They came.
Some stepped through with heads bowed, as if expecting another betrayal to fall from the sky. Others walked in upright, defiant, daring the city to disappoint them. A few turned away at the last moment, trudging along the wall toward distant hamlets they insisted still existed.
"Count them," Han murmured to Ren the scribe, who had appeared with his ink despite the cold. "We need to know how many mouths we just invited to eat what we don't have."
"I am counting," Ren said. "I'm also counting the curses. We may need to carve a rule about those later."
As the stream of people passed, General Sun sat his horse and watched, face unreadable. At last he spoke low enough that only Ziyan, Feiyan and Li Qiang heard.
"I thought I would hate you," he said. "It would have been simpler."
"It often is," Feiyan said.
"But what I see," he went on, "is a city with more… shape… than anything we've held in months. If Qi survives this war, it will owe you. However much it tries not to."
"We'll put that on a tablet," Ziyan said dryly. "Under 'debts to be collected later'."
He almost smiled, then caught himself. "I will take my men east," he said. "Bring more if I can. Wolves or no wolves, they will prefer your law to the Regent's."
He hesitated. "You spoke of a new banner. One day."
"Someday," she said.
"If that day comes," he said, "don't forget that some of us still call the land under your feet 'Qi' in our bones. Not the court. The soil. We might follow a banner that remembers that."
Feiyan's eyes narrowed, filing the words away. Ziyan gave the faintest nod.
"Then don't die before you see it," she said.
He left.
The gate closed on his dwindling line.
Inside, Yong'an inhaled.
By evening, the new arrivals had been divided—no, threaded—into the city's fabric. The temple took the worst cases. The westerners opened their yards. Zhao cleared out a warehouse he'd been secretly using to store far too much wine.
"If you tell anyone," he told Ziyan, "I'll claim it was all medicinal."
"It's going into people," she said. "That's medicine enough."
The midwife with the burned hair smacked Wei's hand away when he tried to carry her bundle. "You'll just drop it," she said. "Men have two good uses and neither involves folding blankets."
"What are the two?" he demanded.
"Reaching high shelves and being wrong loudly enough that others learn from it," she said.
Feiyan laughed so hard she nearly slipped on the steps.
In a quieter corner, Shuye and Ren the scribe sat cross-legged with a handful of merchants and old men who had managed to keep their ledgers when they lost their houses.
"We can't be Qi's market anymore," Shuye said, scratching figures into the dirt. "Or Xia's supply pen. We need our own… flows. Tolls at the gates, fair enough not to choke trade. Grain loans with names carved, not hidden. A weight standard that doesn't change with whoever's cousin runs the scales."
"That's three tablets," Ren muttered. "At least. Maybe four."
"Make five," said the caravan guard, leaning over. "One for 'anyone caught shaving weights will empty chamber pots for the temple until they die'."
"Poetic," Shuye said. "I like it."
Through it all, Li Qiang moved like a quiet axis, making sure the worst tempers were met by someone who'd already decided not to take offense. Children squabbled over sleeping spots; he squatted with them and turned it into a game of drawing lots with bits of broken tile.
"You've become father to a city," Feiyan said later, watching him untangle a dispute over whose goats had eaten whose turnips.
He wiped his hands on his cloak. "Better than being father to ghosts," he said.