That night, under lanterns made from old jars and bits of thin skin, Ziyan stood on a crate that had held grim flour and now held the weight of a person. The banner she raised was pale as winter's intention with a single braided line of blue silk through its heart. It moved like water that had remembered how to carry boats.
"Listen," she said, and the word went farther than her voice. "No throne. Not yet. Not for me. Until the river is taught respect again, we tie our names to this: not to borders, not to chairs, not to the kind of ink that demands weather obey it. We fight for a road that does not sell those who walk it."
Ren's men knelt as if the act might hold their knees together longer. Han did not kneel. He set his hand to his breast and nodded once, the acknowledgment of a rider to a road that had chosen to be less foolish than most. Wei dropped to one knee, then stood immediately because kneeling made him itch. Li Qiang bowed his head in the angle used for swords and funerals. Shuye grinned and looked upward the way potters do when they check if a thing they've made will hold against gravity and appetite.
Feiyan did not kneel. She stood at Ziyan's side, a shadow taller than the light insisted possible, and put her hand on the blue silk as if taking its pulse. "Be inconvenient," she murmured, so low only Ziyan and the idea of her heard it. "Be a road sharp enough to cut bare feet."
A murmur passed through the camp that was not cheering and not prayer. It was men remembering what they'd meant to be before rice and fear had taught them easier habits. Children looked up and saw nothing that would feed them and did not complain because children sometimes understand what adults cannot explain.
Far south, in the hall of listening screens, Zhang wrote himself a new title with a brush he did not grip too hard: Protector of the Realm. The seal sank into wax like a foot into spring mud, heavy, claimed. He imagined a procession that would come when the smoke cleared, imagined trumpets and regalia worn handsomely. He did not imagine the smell of burned pitch in a valley or the way a banner of pale cloth and blue silk could make men walk longer than their legs wanted to.
In Ziyan's camp, the wind found both banners—the pale one near the kiln, the invisible one in the mouths of men who said her name to their hands before sleeping. The distance between those two cloths, between that seal and this fire, could be measured in bread and in blood. The night did not do the measuring. It watched.
Later, when the lanterns burned low and the new banner remembered to flutter even without witnesses, Feiyan limped—finally admitting to the ache—toward the outmost ring where scouts warmed their hands and told lies. She took the folded page from her boot, the one that put a price on Minister Li in tidy script, and sat with it on her knee.
Ziyan found her there without needing to look. "What does the paper say that your face won't?"
Feiyan did not perform surprise. She handed it over.
Ziyan read. She did not sway. The jar hummed behind them like a living thing practicing breath.
"He was clever enough to burn the decree," Feiyan said. "Not clever enough to be unpriced."
Ziyan held the paper over the kiln and then changed her mind and slid it under her armor with the Emperor's half-letter. "Some fires need two logs," she said. "We will choose when."
Feiyan set her shoulder against Ziyan's and let the weight do what weights do: steady things.
"Tomorrow," Ziyan said, looking north where the road collected itself from darkness. "We teach a town to say no without needing a wall. We teach a guild to miscount for us. We teach a river warden to remember his job is water, not stamps."
"And Zhang?" Feiyan asked.
"When he comes," Ziyan said, "we will be a place, not a rumor."
In the borderless hour before dawn, a boy ran along the camp's line tying small blue knots to tent cords. No one had told him. He did not know how to make banners; he made reminders. In the hall of curtains, a draft lifted the silk and let a sliver of the Emperor's pale sleeve show. In the office where Minister Li had burned his decree, the ash in the tray cooled with the dignity of small, completed things.
The road turned a little in its sleep. The jar held heat the way stubborn hearts hold purpose. The two banners listened to the same wind. Neither blessed; neither cursed. Both intended.