As the city staggered, other truths bled through. Mei, under interrogation, confessed not just to carrying my brother's notes but to being part of a secret school that had been teaching banned ideas. Those ideas had been attractive to the merchants who could buy minds and to the magistrates who wanted to catalog genius for their own uses. My brother had not simply been a scholar; he had been a catalyst for a movement — a dangerous, generous movement that made the powerful nervous.
The syndicate moved. They sent an envoy with a porcelain box and a smiling man whose smile did not go to his eyes. He offered a deal: leave the Eastern Quarter, take exile, and the city will heal. The cost declared itself in plain language: silence, payment, and superstition. The man's floor showed us patterns inlaid that told old stories of dragons and men who bargained for power. It made me nauseous.
I met with Yù on the ridge where my brother lay. Frost had rimed the cross. The dragon rubbed her head against my shoulder not for warmth but because she remembered what it was to be comforted.
"He was taken into study," she said at last. "Not dead at first. They wanted him alive to unbundle his methods. But when unbundling broke the method, they saw profit in silence. They called it mercy."
A kindness that leads to cruelty. A trade that becomes a trap. The patterns repeated themselves like tide lines.
I wanted to tear down the syndicate's halls. I wanted to drag the magistrates through the snow to the mountain's edge. I wanted to make them feel what it was to breathe their last in the cold. I had the map, I had the will, and I had Yù.
But Yù, whose life spanned more than markets and tribunals, had another plan.