The river muttered under its thin lid, a tired man talking in his sleep. Frost filmed the ropes and made the horses' manes sound like paper when they shook. Yong'an's ridge—black pines, scarred earth, the moveable cemetery of broken gear—breathed as a thing that had survived long enough to become a place.
They sewed armor with thread and borrowed faith. Leather took the needle like a second chance. Men sat in pairs, one holding, one stitching, the rhythm as old as harvest and twice as stubborn. A boy who had never eaten an orange taught an old rider how to patch a stirrup. An old rider who had never learned to read taught the boy how to keep a knife from rusting. This, too, was a kind of army.
Feiyan and Ziyan walked the parapet for the first time in days without speaking orders. The wind over the river pressed their cloaks to bone and made their hair talk to itself. Below them, the water lay dark and particular, the ruined ice flowering along the edges like white mold.
"Your blade is blunt," Feiyan said at last, glancing at Ziyan's knife the way friends call names without using them.
"It is not my blade that needs to cut next," Ziyan said. "It is my name."
Feiyan's mouth tilted. "Names are tougher meat. They take longer over the fire."
From the north came stragglers of every kind a war can make: Qi regulars who had outlived their units and brought regulations like talismans; deserters with Zhang's colors still stitched at the shoulder and shame stitched into their throats; peasants turned half-soldiers, carrying poles too heavy for their mouths to match. Ren and Shuye registered them with patience already paid for by other men's mistakes. Ren wrote in a hand that knew how to be fair and Shuye squinted at hands to tell what work they want to do and pressed them to it. Han wrote orders that read like prayers and were obeyed because disobedience had grown expensive.
News traveled faster than hunger. In the market of rumor, the loudest hawker announced: Zhang had taken a new title in the capital—Emperor-Protector. The word Protector tasted like iron and attrition when men tried it aloud. The Emperor's fate was a blank screen everyone pretended was a painting.
"Was there music?" Wei asked no one in particular, sharpening his spear until it stopped being a tool and became intent. "Did he teach the court how to applaud a silence?"
Huo brought in a captured scout who smelled of mud and poor sleep. He was young enough that fear had not learned to stand upright in him yet. Feiyan took him to a wind-shadow and let him be comfortable. Comfort made more traitors than torture. He told her, tripping over a humility someone else had strapped on him, that two of Zhang's generals had sent riders to Xia with a map rolled around a promise: recognition for a piece of the south, quiet titles, neat borders, tribute measured instead of stolen.
Feiyan brought the news folded in her voice. Ziyan heard it without flinching. Something in her quietened in a way that meant heat had become shape.
"If Zhang trades the realm like grain," she said when the council gathered around Shuye's kiln, "we will trade him for peace. And collect both debts."
Han's eyebrow made a small bridge that decided not to be built. "You suggest we provoke both armies at once."
"I suggest we show them each other," Ziyan said. "Take back Ye Cheng not as a liberation but as bait. Xia will chase, because pride cannot abide reversal. Zhang will move to intercept, because he cannot resist a stage. Between them, we make the Empire look at its own face."
Ren tapped ash from his brush. "And if it does not like what it sees?"
"Then it will learn manners," Wei said, cheerfully vicious.
Li Qiang stood with his hands behind him, as if prayer and parade were close cousins. "We will need the guilds," he said. "The road-watchers, the boatmen, the men who fix wheels. Teach them to miscount for us."
"Already begun," Shuye said, pleased. "In Xinglu they call a full sack ten measures and a sack missing its top four ten measures as well. Truth is being practiced."