Snow came to the Xia camp as well, but it fell differently there.
In Yong'an, it softened broken tiles and clung to law-slips on temple pillars. Outside, it slicked tent ropes and settled on wolf-head banners until they looked like old men's eyebrows. Men shook it from cloaks with annoyed efficiency. Fires smoked. Horses stamped.
Ren Kanyu drank his morning tea lukewarm, because the brazier had gone to the surgeons' tent.
"The fever numbers?" he asked without looking up.
His adjutant bowed. "Fewer new cases, General. The herbs we kept… work. As far as our healers can tell."
Ren set the cup down carefully. He'd been a soldier long enough to know how easily good news could be turned into a knife if you reached for it too quickly.
"And in the city?" he asked.
"Harder to tell," the adjutant said. "Our watchers say their temple fires burn hotter. More people going in and out. Fewer bundles carried to the pyres."
Ren's fingers brushed the edge of the small wooden box on his table. Inside lay a neat stack of thin tablets, each carved with a day's tally: arrows, grain, dead. The topmost one held a newer line.
Medicine offered. Accepted under law.
He'd asked the runner what Ziyan had said when she took the crate. The boy had repeated her words with fearful fascination. Ren had written them down word for word.
"Let my people remember that when winter came, the wolves sent medicine as well as arrows."
He picked up another tablet. This one bore a different hand, scratchier, more ornate.
The Emperor's.
Ren Kanyu, it read, reports reaching us that you have paused your assault to attend to pestilence, and that you have—
He did not read the rest again. He remembered the phrases well enough: indulgence, misplaced chivalry, forgetting that mercy is the Emperor's prerogative, not yours.
He had sent back a neat, respectful reply. He had mentioned the practical advantage of keeping disease from their own ranks. He had not mentioned law-slips or a woman on a wall who refused to kneel.
He set the Emperor's order aside and unrolled another strip. This one was a copy of Zhang's last letter, the contempt scrawled there now more absurd than offensive. Necessary sacrifice; weak; fodder.
The dead regent's words had become a kind of talisman in Ren's mind. Not because he believed them, but because they reminded him what he did not want to become.
He heard footsteps outside and tucked the letters away.
"Enter," he said.
The man who bowed in wore Qi armor—patched, smoke-stained, stripped of any crest. His hair was bound too neatly for a common soldier, too carelessly for a court officer.
"Luo Fen," Ren said. "You said you knew the city's underways better than its streets."
Luo's mouth twitched. "I was Zhang's rat-catcher for three years," he said. "In every sense."
"And now?"
"Now I prefer my masters less interested in cages," Luo said.
Ren let the impertinence pass. "You saw the law tablets?"
"Yes," Luo said. "Your spy brought the text. I had it copied. Your Xia script is ugly, General, but the words are clear enough."
He spread a rough sketch of Yong'an on the table: walls, river, gate, and an inner line that Ren's own scouts couldn't map—alleys and drains and old storage vaults drawn from memory.
"You see this?" Luo tapped a small square near the northern market. "Used to be Zhang's private granary. Thick doors, no windows, one vent in the roof to keep the grain from rotting. Your lady now keeps her new law carved on the wall outside."
Ren frowned. "Seems an odd place."
"She wants people to remember," Luo said. "Every time they line up for rations. 'No lord may hide grain while the streets starve.' She had that line written bigger than the rest."
Ren remembered the crate of herbs crossing the no-man's-land. The girl's voice, carried by his messenger: No law hidden, no treaty secret.
"You're suggesting we strike there," he said.
"I'm suggesting," Luo said carefully, "that if you want to break her without choking the whole city, that's where you choke. You don't burn houses. You burn that building. You don't kill children. You kill the idea that standing in line under her law keeps them alive."
Ren turned the thought in his mind.
"This is your chance," Luo pressed. "She's made herself symbol and shield both. Zhang never managed that. You topple that one hall, you topple the story she's telling. After that, you can be as polite or brutal as you like. They'll be too scared to tell the difference."
Ren let his gaze rest on the sketch.
On the river. On the battered north gate. On the little square that now held more than grain.
"No," he said.
Luo blinked. "No?"
"Burning granaries is for men who have decided to rule ashes," Ren said. "I have enough of those in my own court. I don't need to borrow Zhang's tricks."
"You sent her medicine," Luo said. "You gave her a day. You treat her like an equal. She won't thank you when she cuts your throat in some glorious speech."
"Probably not," Ren said. "But when I stand before my Emperor, I intend to say that I broke this city's walls, not its spine."
"Walls and spines are attached," Luo muttered.
Ren looked at him. "You want to topple her symbol," he said. "Bring me her pillars instead."
"Her lords?" Luo asked. "Or her people?"
"Both," Ren said. "From tomorrow we press the east quarter and the gate again. But tonight, I want ears in every alley. Who complains the loudest about her law? Who hoards? Who obeys only because they think she's watching?"
Luo frowned. "You mean to make her city eat her from the inside."
"I mean," Ren said, "to see if the road she's building has more people walking it than being dragged along."
He dismissed Luo and went to stand at the edge of his command hill, watching the city's dim shape against snow and sky.