banners and rumors alike. "Listen."