On his hill, Ren Kanyu lowered his spyglass very slowly.
Feiyan exhaled. "He knows now," she said.
"Knows what?" Wei asked, wiping smoke-sting from his eyes.
"That we will pay any price," Feiyan said, "rather than open the city from fear."
Ziyan watched the enemy line re-form, two paces farther back than before, shields tighter, some men glancing sideways as if imagining walls closing around them at any moment. The psychological crack was small, a hairline. But it existed.
"Signal the river quarter," she said. "Shuye's earned the right to eat instead of drown in barrels today."
The flags went up. From the east, an answering color flickered.
The rest of the day did not feel like victory. It felt like work.
Xia did not throw themselves at the ruined gate again. They tested the western wall, found Zhao's men dogged if not inspired. They lobbed more scrolls, fewer stones. Their archers tried to pick off water carriers; the old woman with the strong voice learned to walk with buckets under the cover of an upturned door.
On the wall, a Xia arrow finally found Ziyan.
It came not as a dramatic shaft aimed at her heart, but as a stray arrow loosed by a man aiming at someone beside her. She turned to shout an order and something hot and vicious scraped along her upper arm, spinning her half around.
Feiyan's hand was on her before she fully registered the pain, dragging her back from the parapet. "Down."
Ziyan gritted her teeth. Blood seeped warmly beneath the rent in her sleeve, vivid against so much gray.
"It's nothing," she said.
Feiyan tore the cloth, assessed. "You always say that," she replied. "One day I'll believe you and it will kill you."
Ren the scribe appeared as if conjured, bandage strip in hand. "Hold still," he said, in the same tone with which he corrected crooked characters.
Ziyan let him wrap the wound. Pain cleared her thoughts in an odd way, sharpening the edges of the world.
"You don't leave the wall," Li Qiang said quietly. Not a suggestion. Not quite an order.
"No," she said.
Feiyan tied the bandage knot with more force than strictly needed. "But you don't lean over it like a festival child either."
She stayed.
By late afternoon, Xia's horns called their men back.
They went in order, not in rout. Banners did not dip. The field between the walls and their camp was a worse mess than yesterday—more bodies, more broken wood, more old ladders trodden into unrecognizable fragments. The ice where Shuye's jars had broken the river was already trying to form again, delicate, treacherous.
Wei sagged against a merlon. "Still here," he muttered. "They must be furious."
"They're calculating," Ziyan said. "Anger is for men who can afford it."
Han joined them at the north wall, cloak stiff with frozen spray. "We've lost seventy-three today," he said without preamble. "Forty-eight badly wounded. Two children hit by stray shafts hauling water. Both alive. Barely."
Ren's quill scratched at his tally board. He did not write numbers this time. He wrote names, quick and small.
"Xia?" Ziyan asked.
Han snorted. "At least four times that at the gate alone. More in the river. They'll feel it. They're not Zhang's disposable fodder; they're trained men who took years to make."
Ziyan's gaze went to the distant hill. Ren Kanyu sat his horse, speaking to his officers. The white flag still hung limp beside his standard, not quite furled.
As if feeling her eyes, he turned his brass tube toward the wall. For a heartbeat, she imagined their gazes meeting down that narrow length of polished metal.
Feiyan elbowed her lightly. "He's looking at you again," she murmured. "Should I be jealous?"
"Of what?" Ziyan said. "His confusion?"
"His terror," Feiyan corrected.
When night came, it brought with it something new.
Not arrows. Not ladders.
A single messenger at the gate, under a small white cloth, bearing not a scroll but a crate.
Zhao met him in the outer yard with a squad of archers above. Ziyan stayed on the inner side, listening.
"What is this?" Zhao barked.
"A gift," the messenger replied, voice steady despite a nervous hitch. "From General Ren to Lady Li Ziyan."
Zhao's disdain made the air colder. "We are not accepting bribes."
"It is medicine," the messenger said. "For fever."
A murmur ran along the parapet.
Ziyan stepped through the inner arch.
Close up, the crate was plain, rough-hewn, bound with ropes that showed no clever knots for hidden blades. Inside, neatly packed, were bundles of dried herbs, clay pots sealed with wax, packets stamped with markings in both Xia script and the older, common characters of the shared river-lands.
"For your sick," the messenger said. "The general says disease is not a banner either side should carry. Our own camp is… afflicted. We have more than we can use before it spoils."
Ziyan looked at him. He was young, cheeks chapped, eyes ringed with fatigue. Not a noble. A runner.
"Why send it to us?" she asked.
"Because if it spreads beyond the walls," he said simply, "it will follow us when we move on. And because he says…" The boy swallowed. "'If this woman's road survives, I would prefer not to have salted it with plague.'"
Feiyan's brows shot up. Wei muttered something unflattering about sentimental wolves. Han only grunted.
Ziyan weighed the crate in her mind, eyes narrowing. It could be poison. It could be disease in a box. It could be exactly what the boy said.
She made her decision.
"Ren," she called.
The scribe stepped forward. "Yes."
"Read out the Oath," she said. "The part about no law hidden and no treaty secret."
He did. The words hung in the cold air between siege walls and city stone.
"This," Ziyan said to the messenger, loud enough for those on the wall to hear, "is an offering made in the open. We accept it under the same law that binds us. You will tell your general this: whatever we use, we will write down. Whatever harm comes of it, we will also write. If this is trickery, the world will know. If it is not, then my people will remember that when winter came, the wolves sent medicine as well as arrows."
The boy nodded, relief and awe a strange mixture on his face.
"Go," she said. "And tell him something else."
He waited.
"Tell him that after today," she said quietly, "this city is no longer fighting to live another season. It is fighting to remember it has the right to decide how it lives at all."
She watched him ride back through twilight, a slight, brave shape crossing a field that belonged to no one and everyone.
Feiyan let out a breath. "You are making this very difficult for anyone who prefers simple stories."
"I've had enough of those," Ziyan said.
On the wall above, Ren the scribe began to write by lamplight. Not orders. Not battle tallies.
He wrote down the day's events: ice breaking under invaders' boots, a gate turned throat, a general who brought letters under truce, medicine exchanged between enemies. He wrote the names of the dead and the names of the laws signed and the line where Ziyan had said out loud, in front of soldiers and citizens and perhaps the gods, that she would die under the same rules she demanded of them.
He did not know who would read it years from now, or if anyone would.
But if the road they were building survived the night, it would need a memory.
Morning would bring new drums, new plans, new deaths.
For now, for a few thin hours, the city sat between two empires and did something neither quite understood.
It chose itself.