They moved as a larger sound. Refugees began to step aside sooner, recognizing not the faces but the intent. Old men touched two fingers to the blue knots on doorframes and then to their mouths, tasting luck. Once, a boy pointed at Ziyan's wrist and whispered to his mother the way children whisper about fireworks; the mother hushed him and nodded, not because she believed in any name, but because it was the quickest way to avoid a soldier's attention.
That night they camped in a cut above a half-frozen stream. The stars made an effort. The jar hummed faintly, or perhaps breath learned its echo. Ren spoke with Wei over the men's fire and was told three things he would need to forget to survive. Shuye showed a deserter how to silence the rattle in his spear with a leather lace and received, in return, a story about a paymaster who counted with both hands and one foot. Feiyan slept with her back to a pine, knife tucked into the habit at her thigh. Li Qiang walked the perimeter twice and then a third time until the ring agreed to be unbroken.
Ziyan sat on a flat stone with the jar beside her like a second heart and drew the Emperor's letter from her sleeve. The edges had softened; the ink had bled at one curve where rain had taught it humility. She opened it with the care people pretend to use for holy things and read the dozen characters as if they might change their minds in the night.
If I fall silent, make the silence cost them.
The ink had the same hand as the public decrees, but the spacing was not courtly. It was a man writing at a small table in a room that had too much quiet in it. She folded the letter and put it under the lamellae of her armor, where breath could warm it but not blur it further.
She looked north. Some distances are measured in days. Others in stubbornness.
Feiyan came from the dark and sat without asking for invitation, which is the only invitation that matters when friendship has learned to live with war. For a while she said nothing. Then she traced the edge of the stone with one finger and found Ziyan's eyes.
"Zhang will come himself next time," she said.
"Good," Ziyan answered, and did not let the cold steal the heat out of the word. "Then the road will end with the man who paved it."
Feiyan's mouth made a shape like satisfaction and warning at once. "Roads don't end," she said. "They turn into other people."
"Then we will choose who," Ziyan said.
The wind shifted and carried the taste of ash even this far inland. It caught at the blue knots on their sleeves and made them small flags in a war that had learned to use smaller signs. Somewhere behind the trees, Ren gave a command and the men moved as if the ground had answered first. Somewhere ahead, a wolf considered history and decided not to get involved.
Sleep came grudgingly. The jar kept its own counsel and its heat. Before she closed her eyes, Ziyan slid her hand along the lid as if greeting a living thing and said, to it and to the part of the night that agreed to listen, "We will be inconvenient."
Morning would find them thinner and more numerous, poorer and more dangerous. It would find Zhang's letter at a gate that no longer trusted seals, and Minister Li's unwritten thoughts warm against his skin. It would find a new banner sewn from a strip of blue silk and a piece of a burned robe, held together with thread that had seen better days and preferred these.
The road lifted a little under them, the way roads do when they decide to pretend they are lighter than they are. They did not bless it. They did not curse it. They used it.