Night came down with its cloak already torn.
The snow had stopped, but the clouds stayed, low and heavy, reflecting the dull red of campfires on both sides of the wall. The city was quieter than it had any right to be. Men spoke in murmurs. The shrines were crowded with those who had not believed in anything for years and now found themselves mumbling at carved wood.
In the keep's smaller hall, Ziyan had spread three maps over the table: Yong'an's walls, the river's bends, and the hills beyond where Xia's tents freckled the darkness.
Shuye traced a line with ash-stained fingers. "Here," he said. "Their supply wagons. See how they've pulled them back since we cut the bridge? They sit fat and smug along this fold of ground. Close enough to feed the front. Far enough they think we can't reach."
Han grunted. "They're not wrong."
Chen Rui shook her head. "They are, if we decide they are."
Li Qiang folded his arms. "A sortie would cost us," he said. "Men we can't spare. If we fail, their morale rises, ours breaks. If we succeed…" He looked at the map. "We buy time."
"Time and teeth," Wei said. "It would feel good to bite, just once, instead of being bitten."
Feiyan leaned against a pillar, arms crossed, watching not the maps but the faces. "You've held four days," she said. "Five, if you count the first chaos. You've shown them you won't open the gates. If that's all you do, when they write this siege down, they will call it stubbornness. If you strike out—" her eyes slid to Ziyan "—they will call it something else."
"Recklessness?" Han suggested.
"Rule," Feiyan said, without irony. "The difference is who chooses when to bleed."
Ziyan stared at the inked symbols for wagons, fires, ladders. At the little Xs Ren the scribe had added for each new siege engine spotted.
"We cannot sit and wait for our law to be proven in a graveyard," she said quietly. "If we are building a road, it must go somewhere. It cannot end at the north wall."
She touched the fold where Shuye's finger rested. "We strike here. Supplies. Siege timbers. Anything that lets them sit and starve us at their leisure."
Shuye nodded, almost eagerly. "The slope helps us. I can set jars to roll. Gravity owes me a favor."
Han frowned. "You mean to send a team out, in the dark, through a siege line that has already learned to fear you?"
Ziyan met his gaze. "No," she said. "I mean to go out myself."
The room stilled.
Wei's mouth opened. "Absolutely not," he said.
Feiyan said nothing at all. Her eyes narrowed.
Zhao looked half-pleased, half-appalled. "You are aware," he said, "that rulers traditionally prefer to let other people set things on fire for them?"
"Zhang preferred that," Ziyan said. "And he is ash. The Emperor preferred that, and his palace is rubble under someone else's boots." She laid a palm flat on the map. "If I ask these people to hold this wall because they trust my law, I will not hide behind it when it is time to act."
Li Qiang's jaw clenched. "If you fall outside," he said, "the city may tear itself apart before Ren has to lift a ladder."
"If I stay inside," she replied, "we may never make him lift his eyes from the gate at all."
Feiyan pushed off the pillar and came to the table. "You're not going alone," she said. "It's not romantic if you die with a jar in your hands and no one to make a decent song about it."
Wei snorted. "I'll come. Someone has to complain all the way there."
"Chen Rui's people know the western ditches," Han added reluctantly. "They can slip through where the ground pretends to be useless."
Zhao examined his fingernails. "I've always wanted to know what my steward feels like when I send him on errands at unreasonable hours," he said. "Send one of mine too. If I'm going to be part of this kingdom you're building, I'd like at least one eyewitness to whatever madness crowns it."
Ren the scribe dipped his brush. "Under Oath?" he asked.
Ziyan looked at him.
He nodded toward the wall tablets visible even from here. "You said no soldier seizes from the helpless. No fire set in cowardice. No action taken in secret that affects the city without council. If this raid goes wrong, our people have the right to know why we tried it. And if it goes right…" His gaze sharpened. "They have the right to know they helped decide."
"Then write it," Ziyan said. "Who goes. What we intend. That I asked for volunteers, not conscripts. Post it. Tonight."
Han stared at her. "You'll tell the city you're leaving its walls?"
"Yes," Ziyan said. "If I die, they'll find out anyway. If I live, I'd prefer not to start with a lie."
Feiyan's expression softened by the smallest fraction. "Good," she said. "One less thing for me to remind you of later."