Shuye's grin was slow and feral. He was already palming the scraps of rumor he kept like gambling markers. In a minute, three boys who owed him for jars he had once fired for their mothers were running in three directions, each with a story: Li Ziyan wounded; Li Ziyan retreating; Li Ziyan afraid of the night road. Two old women who sold boiled roots were given coin and a strong opinion to ladle with their broth. A captured scout, dazed and tied at the wrist, was allowed to listen to the news while pretending not to.
Feiyan had been waiting for the turn since last dusk. "Let me write the punctuation," she said, and slipped along the reed line with six quiet men. Where Xia's skirmishers pressed, she gave ground and took throats, let one runner see her limp, let two more live long enough to be proud of surviving a brush with the name they'd been paid to hate.
By late afternoon, Ziyan pulled the line back as if some invisible rope had tugged them. The ridge cleared. The west ford looked abandoned. The jar rode against Ziyan's knee, heavy as a verdict. Han scowled and gave the signal with his chin; the cavalry peeled away in twos and threes into the band of black pines north of the ridge, their tack muffled, their eyes learning a night they hadn't met yet.
Across the river, pride argued with caution and won, as it does when drums are listening. The first battalions poured over the gap their engineers had bullied into existence, crossed the broken shallows, and climbed the near bank with the clumsy hunger of men who believe at last that victory has agreed to let them in. Scouts went too far too fast. Officers counted torches and were pleased by how few they found. Horses blew steam like small, triumphant storms.
Night gathered in the pines and found itself invited. The valley's floor was a quilt of hummocks and old marsh, stitched with narrow ditches where Shuye had set jars under scraped dirt and pine duff. Feiyan had strung wire between two low trunks at shin-height, the kind of courtesy that makes arrogance kneel. Huo's riders looped wide and took the far lip of the bowl, three horns between them and the sense to use them as if the wind were the enemy.
Ziyan took the high spur that saw into the valley and nothing beyond. The jar sat in the crook of a root; she set her palm on it and felt calm arrive as if warmth were a ranking officer. The Emperor's letter rested inside, unread again, heavy with a dozen characters that had already stepped out into the world without her.
"Wait," she said, and her companions, and the valley, and the part of herself that had learned to love postponement all obeyed.
Xia's vanguard entered the bowl. Their lanterns swung with the confidence of men who had been told they were here to collect what the day had promised them. The first horse stumbled on the wire and screamed; the second put a hoof through a jar's shallow lid and learned a new verb that ended in fire. Troops bunched. Commanders shouted for lines that did not know where to stand because the ground had decided to move under them.
"Now," Ziyan said, as the third horn sounded from Huo's ridge. Shuye pulled the mother wick he'd braided into the valley's weave, and light ran in tidy lines: here a gout of pitch as high as a man's oath; there a ring of flame that made a sudden room and locked it; here a seam that lit like a smile and cut a hundred men into three smaller arguments with themselves.
Han's riders dropped from the dark like rude birds. They did not charge so much as demonstrate momentum. Lances took men in the act of trying to be surprised and lifted them into decisions they had not practiced. Wei went through the edge of a company the way a door goes through a paper wall. Li Qiang held the narrowest place where the pines crowded and showed five men in a row that the shortest measure of time is between parry and answer.
Feiyan reappeared at Ziyan's elbow, breath steady, blade bright, blood an afterthought. "They came to be fed," she said. "We gave them the meal."
"Not enough," Ziyan said. The valley roared and roared. Men ran. Others stood and were wrong. A captain tried to rally under a banner that had lost interest in wind and caught instead; he died doing the right thing the wrong way, which is how most officers go.
"Then you let me bring dessert," Feiyan said, and vanished again, limping in a way that told the night to keep its sympathy.