Chen Rui spoke, rough and measured. "On the road, you learn there are bandits you can fight, and storms you can't," she said. "You build your fire under a rock when the sky wants to kill you. You don't call it surrender. You call it living long enough to walk tomorrow."
Han scowled at her. "And when the rock shifts and crushes you?"
"Then you chose wrong," she said. "Or you stayed too long. No law fixes that. Only knowing when to move."
Zhao smirked. "Listen to us. We sound like philosophers. Or worse, poets."
Wei ignored him. "What about the Emperor of Qi?" he asked. "If he isn't already dead, he will hear that Yong'an bent knee to Xia."
"Qi bent knee to Zhang's knives long before we did anything," Feiyan said. "If the Emperor is still breathing, he's busy counting which cousin will stab him first. We're not even on his table of worries."
"That's what scares me," Han said.
Ziyan's hand tightened on the bamboo slip. "I won't make this choice alone," she said. "That's the whole point of what we've been doing. Ren expects me to decide and deliver a neat answer. He doesn't have a council like this. That is our strength and our burden."
She nodded to Ren the scribe. "Call the guild heads. The quarter captains. Chen Rui's people. The healers. Anyone who has led others in these last days. We won't fit the whole city in this hall, but we can fit enough."
Ren's eyes shone with a kind of fierce weariness. "I'll need more tablets," he muttered. "And more ink. And fewer rocks falling through my roof."
He went.
While he did, they argued among themselves in tighter circles: Feiyan with Han and Zhao; Wei pacing in short, angry lines; Li Qiang watching Ziyan more than anyone else.
When there was a gap, he stepped close.
"If you choose this," he said quietly, "people will say you sold Yong'an to save your name."
"If I don't," she answered, "they'll say I burned it to save my pride."
"I don't care what they say," he said. "I care what you carry."
She looked at him properly then, at the lines siege had carved around his eyes. "I swore," she said, "that betrayal would not be the thing that defined me. Zhang betrayed me. Qi's court betrayed itself. I will not betray these people just so I can say I never bent."
"And is this bending?" he asked.
She thought of Ren's steady eyes, of his quiet admission that he feared his own Emperor's future more than her law. Of the steward throwing himself at fire instead of profit.
"It is… stepping sideways," she said. "Out of one man's shadow into another's. But in that sideways space, there is room to build something. A road. Maybe a kingdom of our own, one day. But for that, we need hands left alive to lay the stones."
Li Qiang exhaled slowly. "Then I'll take whatever curse they throw," he said. "If they spit on you for this, I'll stand in the way first."
"You already do," she murmured.
The hall filled.
It was not every soul in Yong'an, but it felt like it. Guild banners tangled with unit flags. A pair of temple elders took a corner, sitting stiff-backed. Chen Rui's westerners leaned together, wary and stubborn. Even the caravan guard came, standing at the back, arms folded like a man who expects to be disappointed and refuses to leave anyway.
Ren the scribe clambered onto a low platform and held up the bamboo slip.
"These," he said, "are the terms the Xia general offers. You will hear them. You will know what is being weighed for you. No one will say later that it was done in a corner."
He read.
When he finished, the hall exploded.
Shouts. Curses. Questions. Some voices cried "never"; others "we're tired"; some "what choice do we have?" One old woman simply kept muttering, "Grain, grain, always grain," as if that were the only god left.
Ziyan let it wash over her for a few breaths, then raised her bandaged hand.
The hall quieted, more from habit than obedience.
"We have three choices," she said. "One: refuse. Fight to the last stone. Let Yong'an be remembered as a grave that would not kneel."
A murmur. A few fists lifted.
"Two: surrender as Qi expects us to," she went on. "Open the gates. Let Xia write our laws, hold our keys, decide who eats and who hangs. Live or die according to their moods."
Spitting. Laughter, ugly and afraid.
"Three," she said. "We carve our own surrender. We sign this treaty with our eyes open. We tell our children: yes, wolves stand at our door, and for a while we shut it by promising not to stab them in the back from our doorstep. In that while, we build. We teach. We make sure that if anyone comes later to paint over our tablets, they have to chip through more than stone."
Someone shouted, "And when Xia changes its mind?"
"Then we change ours," Ziyan answered. "By then, perhaps we will have three walls instead of one. Perhaps other cities will have heard what we did and written their own tablets. Perhaps Ren Kanyu will no longer be the one giving orders. Perhaps I will not be the one standing here. Perhaps we will already have torn off their name and kept their map."
Zhao raised his hand lazily. "I vote for the third disaster," he drawled. "It sounds like it leaves me alive long enough to be properly unhappy."
Han snorted. "I don't like it," he said. "But I like the first two less. If we can keep our own watch, our own captains, our own grain… then we will make sure that whatever flag flies over the gate, the men on the wall answer to this hall."
Chen Rui's voice cut through. "On the road," she said, "you sometimes ride under another lord's banner for a time to cross his bridge. As long as you know you're riding for your own wagon, not his honor. I say we take his bridge and make sure we're ready to burn it if he tries to close it behind us."
The temple healer rasped, "If I have herbs and space to boil them, I don't care whose name you carve on the city gate. Sick bodies don't read plaques."
Laugh rippled, broken and real.
"What about the dead?" someone shouted from the back. "Xu Min. The boys at the river. The ones crushed under stones. Are we spitting on them if we… bargain?"
Ziyan's throat tightened. She looked toward the half-open door where the law tablets stood beyond, one still cracked, one new, one scarred.
"We write them here," she said quietly, touching her chest, then pointing to the square. "We write that they stopped wolves long enough for us to have this choice at all. We write that we did not throw their lives away chasing a death that makes a prettier song. If any of you believe they would rather we all joined them tonight than build a different ending tomorrow… say so."
Silence.