Ren Kanyu had never liked Bai'an's palace roofs.
They were too smooth, too well-intentioned. In the border forts, tiles chipped and shifted under frost; stone remembered siege ladders, wind, mistakes. Here, everything had been laid once and expected to last forever. It smelled, to him, of laziness.
He walked beneath those roofs anyway.
The inner court was a square of polished stone and carefully placed pines. Snow rested politely on every branch. The air tasted of incense and silk. Courtiers in layered blues moved like pieces on a board no one dared admit was cracking.
Ren Kanyu's boots made more noise than etiquette liked. He did not soften his step.
The Emperor of Xia stood at the far rail, hands tucked into his sleeves, looking east.
His hair had more white than when Ren had first knelt before him. The gold on his robe had been re-embroidered twice. Only his eyes had not dulled. They had grown sharper, like a man learning late that vision is more precious than sleep.
"You walk as if the stones offended you, General," the Emperor said without turning.
Ren bowed, properly. "The stones are innocent, Your Majesty," he said. "It is the men who think them unshakeable I distrust."
A few of the nearer courtiers murmured disapproval at the bluntness. The Emperor's mouth curved.
"Qi's regent would disagree," he said. "He writes that the ground under Yong'an is contaminated. That our maps will rot if we let his 'proto-kingdom' stand."
Ren kept his head bowed. "Zhang writes many things, Your Majesty," he said. "Ink is cheap where he walks."
At that, the Emperor did turn.
A silk scroll lay open on the rail beside him, held in place by two carved jade weights. The characters on it were neat, disciplined, and dangerous.
"Joint pacification," the Emperor read. "Shared threat. 'Contagion of law from below.' Zhang is a poet when frightened."
Ren's mouth tightened. "He has learned that words like 'contagion' and 'joint' travel well in halls," he said. "They sound like medicine."
The Emperor traced a line on the parchment: from the mark for Yong'an to the scratch representing Haojin, then out along the river that formed so much of the uneasy peace between Xia and Qi.
"You have been sending me reports of your own," he said. "Less… dramatic. You call Yong'an 'a useful irritant.' You call their leader 'dangerous, but presently more trouble to Qi than to us.'"
"I stand by those words, Your Majesty," Ren said.
"And yet," the Emperor said, tapping Zhang's tight script, "my envoy returns from Qi's capital saying Yong'an has begun planting law-houses on our side of the traders' routes. Haojin. Perhaps others. You said they would not spread quickly."
Ren's jaw clenched for half a breath. So Ji Lu's warning had been timely but not solitary.
"They are faster learners than I like," he admitted. "But they do not send banners. They send scales and clay and arguments about blankets. That is a different kind of army."
"Zhang believes it the more dangerous kind," the Emperor said softly. "He suggests we coordinate. Crush their Road from both sides. Present ourselves as guardians of order, together."
A murmur of approval chased that idea around the pillars. Old generals straightened. Younger nobles nodded, seeing only maps and glory.
Ren bowed lower, carefully hiding the flinch at the back of his neck.
"Zhang has ash in his halls," he said. "He likes making more."
The Emperor watched him.
"Tell me, Ren Kanyu," he said. "Is Yong'an our enemy?"
Ren thought of Ziyan on a ridge, wind tearing words from her mouth and sending them skittering across a frozen river. Of her fierce courtesy. Of the way she had not flinched from calling his Emperor what he was to his face: a man whose borders were written in other people's blood.
"They are an inconvenience," he said. "A question in stone."
"That is not an answer," the Emperor said.
"No, Your Majesty," Ren said. "It isn't."
He straightened enough to meet his sovereign's eye.
"Yong'an is a door," he said. "If we smash it, whatever they have bottled there spills. Into Qi, perhaps into us. Men who have learned to argue with their rulers are difficult to unlearn."
"And if we leave it?" the Emperor asked.
"Then they will teach by example," Ren said simply. "Quietly, clumsily. Without our banner to blame. Zhang will exhaust himself trying to make his people forget that they saw clay tablets stand up to his decrees. While he does, our eastern villages will eat."