Dawn found Yong'an with smoke in its teeth.
The slope where Xia's wagons had stood was now a black scar on the hills, dotted with the hunched shapes of men digging fire pits deeper so the last embers wouldn't light the grass. From the north wall, the defenders watched and muttered, half in satisfaction, half in disbelief that they'd done it and still woke up breathing.
"They'll feel that," Wei said, rubbing his bruised shoulder. "Timber doesn't grow back overnight."
"Neither do men," Han replied. "He showed restraint. No cavalry charge. No bodies on our ditch. He'll spend that tomorrow."
On the wall, Ziyan flexed the fingers of her injured arm. The bandage was new; the cut from the raid had reopened when she'd misjudged a slope and driven her shoulder into a wagon wheel. Feiyan had sworn at her for an entire minute as she wrapped it.
"Wagons burn," Ziyan said. "Orders don't. He'll have new ones by now."
She was right.
In Xia's command tent, Ren Kanyu stood over his own map, where the slope was nothing but ink and a few smudged notes.
"They hit us where it hurt, not where it was easy," his adjutant said, voice carefully neutral. "They know what they're doing."
"Yes," Ren said. "Which means the old ways of siege—starve, batter, repeat—will cost more than they give."
He unrolled the Emperor's latest dispatch again, though he'd already memorized it.
Break them quickly. Break them visibly. Make their law a warning, not a story.
He felt the weight of that more than the implied threat to his command.
"What is her heart?" he asked aloud, though the tent held only him and the adjutant.
"The granaries," the adjutant said promptly. "The gate. The north wall."
"No," Ren said, almost gently. "Those are bones. Important. But not heart."
His finger tapped the inner map: the temple marked with a small cross, where reports said healers boiled both Xia and Qi herbs; the market square with the law tablets; the granary Zhang had once hidden and she had turned into a public measure of justice.
"Here," he said. "If we cannot break her walls without burning the city into ash, we break what makes the city hers."
He saw, in his mind, a carved tablet splitting under stone. A law turning into rubble in an instant.
Ren's jaw tightened.
"I want all catapults retargeted," he said. "For one day, we aim past the wall. Here. Here." He pointed. "Granary square. Temple quarter. No fire-dipped stones—just rock. We are not burning them. We are… shaking their faith."
The adjutant stared. "General, that—"
"—will kill people," Ren said. "Yes. It is siege. But we do not aim for packed roofs. We aim for stone. Leave them alleys to run through. If their Lady truly holds them, we'll see whether her law stands when the sky falls in the middle of her city."
"And the infiltrators?" the adjutant asked. "Luo has… suggestions."
Ren's hand hovered over the sketch of old drains and culverts Luo Fen had mapped from memory. A rat-route under the wall, half-choked with silt, forgotten since Zhang's time.
"Send them," he said at last. "Small group. Knives, not ladders. Their target is the temple's store of herbs. I will not poison wells. But if I can deny her medicine, the fever will do what we have not yet managed."
He did not say, aloud, that if the infiltrators succeeded, the Emperor would be satisfied with visible breaking. Tablets shattered. Medicine spilled. Law proved fragile.
He also did not say that if they failed, he would have to face the fact that this road of hers had more in it than one woman's stubbornness.
"See that Luo rides with them," he added. "If he wants to play guide for wolves, let him walk in front of their teeth."
The first stone that landed in the city was a mistake.
That was what men said later, because it made it easier to think about.
It came just after noon, when the snow clouds thinned and the sun decided it would show itself if only to prove it still existed. The bombardment had been regular all morning: stones slamming into the north wall, dust pluming, defenders ducking, laughing nervously when the rock bounced instead of bit.
This one hissed higher. The watch on the wall saw it too late.
It cleared the parapet.
It came down like an argument ending in the wrong room.
It smashed through the corner of a warehouse two streets behind the wall, spraying timber and grain and roof tiles into the air like a potter having a tantrum. Men in the lane below screamed and scattered.
On the north tower, Ziyan went very still.
"That was not the wall," Li Qiang said.
The second stone confirmed it.