Zhang's horns barked and his front ranks broke into a run. The road, tamped hard by a thousand boots, gave up its patience and turned slick. Men went down in the first rank and dragged certainty with them. Then Zhang sent the man he had polished for this hour.
He came wearing a lacquered half-mask and a coat cut to move with his breath. His horse was narrow-waisted and mean. He carried a blade too honest to be decorated. When he reached the broken edge of the fight, he did not raise his voice. He simply looked at Ziyan across the lurching distance and turned his wrist in a small invitation.
"Liang," Han said, as if naming weather. "The Emperor's old knife. Zhang stole him from service with a promise."
"Then I will return him," Ziyan answered, and rode.
They met between the failing planks and the road churned into porridge. Snow hissed around their horses' knees. Ziyan's first cut tested his reach; he caught it without arrogance, turned, and came in low enough to make the ice itself reconsider. She answered with a parry that accepted his strength and let it pass, a door opened for a guest already falling forward. They circled once, twice. Behind them, men screamed, wagons burned, horns tripped over their own commands. In the narrowing world of two horses and two blades, none of it existed.
Liang feinted high and struck for her bridle hand. Ziyan slid inside the arc and felt his steel scrape the jade that had taught her patience. The shock traveled up his arm; the ring did not crack. His eyes changed a fraction, the way a surgeon's do when a blood vessel refuses the expected path. He angled to break her knee; she dropped from the saddle as if gravity were a lover and cut at the girth. His horse lurched, furious; he rolled free, clean as a trick well-practiced, and came up with snow in his mask's slit like frost in an old scar.
"Yield," he said, as if offering her a clean death.
"Learn," she said, as if offering him a way to live.
He came again. This time she let him. She let the cut break the air where her throat had been and stepped through the space it made, an answer inside a question. Her hilt struck the inside of his wrist with a neatness bookkeepers envy. His blade rang against ice, then chose the river. He drove forward with his shoulder and brought them both to one knee; he was heavy, disciplined, inevitable. She whispered into the small space between their faces, "Listen," and brought her forehead into his mask with a crack that decided the conversation. He reeled. Her knife—short, workmanlike—slid up beneath the edge of lacquer and ended the career of a man who had not been given many choices.
For a heartbeat the fight paused around them, as if death itself had called for attention. Xia's front ranks, already faltering, hesitated; Zhang's nearest officers shouted new orders that sounded suspiciously like prayers. Ziyan rose through the stillness like a blade being drawn. She did not lift Liang's mask as trophy. She left it as punctuation.
"Forward!" she called. Not a roar. A clear, flat command that found spines and pulled them upright.
Han's riders hit the left flank where Zhang's men had begun to believe they were winning. Ren's signal flags sent Feiyan's wedge through the gap where panic had made a door. Wei laughed like a man who had never expected to be allowed this joy and took three soldiers out of their saddles in a rhythm that felt like music.
On the river, the fire finished its arithmetic and died, leaving black water busy with ragged men and the heavy silence that follows promises kept too well. The planks, charred and floating, drifted like a treaty no one would sign now.
Zhang watched from his hill with a face like expensive stone. He had sent a knife and seen it turned on its owner. He had counted on numbers and found them shy. He lifted his hand, and his standard dipped, precise, reluctant. The rear ranks began to pull back to the secondary line where someone had had the good sense to build entrenchments before dawn. The retreat was orderly. It stank of dignity and defeat in equal measure.
Ziyan did not chase into the teeth of prepared earth. She held her men at the churned field's edge, where snow and mud had made a treaty of their own. Archers sent a last, thin flight after the withdrawing ranks; it plucked a few names out of the world and then let the rest go. Feiyan limped back with blood drying black on her sleeve; her eyes were clear in the way knives are when they have done honest work.
"Qi?" she asked.
"Gone," Ziyan said.
Feiyan considered that, then nodded once, permission or absolution or neither. "The east?" she said, chin lifting toward the river.