Feiyan took it in the way she took a blade from its oil: admiring the craft and suspecting the uses it would be put to. "Ghosts don't build walls," she said, watching Shuye and two boys stack baked mud into a waist-high barrier that would not stop a horse but would stop a wind. "They pass. They scratch, and go."
"Then we stop being ghosts," Ziyan said.
She stood with Ren at the edge of camp where the ground thought about becoming road. His men staked lines as if tents, like arguments, stood better when their corners were true. Han's riders slept in their saddles by turns, a law older than kings. Li Qiang tried the edge of a repaired sword and nodded once when it spoke to him without complaint. Wei whittled a peg and a soldier learned something from his hands that would keep a gate from rattling. Shuye built a small kiln out of flattered stones and convinced it to take a flame as if he were asking a proud elder to sit.
"Do you mean to stay?" Ren asked Ziyan, not because he needed the answer but to learn how she said it.
"We mean to return," she said. "Staying is a kind of waiting. Returning is a kind of promise."
He considered that and did not argue because he preferred good words when they were attached to work.
Feiyan did not like the way time began to gather like kindling. She took two men and a rope and went scouting. The hills understood her. She returned at dusk, cloaked in burrs and quiet. She carried a courier's pouch cut from a belt that had recently been attached to a man who could not run as fast as his orders required.
Inside lay a sketch of their camp drawn by a competent eye and a list in a neat, painful hand: names marked for turnings, prices on mouths, a bounty on a certain retired minister by the river—dead or alive, the script added as if mercy and cruelty were accounting categories.
Feiyan folded the paper small enough to hide under a fingernail. She looked at Ziyan across the yard where men ate and women ladled and children made rules for games that had learned to be quiet. She did not show the page. Not tonight. She tucked it in her boot and felt its edge like a pebble she would walk on until it cut, because some wounds must be chosen, and some words must be delayed.
She swore she would tell her. Soon. Not when it would make Ziyan act like a daughter instead of a commander. The courier sent by the Emperor arrived on a horse that had outlived wiser decisions. He carried the habits of the old post: a water gourd refilled without asking in every village, a way of sitting that preserved his knees, an ability to recognize which tents contained men who had started wars for the smell of it. He asked for no names. He tied his mare at the line without flinching when Han's sergeant weighed his bones with a glance.
Ziyan met him at the jar, because that had become where proper things happened. He offered the tube, iron-sheathed, silk sealing clouded with handling, uncut. She took it and did not ask him what it had cost.
"For you," he said. He did not bow. That was proper.
Feiyan slit the seal with a fingernail and handed it to Ziyan because some ceremonies are owed even when war makes a mockery of all ceremony. The characters inside were crisp where the brush had been sure, blurred where breath had snatched a drop.
The throne remains. If I fall, keep the road.
It was not an order. It was the sentence a man writes when a century learns to be a season.
She read it twice. She thought of a boy with a jade tablet learning where to kneel. She thought of screens whispering, and her father's hands that smelled of ink even when washed. She exhaled slowly and felt the breath want to turn into a sound she could not permit.
She fed half the letter to the kiln Shuye had coaxed into fraternity. The paper blackened and went to smoke, carrying what it could to places where it would be safer. The other half she folded and slid beneath the lamellae at her shoulder, where sweat and heartbeat would teach it her shape.
Ren watched with guarded respect. Han watched with unguarded practicality. Wei watched with relief that orders had become clear. Li Qiang watched without judgment because he already knew he would obey. Shuye watched with the interest of a craftsman in how things burn. Feiyan watched as if from a step sideways to time.
"What is it?" Ren asked, because someone had to.
"A request," Ziyan said. "Not from a throne. From a man. That is heavier."
"And you?" Han said. "Do you answer?"
"I keep the road," she said.