The soldiers shifted, confused, but obeyed. Chen looked back once, throat working, as if some part of him had wanted to see real rebellion and didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
When the door closed, the hall let out a breath like an old man after stairs.
Lin Chang picked up the splintered tile halves.
"Poor thing," she said. "Didn't even get to hang crooked for long."
Shuye stared at the broken pieces, then started to laugh. It sounded slightly mad, but it grew.
"He punished a plank," he said. "He's going to write to Zhang that he decapitated sedition."
"Wood remembers," Lin Chang replied. "We'll nail the halves up side by side. Now we have two tablets. It's multiplication, not loss."
Sun Wei leaned against the table and finally let himself shake.
"He gave us a line," he said hoarsely. "Between what he must do and what we choose to be."
"And you gave him one," Chen Rui said. "If Zhang comes for him later, no one here will say Du never stood under the sparrow."
Shuye's brush was already moving, scribbling on a scrap.
To Speaker Ziyan, he wrote, still chuckling. The Regent's new order reached Haojin. Du obeyed in his way. He split a tablet instead of a skull, and named his own men ringleaders. We bled only in our pride. The sparrow above the wall has a chipped beak now. It seems to suit it.
He hesitated, then added:
If captains like Du are cracks in Zhang's ash floor, we'll keep dripping water into them.
In Yong'an, Ziyan read the report with her back to the new-carved stone.
She could picture it: Du, sword flashing, cutting wood where the decree wanted flesh. It was obedience, twisted just enough to make space.
"So he chose," Han said. "Not the hero's choice. Not the coward's. The sort that buys time."
"Time matters," Feiyan said. "It's the only coin we don't know how to mint more of."
"It also means Zhang's orders are fraying as they travel," Zhao said. "Some captains interpret. Some refuse. Some over-enforce. That kind of uneven obedience is the start of cracks."
Ziyan folded the silk.
"We'll widen them," she said. "Gently. Where men like Du bend the decree to spare wood and bone, we send law to support that bend. Where men like Chen pounce, we send witnesses and ink to make sure everyone sees."
Ren looked up from his tray. "And when Zhang stops sending decrees and starts sending armies?" he asked.
Ziyan's hand went to the stone behind her. The words there were still shallow, but they would deepen with touch.
"Then we will have to be more than ink and tablets," she said. "But for today, a captain chose to break wood instead of people. That's a victory even if no one sings about it."
Feiyan's mouth curved. "I'll arrange a song," she said. "A little one. 'The Tale of the Captain Who Whipped His Own.' Bandits love that sort of story. So do peasants. Zhang will hate it."
Snow sifted over the wall, thin and persistent.
Ziyan watched it for a moment, thinking about Du Yan, about Ji Lu, about all the men caught between orders and roads.
"He's still on their side," Wei said.
"For now," Ziyan agreed. "But the Road runs under his feet too. He just started to notice."
The next pigeons left with two scraps: Shuye's laughing account and Ziyan's short reply.
You balanced on the line, she wrote. I will not drag you off it before you are ready. But know this: the day will come when the line moves. When it does, choose fast.
The bird that carried it beat its wings against the winter air, faint and stubborn, heading for a garrison where a captain who had cut wood instead of throats lay awake, wondering when exactly he had become a man his own Edict feared.
The Road Under Heaven curled around his cot like another blanket, waiting.