Han's riders looked at Ziyan and found they were willing to be bold if boldness had a plan. She had one. Shuye outlined it with his hands and a length of twine; Huo added a correction where the current curled; Wei measured the distance with his eyes; Li Qiang set his jaw.
They split. Huo took four riders upstream to cross where the river shoaled around a stubborn rock; they would come down on the far bank like regret itself. Feiyan and Wei would take the near parapet, silent and surgical, to keep the drum asleep. Ziyan, Li Qiang, and Shuye would become carpenters with the river's help: sledge, wedges, pitch in the throat of the second arch.
It began with a cough of flame and the subtraction of two sentries who had chosen the wrong moment to discuss boredom. Feiyan's knife taught the drum the advantages of silence. Wei's spear taught a sergeant about the fragility of knees. Shuye slid under the arch until the river was a hand at his neck, set two jars in the mouths where stone met old mortar, and backed out with the care of a man leaving a saint's bad mood.
Li Qiang raised the sledge. The first blow thudded. The second found the hairline crack Feiyan had predicted, the one no eye would trust but a river would. The third persuaded the jar to remember what it had been made for. Sound bulged. Stone frowned. Water cheered.
The arch did not so much collapse as decide to be elsewhere. Half the span slumped into the current with the theatrical dignity of officials being dismissed; the rest tilted enough to make the parapet's flags attempt to fly without instructions. On the far bank, Huo's riders emerged from reeds and began the useful work of turning wagons into furniture no one would ever sit on.
A single rider in a lacquered half-mask spurred out from the shadow of a poplar and charged for Ziyan through the settling spray, sword up, horse angry. He was better than his uniform suggested; the blade came at a tricky angle, a craftsman's insult. Ziyan caught, turned, felt the jar-heavy pack horse brush her hip, and thought of the child's shoe in the ditch. She stepped inside the rider's arc, drove her hilt into his wrist with a kindness that broke, and let him choose between river and mud. He chose wrong, and the river changed his name to something short and wet.
"Three," Feiyan said, appearing at her shoulder with a neat line of blood along her blade like a signature.
Horns finally found the right notes. From the hills, a handful of Zhang's cavalry came on with more courage than sense, seeing their bridges vanish into arithmetic. Lord Han's riders met them in the shallow water with the joy of men who rarely get to do exactly what they were hired for. Wei whooped and took a man from his saddle with a move that made physics sulk. Li Qiang parried, turned, struck; three motions that cut a story into a new, superior version of itself. Ziyan stayed by the jar and by the arch and by the truth of why they were there.
It did not last. Good work rarely does. When the last of the flags sank into the brown churn and the last useful sack had been dragged to the right bank and split over the shallows, Ziyan whistled twice. It carried. The riders broke, clean and practiced, and the river rolled on as if it had always meant to tidy this stretch of world.
They returned to Yong'an with wet boots, smoke in their hair, and a wedge missing from the sledge because the river had decided to keep it. Han waited in the same courtyard, a man who had begun the day intending to ask permission of his doubts and ended it writing letters to his future.
"Which bridges are mine?" he asked, dry.
"The ones your horses can swim," Feiyan said.
"Good," Han said, and for once he smiled in a way that let his scars be part of it. He looked to Ziyan. "You were right. Three gates make a wall. I will hold mine. And at dawn, I will not be deaf."
A drum beat in the distance—faint, insistent. The courier came before the echoes faded, hard-ridden and hollow-eyed. He didn't climb the steps; he delivered the news where his knees chose to fold.
"From the capital," he said. "Xia banners have crossed at East Crossing. They light fires on the river's lip. The Emperor has shuttered the inner city. He sends no orders. Only this—" He held out a strip of silk, stamped with a seal that had been meant to last longer. "—'Hold what can be held.'"
Silence took the yard and weighed it without cruelty. Ziyan placed her fingers over the seal, felt the old wax give like an exhausted man, and then removed her hand.
"We will," she said. "And we will take what must be taken."
Shuye leaned his shoulder against a pillar and let out a breath that might have wanted to be laughter in an easier season. "Bridges," he said. "Walls. Names."
"Tomorrow," Feiyan said, sheathing her blade like a promise. "We cut again."
The night over Yong'an was sharp and undecided. It did not bless them. It did not curse them. It listened—properly, as if at last it understood what sort of story it had agreed to shelter.