The pines took the wind and made it a smaller thing. North of the river, the road remembered how to be dirt instead of strategy. Ziyan's company moved through it as through a rehearsal of winter: breath in visible ropes, leather complaining, hooves carving sense into frost.
They passed farmhouses that had learned to close their eyes. In doorframes where no official would bother to look, blue silk was tied quiet and small: a mark that meant nothing to enemy patrols and everything to those who wanted the road to be less lonely. Once, a woman with flour on her hands stepped out and set a bowl of millet on a stoop. She did not meet their eyes. Shuye left a shard of kiln-fired glaze shaped like a leaf in its place. It glinted green before snow remembered its work.
Deserters found them the way water finds lower ground. Three at first, then five, then a dozen men wearing mismatched bits of Zhang's colors as if shame could pass for camouflage. They came with their palms up and their mouths hard and asked for a banner that would feed them. Wei told them the truth and did not make it kind. Li Qiang listened to how they held their spears; he kept four and sent eight away with food and a warning about how rumor gets men killed faster than arrows.
"It is easier to raise ghosts than armies," Li Qiang said that night, cleaning a blade with a strip of old cloth. "You are doing both."
Ziyan did not argue. She watched Feiyan return from the dark, step silent, limp hidden because it was no one else's business, and let the recognition settle that she had become, without asking for it, the thing men organized their courage around. She did not know yet how to feel about that. She did know it made sleep more arrogant than before.
They crossed a creek that had forgotten how to be noisy and found a small troop waiting on the far bank, white flags more practical than ceremonial. The man at their head wore travel-stained armor cleanly; his hair was bound without vanity. He saluted not as a supplicant but as someone who had learned the correct angle for respect and kept it.
"General Ren," he said, and then, because courtesy insisted on introductions when power balanced on a wire: "Ren Jingshu of the northern prefecture, once of the Academy. I studied under Minister Li until war taught me faster."
"Li Ziyan," Ziyan said, because hiding was a habit she would not indulge in front of men who had walked here on purpose. She watched his eyes when she said her father's title. They did not shift. That was either good or practiced.
Ren's soldiers carried spears that had not been sharpened recently and looks that had. Their bannerstaff was bare; the cloth had been used, Ziyan guessed, to bandage something no surgeon could fix. Ren saw her glance.
"No colors," he said. "We kept breath instead." He paused. "Half my remaining men, if you can pay them in bread and orders that do not insult. I will not lend lives to a rumor."
Feiyan's weight changed a hair's width; she measured him from throat to boot sole and found corners she did not like. Shuye noticed the way Ren's men watched the jar even when trying not to, as if stories could be carried like grain. Wei took Ren's measure with the particular dislike soldiers reserve for scholars who learned command later than killing.
Ziyan looked past Ren at the road, at the way the pines parted as if ready to host a banner whether one came or not. "Bread we can steal," she said. "Orders we already have. If you want glory, keep walking. If you want to leave something in this world that can't be burned in a morning, come."
Ren considered that, and the jar, and the woman who spoke as if bridges and men were alike in the ways that mattered. He nodded. "Half my remaining men," he repeated, and his mouth made a shape close to a smile that did not ask to be seen. "The other half I will spend buying us time if Zhang decides to collect a debt he has not written down."
Feiyan did not approve. She did not say so. When Ren turned away to bark an order, she spoke low enough that only Ziyan and the jar heard. "He is a book someone else started and left in the rain."
"Then we will dry the pages that still matter," Ziyan said.