They rode south into a morning that had not yet decided whether to be spring.
Mist dragged low over the fields, snagging on hedges and broken fence-posts. The road was mud where carts had worried it, frost where shade still held. Each hoofbeat sounded louder than it should have, as if the land knew enough now to listen.
Ziyan did not set a punishing pace. That would have been fear wearing urgency's cloak. She set a steady one. Hard enough to make the riders lean into the day. Measured enough that no horse would break before the thing that actually mattered.
Li Qiang rode at her right, silent in the way only men who have already finished arguing can be. Wei took the left, restless, grin sharpened thin by nerves. The twelve behind them were a cross-section of the Road Commonwealth itself: two of Chen Rui's westerners, one of Zhao's riders, three from Yong'an's wall garrison, one boy from Reed Mouth who had grown into a messenger faster than anyone liked, and the rest men and women whose names would never make it into court records but already lived on Ren's tablets.
No banner.
Only the sparrow stitched inside cloaks, where warmth and witness both could keep it.
By midday, the first sign they were near Green Dike was not smoke, but absence.
No children by the lane. No women washing pots at the ditch edge. No old men pretending to mend something while actually counting strangers' teeth. The village had pulled its breathing inward.
"Good," Han would have approved from a hundred li away. "Means Luo listened."
Feiyan, had she been there, would have said: "Or it means someone else got here first."
Ziyan saw both possibilities at once.
They slowed at the rise before the village and spread instinctively. Not a battle line—too honest for this kind of danger. Just enough distance that one arrow would not solve anyone's problem all at once.
Green Dike sat in the shallow fold between the riverbank and the dike wall, roofs low and practical. The sparrow tile still hung under the tavern eaves. Zhang's decree was still nailed beneath it, its corner peeling in the damp.
No soldiers in sight.
But on the far side of the square, near the little shed they had only recently begun calling a Road House, a shape hung from the beam.
Wei saw it first and swore so hard it seemed to scrape the mist.
Not a body.
A goat.
Its legs were tied and its neck draped with a board on which someone had painted in rough, mocking strokes: ROAD TAX PAID.
For a heartbeat, fury nearly turned the world red.
Then the absurdity of it bit through. A warning. A message. A taunt. Not yet blood, but close enough to smell it.
"Zhang's men have a sense of theatre," Li Qiang said, voice low and dangerous.
"Bad theatre," Wei snapped. "I've seen drunker threats."
Still, Ziyan felt the edge under the jest. Someone had come. Someone had stood in this square and declared that the next thing hung might not have hooves.
A door opened in the tavern wall. Headman Luo stepped out, followed by the tavern woman and three men with staves. They looked like people who had not slept so much as crouched through the night waiting for it to decide whether to continue.
When they saw Ziyan on horseback, something moved across their faces too complicated to be called relief.
"You came," Luo said. Not accusation. Not gratitude. A simple, exhausted fact.
"I said I would," Ziyan replied.
Luo's gaze went briefly to the riders behind her. He counted. His mouth tightened. "Then either you are brave," he said, "or this is worse than I hoped."
"Both can be true," Wei muttered.
Ziyan dismounted. Mud sucked at her boots. She walked to the hanging goat and looked at the board again.
"Who?" she asked.
Luo rubbed both hands over his face. "A patrol yesterday," he said. "Not enough for a sweep. Seven men. One sergeant with a voice too loud for his rank. They read the decree. Asked where our Road House ledger was. We told them the law says records aren't handed over without witness from both sides."
The tavern woman spat. "He laughed," she said. "Then he said witness was exactly what he had come to make."
"They searched," Luo went on. "Found nothing useful. Because we moved it, as you told us. Then they took the goat from Mill Bend's cousin and hung it up. Said next time they'd take the headman. Or the first child who shouted 'witness' before being spoken to."
Wei's knuckles whitened around his reins. "Next time I'm hanging the sergeant by his ankles and letting the goat read the charges," he said.
Ziyan ignored him, because if she looked too directly at the anger in the square it might become her own, and she needed that anger cut into shape.
"Did they say how soon next time was?" she asked.
Luo shook his head. "No. Which is worse."
The Road House shed door opened then, and a boy stepped out carrying the clay chest in both arms as if he had no intention of ever letting it out of his grip again.