Then the caravan guard spoke, voice rough. "My boy's on the wall," he said. "He'll die there if it comes to it. I'd rather he died ten years from now under a law he chose than ten days from now under a rock someone else dropped. Take the bargain. But don't let go of the spear just because someone calls us 'pacified' on a map."
Ren the scribe looked at Ziyan, waiting.
She could feel the hall's weight pressing in. Expectation, fear, anger, hope—all those old words that had gorged themselves on her life.
"I won't pretend this is clean," she said. "It isn't. It's messy, and it will cost us in reputation, in simplicity, in songs." Her mouth twisted. "Bards will have to work harder."
Scattered chuckles.
"But I did not write those tablets so we could die under them like obedient sacrifices," she went on. "I wrote them so we would know, in days like this, what we're trying to keep. Not crowns. Not borders drawn by men who have never seen these streets. A way of choosing. Of arguing with power, even when it lives in our own bodies."
She took Ren Kanyu's letter from the table and held it up.
"I propose we accept," she said. "On our terms. We will send him a treaty written by this council, read in this square, carved on those stones. We will swear not to harbor Qi's armies. We will swear to pay in grain when we can. We will not swear to silence. Or to forgetting. Or to loving his Emperor."
She drew a breath that hurt. "Those who agree, raise your hands."
Hands went up. Some high, some reluctantly, some trembling. Han's. Zhao's. Chen Rui's. Shuye's. Ren the scribe's. The steward's. The caravan guard's. Many more.
Those who opposed did not slink away. They crossed their arms, scowled, shouted that they would remember this day and curse Ziyan if it went badly. She nodded to each of them.
"Good," she said. "Remember. Curse me. That's another kind of law."
When it was done, Ren carved.
Ziyan went alone to the square.
Under the bruised sky, before the cracked tablets, she read the treaty aloud, line by line. No embroidery. No hiding. When she finished, she pressed her hand to the fresh wet ink at the bottom and left a smeared print beside her name.
"Let it be ugly," she said to Feiyan, who watched from the shade of a pillar. "Pretty seals have lied to me enough."
Feiyan's mouth curved. "Ugly things survive," she said. "They're too stubborn to die politely."
An arrow fell into the square not long after dusk, green fletching bright against the soot. It carried a single strip of silk, hammered with a simple seal.
Ren Kanyu's answer was short.
We have an agreement.
No flourishes. No compliments.
Ziyan read it, then handed it to Ren the scribe. "Carve a copy," she said. "And keep the original with the others. Our grandchildren can argue later whether we were clever or cowardly."
"And you?" Li Qiang asked.
She looked toward the north wall, where Xia's campfires smoldered steady but did not advance. Toward the river, where ice was trying again at the edges.
"I," she said, "am going to sleep for three hours. Then I will wake up and start building a kingdom inside another man's empire."
Feiyan snorted. "Ambitious."
Ziyan smiled, small and sharp. "We've been doing it already," she said. "We just signed for more time."
Outside the walls, Ren Kanyu added one more tablet to his wooden box.
Yong'an: pacified border city, local law tolerated.
He knew it was a lie that told more truth than most.
In between their ledgers, the river ran on, indifferent to treaties and titles, carrying ash and ink and the faint, stubborn echo of voices that had chosen, for now, to live.