It was then, when the hall's breath became a thing that could be bartered, that the old mask came back to the world like a rumor restitched. Feiyan stepped from a shadow with the deliberate quiet of someone who had been learning patience since childhood. She did not enter as a supplicant; she entered as a threat with an old friend's face. The scarf she wore hid the lower half of her face; the rest of her was the same—hands that had learned to be blades, eyes that had learned when to pretend they were not.
Zhang's brow tightened—a small, quick fissure. He had been told Feiyan lived elsewhere. He had been told she had bled the city's gutters dry and not her own. He had not been told she had returned to stand where she would be noticed.
Feiyan's voice was low enough that the silk only barely wanted to keep the sound. "Regent Zhang," she said, and the name carried like a stone dropped into a pond where ears were waiting. "A word."
He pivoted with courtesy practiced enough to be wicked. "Lady Feiyan," he answered. "You surprise me."
"You are easy to surprise," she said. "You earn the discipline of being expected." She looked at the Emperor, and for a moment the room became smaller because the living man in the bed still required an audience. "If the Emperor dies, the court answers to no man. If the Emperor is used to crown a man, it answers to him."
Zhang's smile tightened into a blade dressed as a smile. "You speak plainly, for one who has been called traitor."
Feiyan did not flinch. "I speak true. Plainness costs less than invention."
A murmur rose among the ministers like a wind testing doors. Some coveted the clarity of a regent with tools in hand; others feared a man whose authority had learned violence and not mercy. The question hung: who would claim Qi when the Emperor's breath finally left?
Zhang moved then, with the grace of someone who has practiced seizing moments. He stepped close to the bed and spoke in a voice that had learned to ask for what it wanted without begging. "Your Majesty," he said, "I will keep the realm together. I will press the borders, make the markets pay, and silence the chaos. Let me—"
The Emperor's hands opened like a woodcutter releasing a tool. He took Zhang's sleeve between two fingers, and for a heartbeat the two men's ambitions felt like two ropes laid side by side.
"No," the Emperor said, quietly and with more force than the room's panic had expected. "No. I have watched men call themselves protectors and become tyrants in practice. If I go, I will not give the realm for one man's ease." His breath rasped like someone reading a long, bitter line. "Choose the field. Not the throne. Let the road speak."
Zhang's face did not change, but the light in his eyes did: a slight impatience as if an invited dinner had run out of proper courses. He straightened. "Then, if not by seal," he said, voice low, "by necessity. The realm must not fracture."
"You speak of necessity," Feiyan said, stepping a hair closer, her scarf still hiding a smile that had teeth. "Necessity is often the name ambitious men give to hunger."
Zhang's hand curled into a fist and then relaxed. He had armies and lawyers and a patience bought with other men's hunger. He had decided, long ago, that power was a ledger in which other people's losses counted as interest.
In the corridor, a door opened. A pair of guards found Minister Li in the corridor, alive though hollowed by interrogation. He had not been broken enough to stop being dangerous; he had been kept as dangerous currency. His eyes met Ziyan's and something like apology moved across his face—small and private.
Ziyan followed the look and found words that were not yet surrendered. Minister Li's mouth moved. "If I am to die," he said, voice brittle with smoke and book dust, "do not let them write my end as neat as an accounting error. Let them remember that someone once chose inconvenient things."
The Emperor's breathing grew thinner still. The hall closed around him like a book about to be shut. Councillors pressed forward, and Zhang's advisers did the small mathematics of victory. Outside, the capital learned to hold itself like a body waiting for rain.
Ziyan stepped closer to the bed and put her hand over the Emperor's. His skin was warm in the way that made history feel urgent. She did not promise crowns or lists or future honors. She promised a road; she promised memory.
"If you sleep," she said to him, not to the court, "Qi will remember you with whatever honesty the road can afford."
The Emperor's eyes opened once more. He looked at Zhang, then at Zhang's men, at the ministers who had been practicing solitude and authority in the same motion. He looked finally at Feiyan—masked, steady—and then at Ziyan, who had learned to be a thing both soft and sharp.
"Then teach them," he whispered, and the breath left like a small coin slid into the river. The body beneath the silks went still, and the room's air turned to a thing that had to be counted.
Out in the corridor, a clerk began to write the Emperor's name into paper as if recording a debt. A guard closed a fist around a seal with a hand that did not tremble. On the bed, the Emperor's face smoothed into the unreadable line of sleep that explains a life with the economy of silence.
The capital inhaled and then exhaled in a way that made the walls creak. Zhang bowed, not to the man but to the office the man had carried. His next words were not for the bed but for the future he planned with knives and ledgers.
Feiyan turned away from the bed and set her hand on Ziyan's sleeve. Her fingers left a small, warm print that promised to be a map. "They will come," she said simply. "Both of them. And those who wait for a winner will bring knives for both."
Ziyan looked at the mask-feathered face of her friend and then at the circles of men who would now learn to divide the world by whether they shut their mouths or sharpened them. "Then we will be a road that does not bow," she said. "We will be inconvenient, and we will be many."
Outside, the city's bells began to toll in a rhythm that balanced sorrow and warning. On the road south and north, riders rose and readied. Between them all, the jade ring at Ziyan's thumb warmed in a skin that had decided to listen and not to be silenced. The capital had a dead man's breath to deal with, and a living man—Zhang—who smelled like a promise someone could collect.
Feiyan slipped the mask from her scarf and let it hang against her chest like a small, unlisted favor. In the courtyard, a courier mounted and began to ride, carrying letters that would decide which men would be called useful and which men would become cautionary tales.
Qi slept poorly that night. The sleep of nations on the brink is a thin sheet that wires itself to rumor. In the city's shadow, Ziyan and her small, unruly court prepared. They would teach the road to be a politics that did not need a throne to be dangerous. They would force the capital to remember what it had nearly sold.
The first dawn after the Emperor's sleep would be loud.