Stone Gate arrived in pieces.
First came the carts—creaking things piled with bundles that had once been households: quilts smoked grey, pots blackened, a shrine tablet wrapped in a jacket. Then came the walkers: men limping, women carrying children too old to be carried, children carrying nothing at all because there was nothing left light enough.
The gate-drums sounded the pattern for refugees: two slow, one quick. Yong'an's walls leaned forward as if they could listen better.
Ziyan stood on the inner parapet with Han and Wei, cloak tugged by a wind that smelled of wet ash and unfamiliar millet. From up here, the line of the road looked like a scar someone had tried to sew and failed.
"How many?" Han asked.
Li Qiang was already counting, the habit etched into his bones. "Three dozen carts," he said. "Maybe twice that many on foot behind them. More coming. The runner said 'two days'—Zhang doesn't burn gently."
Wei's hand flexed on the hilt of his spear. "We can't feed an entire town," he muttered. "We barely feed our own on good weeks."
"We fed Ye Cheng's survivors," Ziyan said quietly.
"And we almost starved," he snapped back.
"But we didn't," she said.
He shut his mouth. The wind filled the argument for them, worrying at the torn edges of the arriving crowd.
Feiyan dropped down from the watch-tower roof without ceremony, landing with her usual lack of extra movement.
"Half their roofs gone," she reported. "Fields trampled. They left in a hurry." Her eyes swept the road, sharp. "I don't see soldiers."
"They're behind," Han said. "Or elsewhere. Zhang doesn't need to chase ashes. He let the fire do his message."
"The message reached us," Ziyan said. "We should answer."
She went down to the gate.
By the time the heavy timber swung inward, the first of Stone Gate's people had reached shouting distance. They didn't shout. They didn't have the breath.
A boy stumbled through the threshold first, hair full of soot, clutching a charred beam as if it were a staff or a memory.
Behind him came a woman with a shrine tablet strapped to her back. The characters for Stone Gate were still visible through the smoke.
"Stop," Han called, raising a hand.
They stopped as if someone had seized the string that held them all together. Fear rippled; anger followed.
"This is Yong'an," Han said. "You are welcome. But you enter under our law. No seizing without witness. No beating without cause. No taking another's bread without account."
A few of the refugees blinked, bewildered. One man laughed, harsh.
"Law?" he spat. "We had law. It came on paper. It burned with our doors."
The woman with the tablet kept her gaze level.
"Is this the Road City?" she asked.
Heads turned. The words sounded strange in her mouth, but they had travelled faster than her feet.
Ziyan stepped forward.
"It is," she said. The admission settled over the square like new dust. "I am Ziyan. First Speaker. You've come under our mark. That means we owe you more than condolences."
The shrinetablet-bearer looked her up and down with the assessing gaze of someone who had lost too much to be impressed by titles.
"We had a sparrow on our market wall," she said. "One of your little tiles. It said no beating under it without witness. We thought it clever." Her mouth twisted. "Zhang called us nest and burned us for it anyway. Where was your Road then?"
Her words hit like stones. People on Yong'an's side flinched.
Ziyan took the blow and did not look away.