The road rose and folded as if it were taking a breath it had no right to keep. Morning bled thin over the capital's tiles; courtiers moved like moths around lamps they no longer trusted to be honest. Ziyan rode beneath banners that bore the Emperor's insignia and one that did not, because wars make room for contradiction. Ren and Han rode either side of her, Li Qiang close enough to count the beats of her heart if he liked. Wei rode last, a grin that had eaten the edges off of mirth and left something sharper in its stead. Shuye carried the jars the way men carry grudges—carefully, because they matter.
The city received them with a complexity Ziyan thought she understood and did not. Streets that had once known her name as a child now treated it like a rumor—heard and not trusted to be true. Spies bowed with the ease of men who had practiced being pleasant while learning how to stab. Servants watched their steps as if they were choreography that might be tested.
At the Hall of Rites, the curtain was drawn and curtains had learned the habit of hiding more than light. Inside, the air smelled of old medicine and fresher fear. The Emperor lay on his bed stacked with the soft things power could buy: silks that had the look of prayer and pillows that had been promised years of obedience. His breath came like someone with the wrong map for the body. Around him, ministers argued in hushed, precise tones, as if argument could be made polite with enough ink.
Zhang stood apart from the chamber's practiced grief, not because he felt it less but because he had chosen the posture of a man not yet requiring sympathy. His hand rested on a table where seals slept like bait. He listened to reports with the composure of someone who had made peace with necessity.
A physician whispered to the throne's attendant that the Emperor might not see another sunrise. The words slid over Zhang's face but found purchase in every other presence like frost in a reed. Minister Li was not present—his absence was a rumor that smelled of ash. Someone said his house had been searched; someone else said he'd been taken away for "questions." Whether he was alive enough to be used or dead enough to be made an example was a detail each courtier interpreted according to appetite.
Ziyan watched the men who ran the court. They had learned the arithmetic of silence: subtract the Emperor and add a regent, divide loyalty by fear and hope for a sensible remainder. It was that calculus she had come to unlearn.
She did not ask permission to stand near the bed. She moved as if she belonged to the room's furniture now—an object of decision. The Emperor's eyes opened like a storm that couldn't remember its own noise. His voice was small, but it had the authority of a bell long used.
"Li Ziyan," he said, though he did not call her by the style her enemies loved. "You have returned."
She knelt because the court expected genuflection and because kneeling keeps a head from answering before it thinks. "I have, Your Majesty."
He tried to smile; the motion gave him something like the memory of warmth. "You will cost me much," he said. "I have no heirs who will not sell the sky for a title. The court will split like rotten wood if I fall." His hand trembled and sought the air as if to touch a banner that might still be real. "If I go, do not let Qi forget how to be a country."
Ziyan folded her hands. "If you sleep, we will keep its breath."
The Emperor's eyes closed for a breath that held two lifetimes. When his lids lifted again, they found Zhang's figure with the restful indifference of someone with appointments. Zhang came forward and bowed as if offering a hand to a man who might need it. "Your Majesty," he said, all patience and promise. "Let us speak of the future. The realm requires decisions that do not depend on sleep."
A cough shook the Emperor thin. Ministers shuffled parchments, making noise like nets thrown into shallow water. A clerk who had once copied Minister Li's hand stood at the foot of the bed and looked at Ziyan with an expression that asked whether promises were still a currency someone kept.