Xia's crossing had broken. Those not taken by water had fallen back to their bank, building a new line of shields and shame. A single banner sagged among them, heavy with wet and confusion.
"They will come again at dusk," Li Qiang said.
"Let them come hungry," Ziyan answered. "Shuye?"
Shuye jogged up, soot smiling his face into a mask she preferred. "The crates?" he asked.
"Open them," she said. "Throw grain into the river where Xia can see it. Burn the rest under Zhang's nose. Then send a cart of bread to the villages nearest his road."
Wei stared. "We will feed peasants before soldiers?"
"We will feed loyalty," Ziyan said. "Soldiers eat because they are told to. People eat because they choose to live."
Ren's stylus scratched despite the cold. He wrote the order into the day, because some commands deserve to outlast breath. Han looked at her with a warmth he did not usually waste. "You are building something," he said, as if surprised to hear approval in his own mouth.
"Not a throne," she said. "A road."
Wind lifted the blue silk at her wrist. She felt the tug like agreement. From the city's walls, a murmur rose—faint, disbelieving, multiplied by stone. She did not turn to receive it. She did not bow to it. She let it happen.
By afternoon, Xia had withdrawn to the far bank to count and pretend. Zhang's lines had shortened and hardened; his lieutenants walked their men like fathers who have learned to be strict. Snow fell thinner, a careful lace across ruin. The field steamed like a beast breathing out pain.
At dusk, Feiyan brought a prisoner to Ziyan—a courier in Zhang's colors with mud on his face and bitterness in his teeth. He stared at Ziyan as if measuring an old rumor against the person it had chosen. "He says," Feiyan reported, "that the Regent will offer parley at dawn."
"Dawn is busy," Ziyan said.
The courier flinched. "He will hang your father's head on the south gate if you refuse."
Ziyan's breath did not catch. It had caught once already this lifetime. "My father is in the earth," she said. "The gate can keep its trophies. Tell your master I accept parley on the river road at first light. Tell him to wear boots he is willing to soil."
Feiyan's mouth tilted, private satisfaction. The courier swallowed, nodded, and fled back through snow that could not take his fear any whiter.
Night took the field in a single, deliberate exhale. Men built small fires and held their hands over them as if warming fingers might teach the future to be kind. In the dark beyond the light, voices rose and fell—low, exhausted, carrying a new shape. It did not have a name yet. It sounded like something sacred pretending not to be afraid of itself.
Ziyan stood apart, with the jar near her ankle and the ring a cold sermon on her thumb. Feiyan came and stood beside her without touching. "You stepped into war's mouth," she said. "It did not close."
"It will," Ziyan said. "But not on me."
Feiyan turned her face to the drift of snow and let it stipple the scars there. "They will start calling you something," she said. "You won't get to choose the word."
Ziyan watched the black ribbon of river and the pale smear of the city beyond. "They can call me what they like," she answered. "I will choose the work."
From the eastern darkness came the murmur of a thousand men remembering how to pray. From the west, the creak and shuffle of an army that had been sure of itself for too long. Between them, under a sky that had finally stopped trying to erase itself, a road began to feel its own weight and did not sink.
Dawn would bring parley and treachery and the next chore of survival. Tonight was for the counting of breath and the sharpening of knives and the quiet, precise joy of having taken one more step toward a country that did not yet exist, except in the way men warmed their hands and the way women tied blue silk knots small and tight and true.
Ziyan did not sleep. When the last fire sank to a red thought, she was still there, listening to the river remember.