A man near the front—soft hands, old officer's knot on his cloak—spoke up. "Princess," he said. The title slipped out before he caught it; he did not correct it. "If you bend, we might sleep without expecting fire at the wall."
"We might go back," an older woman added, eyes bright with unshed grief. "To being just people under a dragon, not a… question under the sky."
The midwife rapped her staff. "And go back to which part, child?" she demanded. "The part where Gaoling screamed and no one came? The part where Ye Cheng burned?"
Ji Lu raised a hand, palm open. "The Regent acknowledges past failings," he said. "He writes of a 'new start'. He fears, above all, Xia taking what remains. If you stand apart, you give them excuse."
Wei snorted. "We gave Xia plenty of excuses by existing," he said. "They didn't seem to need more."
Ji Lu's gaze slid over him. "You are western," he said. "You speak of Qi as if it were a stranger's house. Fine. But these people—"
He gestured to the crowd, to the familiar faces Ziyan knew: traders, refugees, children, workers, Sun Wei's boy copycats, Lin Chang's cousins, men from the western quarter, women from the riverbank.
"These people were born under Qi's reign," he said. "Their parents, their dead, their stories are tied to that name. You ask them to give it up for a… road."
"Roads go somewhere," Chen Rui said. "Thrones mostly sit."
Ziyan remained turned toward the crowd.
"When Ye Cheng burned," she said, "I ran with you. Not away from you. With you. When the wolves came, I opened the gate not to welcome them, but to let the living through. Qi called that treason because it was easier than admitting it had failed us."
Her hand brushed the nearest tablet's edge.
"When we carved these, we did not ask Bai'an or the capital for permission," she went on. "We asked each other: what must never happen again? No soldier seizing food in the night. No beating without witness. No tax without account. No law handed down that we cannot argue with."
She looked back at Ji Lu. "Qi calls that rebellion," she said. "Xia calls it infection. I call it remembering how to be human."
"And when their armies come?" Ji Lu asked quietly. "When Zhang rides with his ash banners and Xia's general decides Yong'an is more trouble than it is worth? Will your tablets stop arrows?"
"No," Ziyan said. "Our people will."
He opened his mouth. She lifted a hand; to his credit, he closed it.
"Listen," she said, to him and to everyone. "Qi offers forgiveness if we become its kind of obedient. Xia offers tolerance if we stay small and useful. Zhang offers death if we grow. None of them offers what we are already building: law that belongs to those it binds."
She gestured to the midwife, to Lin Chang, to Ren, to the steward, to the children smudged with chalk. "They have a say," she said. "Did they have one when Qi decreed Gaoling an 'acceptable sacrifice'? When Ye Cheng's ashes were scraped into Zhang's plaster?"
Ji Lu flinched, just slightly. "We needed to buy time," he said. "To hold the heart."
"Your heart lives here now," the midwife snapped. "In these cracked walls and bad tempers."
A ripple of agreement. The officer who had spoken before looked torn, his hand tightening on the faded dragon at his cloak's corner.
"Counsellor," Ziyan said more softly. "I know what it is to love a name so much you bend yourself into knots to excuse what men do under it. Qi. Xia. Liang. Whatever we call it, it's always someone at the top telling those at the bottom to die nicely."
Her voice did not rise. It didn't need to.
"I won't let Yong'an be spent like that," she said. "Not by Qi, not by Xia, not by any man who needs my name to make his crimes sound clean. This—"
She touched the tablet.
"—is the last place I will build that can be betrayed without answer."
She turned fully to Ji Lu.
"Tell your Regent," she said, "that Yong'an remembers being Qi. It remembers, and that is why it refuses to return. Tell him: if he wants our loyalty, let him kneel here and sign under our tablets. Let him send grain without riders to seize it back, healers without collectors to follow. When he has done that long enough to prove he serves his people instead of his throne, we will speak as equals. Until then, he may keep his forgiveness. We have done nothing to ask for it."