Ziyan stood with her palm on the parapet's rimed stone and felt the cold find her bones and fail to move them. The jade ring against her thumb held its chill like a lesson. Blue silk at her wrist rose and fell with the breath she chose, not the breath the world demanded.
"They will cross at first light," Han said, voice low, as if respect could keep sound from shattering. "Xia on the east, Zhang on the road. A vice."
"Let them," Ziyan answered. "A vice only crushes what refuses to flow."
Feiyan drew her scarf higher, eyes narrowed to winter. "Then we cut their hand open when they squeeze."
Shuye touched the roll on his back as one touches a sleeping animal. "The jars are ready. So are the planks at the ford."
Wei grinned without cheer. "And I'm ready to make someone's mother swear at his foolishness."
Li Qiang said nothing. He stood where he could see the river's skin, thin and treacherous, glazed into teeth where the current slowed. When Ziyan reached him, he did not look away from the dark, moving line beneath the ice. "It will hold until we ask it to remember," he murmured.
"It remembers," Ziyan said. "So do we."
Night lowered itself. The world became a room with the lamp turned down. Ziyan set her hand briefly on Feiyan's shoulder; the touch was a map that had learned itself by heart. "Go," she said. "Take Wei and Shuye. Cut their hunger first."
Feiyan did not answer in words; she slipped away like a habit. Wei checked his spearhead against his thumb and followed. Shuye hefted his roll, his smile a narrow, bright thing men learn after surviving their own ideas once too often. They vanished into the white.
The snow muffled everything except what mattered. Feiyan counted paces by feel, not sight. The Xia camp on the eastern ridge breathed in ordered little huts, their ropes tight, their fires prudently low and mean. Men who meant to win did not waste warmth. Feiyan liked them for that. It made the betrayal cleaner.
They found the wagons flagged with blue chalk—the mark left by Ren's last daylight eyes. Grain. Tools. A crate of spare bowstrings. Shuye slid two jars beneath the axle of the lead cart, then another under the tongue of the third, his hands sure and slow. Wei moved through sleeping shapes with a sort of dark politeness, cutting one throat, then another; he did not hurry. Feiyan lifted a plank from the stack of bridge timbers, sniffed the sap, and smiled behind the scarf. Resin-rich. Greedy.
"Oil," she breathed.
Shuye's small brush appeared like a conjurer's coin. He traced a thin line along each plank's grain, a promise only fire and wind could read. Wei set a phoenix-feathered arrow in the last crate as if it were an insult carefully wrapped. Feiyan crouched to listen—the small, even noise of a camp that had not yet learned to fear properly. Enough.
They left the way they'd come: through snow, through silence, through the kind of dark that hides and invites in the same gesture.
By the river, Ziyan waited where the ice first learned to be brave. Her breath plumed, then slept. When Feiyan's shadow touched her, she did not start. "It's done," Feiyan said. "They will carry their own fire."
"Good," Ziyan answered. "Then we will carry the rest."
Dawn arrived like a wound reopening. The snow lightened but did not relent. From the east came a single horn, steady as a thought men refuse to doubt. Xia's ranks unfolded along the bank, ladders and planks and rope in neat, old arithmetic. From the west, drums pounded with a shorter temper. Zhang's columns moved down the road like a ledger learning to march. The capital's gates—half-shuttered, half-ashamed—watched both without blinking.
"Do not shoot until they cross," Ziyan told her archers. "Do not shout until they slip."
Li Qiang raised his sword. Han made a small adjustment to the leftmost company as a man straightens a picture that should tilt. Ren stood at the message post, ink stiff with cold, and wrote the first words of a story not yet sure of its ending.
Xia reached the ford first. Planks went down over ice with the confidence of carpenters who have coaxed rivers into obedience since childhood. Men stepped out, shoulders squared, breath smoking in little, brave ghosts. Their weight hummed through wood and frost. Beneath them, the current thought of other days.
Zhang's vanguard came within arrow flight of Ziyan's rear lines. Wei spat once into the snow and grinned in the same motion. "Late to my funeral again," he said.
"Not yours," Ziyan replied. She lowered her hand.
Shuye's first jar cracked under the crossing like an egg of thunder. Fire crawled along oil it recognized as kin. A plank took breath and went bright; a second sighed and followed. Men shouted, then learned the new grammar of falling. The river took them without ceremony. Horses reared and made errors; ice splintered in sentences too quick to read.
"Now," Ziyan said.
Arrows rose, black and sudden, the way crows do when a field remembers it is a feast. They struck where men tried to choose between water and flame. Wei's riders surged to meet the few who made it to shore, spearpoints speaking a clean, precise language. Feiyan was already gone, a flash where shadows met panic.