The envoy spoke before I could. "He is merciful," he said softly. "We have taught him the law that mercy obeys. It is larger than blood and colder than anger. It is the only law that does not break."
I looked from the cracked seal to the eyeless gods on the lintel. Rain had made their faces patient. The spirals at their throats were too many to have been cut by men with lives to lead.
"Shen Yue," I said.
"Here," she said. She did not breathe it—she placed it on the floor like a blade.
"If a river learns," I asked, "what does it forget."
"Banks," she said. "Villages. Names."
"Good," I said. My voice filled the temple the way water fills a bowl. "Then listen."
The envoy's eyes flicked, finally, to my face. It is a skill courtiers learn—how to look at masks and not the men beneath them. He did not want to meet my eyes. He wanted to meet the decisions my house made on its worst days. Still, when the room changed, his mouth skipped a breath.
I did not move. I let the thing under my ribs rise like a tide that chose indifference over appetite. The air thickened. The torches bent until the flames drew long knives toward my chest and then, shamed by their boldness, shrank. The cracks in the floor ran quieter. The eyeless gods on the lintel did not look, but the stone remembered what looking felt like.
The cracked seal lay on my palm. It warmed, as if somewhere far away a river touched a forge. A thin sound threaded the air—the kind clay jars make when a potter tests them with his fingernail.
"Return," I said.
I did not speak it from my mouth. The word came up through the stone, through my marrow, through the wet at the back of my throat where language goes to breed. It was not a command in the court's grammar. It was what tides say to ships after patience ends.
The monks staggered without moving their feet. One began a prayer in a clean rote voice and coughed a thread of dark red that did not drip. The envoy's pupils blew wide as if he had been struck blind in a room with light. The ox set its hooves and leaned backward, straining the yoke, eyes rolled white to see a sky no priest had promised.
Shen Yue's hand found my sleeve, not to pull me back, only to see if I would allow physics to continue. General Sun took one step, the step men take who will die in the next ten steps if told. Wu Jin's lips shaped a phrase that had many exits; he chose none.
The cracked seal split cleanly. The break was so simple it argued that it had always been there. The two halves fell apart like brothers who had run out of reasons to share a roof.
"Return," I said again, climbing no higher than the pitch of water.
The envoy dropped to his knees. He did not mean to kneel. His spine forgot it was a flagpole. He pressed his forehead to the cold stone and whispered something too small to be a prayer: a child's name, perhaps, or the name he had before he learned to cough incense.
He looked up. His eyes had learned new math.
"The Emperor will come," he said. He did not threaten. He did not preach. He reported. "He will come as law. If you do not kneel, you will be corrected."
"Then bring him," I said. "Bring him where knives decide correctness."
The envoy swallowed. He stood without grace, which is a kind of honesty. He signaled with two fingers; the monks lifted the empty halves of the seal and wrapped them again in the silk that had learned to behave like skin. The ox found its balance. The spearmen did not raise their shields; you do not shield against weather.
At the temple threshold the envoy paused, as if some rote demanded it. He half-turned. "You brought winter home," he said to me. "We brought sleep. Between them, roofs go quiet."
"Roofs remember," I said. "They count what sleep forgets."
He left. The crows that had followed us considered following them and then chose to stay. The reeds bowed once and forgot why.
For a time none of us spoke. Men stacked silence the way they stack timber; it makes them feel protected if not safe.
Sun was first. "We will meet them," he said. "At a ground we choose. With ditches that remember to burn."
Shen Yue let go of my sleeve. The place her fingers had rested felt cooler, as if a part of me had not wanted to warm her anymore. "You frightened them," she said, low. "You frightened me."
"I did not move," I said.
"That is what frightened me," she answered.
Wu Jin exhaled like a man who had been under a wave and decided it was a lesson, not a punishment. "If the South brings him as law, we must behave like precedent. We will force them to argue in a language that bleeds. The court will wish to bargain." His eyes found mine and refused to ask for pity. "The court is out of language."
"Then we will teach it," I said.
We mounted. The lamps in our hands righted themselves a little, embarrassed by their earlier eagerness. On the way back the road remembered how to be one. The crows went ahead, as if to inventory the roofs that would prefer to remain roofs.
At the last bend before the city, a courier waited, horse lathered, mouth white. He held out a baton as if it were a hot coal. "From the northern pass," he rasped. "Zhou banners. Not many. Enough to watch. Enough to write the first paragraph."
"Good," I said. "Let them write."
In the courtyard of the palace the eunuchs met us with faces as smooth as pond ice. The Lord Protector waited beneath the colonnade where the lamps have learned to mind themselves. He did not ask what I had done. He asked only, "What did they bring."
"Proof," I said, and put the two halves of the seal on the stone before him.
He did not reach for them. He looked at me—the way a man looks at a fire that has decided to keep him warm today.
"The South has chosen their god," I said. "Let us remind them the North already has one."
Shen Yue's breath stopped. She didn't know whether I meant myself.
"Choose the ground," I told General Sun. "Not at the marsh. Not at the roads they name. Where the wind trips and the ditches remember. We will not wait for bells."
"At dusk," Sun said.
"At dusk," I agreed.
Wu Jin bowed with the politeness of a man who has discovered a tiger sleeping under his desk. "I will teach the court to say nothing beautifully," he said. "It will be our last art."
Night sharpened its teeth along the eaves. The lamps bowed as I passed. The moat leaned, listening. Under the city, the cisterns breathed like animals that had learned patience. The silence under my ribs did not purr. It waited, pleased, as if the room had chosen the right guest.
When I reached my door, the torch there leaned so far it would have kissed my shoulder if it had been born with a mouth.
"Return," I said to it, softly, a joke told to a god.
It straightened. Even gods prefer not to be mocked.
At dawn, riders would go to the stones where we had decided to make our argument. At noon, Wu Jin would feed the court words that sounded like food. At dusk, we would begin to count how many names a throne requires when it is carried like a coffin.
I slept without turning. In my sleep, the rivers did not change their minds. They learned a word and spoke it until banks forgot they were banks.
When I woke, winter had already entered the room and sat where I sit.