Li Qiang saw the slight easing at the corners of her mouth.
"He showed you his teeth," Feiyan said. "And his leash. What will you do with that?"
"Use it," Ziyan said simply.
She turned to Chen Rui. "Your missing scout," she said. "Name?"
"Xu Min," Chen Rui said, jaw tight. "Stubborn as a broken gate. If he shouted that to Ren's face, I'm not surprised they had to hang him to get him quiet."
"We'll write his name," Ziyan said. "On the law tablet. And on the wall."
"There's no room," Ren the scribe protested automatically.
"Make room," she said.
He nodded.
Feiyan caught her sleeve as they left the hall. "The letter—"
"—does not change that he plans to take this city," Ziyan said. "Or that I plan not to let him. But it tells me something important."
"Which is?"
"That he is watching the same battle I am," she said. "Not just the one between walls and ladders, but the one between how men are ruled."
Feiyan snorted softly. "And here I thought this was about who gets to stand on the higher pile of corpses."
"It is," Ziyan said. "But after that, there's a question of what you build on top."
Outside, snow had eased to a fine, sparkling dust. The city moved in its tired circuits: bucket lines, patrols, mess queues. Somewhere a child was laughing at something clumsy a dog had done. Somewhere someone was crying into their hands where no one could see.
Ziyan climbed the north wall again as night came on. She held Ren's letter in one hand, Xu Min's blood-stiffened scrap in the other.
"Give me that," Feiyan said, nodding at the cloth. "We'll sew it into the inside of your cloak. Let his stubbornness sit between your shoulders."
Ziyan handed it over.
She faced the distant lights of the Xia camp and, in the quiet moment before drums, spoke softly, more to the stone than to the enemy.
"You won't break this city by being worse than Zhang," she said. "If you break it at all, it will be because I wasn't good enough at what I chose."
Feiyan tied the scrap into place, fingers deft. "Then be better," she said. "And if you're not, I'll remind you. With something heavier than letters."
Ziyan laughed once, breath white. "You keep promising."
She lifted her gaze. Tomorrow there would be more ladders, more rams, more jars shattered under hooves. More names for Ren's tablets and Ren the scribe's, each in their neat, different hands.
But tonight, on this wall, under this thin, stubborn snow, she allowed herself a final, sacrilegious thought:
If Ren Kanyu lived through this siege, he might one day be the only kind of enemy she respected enough to sit across a table from without reaching for a knife first.
"Tomorrow," she said, to Feiyan, to Li Qiang, to the city, to the watching general on his hill, "we hold again."
The wall under her feet, old and cracked and bearing more weight than it ever had before, seemed to agree.