Feiyan emerged from the shadows of a ruined colonnade, a strip of blue cloth now tied around her arm below the shoulder. It matched the silk on Ziyan's wrist, though more worn. "We have trouble," she said.
"More than the army outside?" Wei asked.
"Different shape," Feiyan said. "There's talk in the lower wards. Some say this is not our war. That Xia will be kinder than Zhang. That we should open a gate and let empires kill each other over our heads."
Ziyan's gaze cooled. "How many?"
"Not many," Feiyan said. "Yet. But words breed like rats."
Wei spat. "Better rats than traitors."
"Sometimes they're the same," Feiyan said quietly.
Ziyan walked to the edge of the broken pond, looked at the hairline fractures in the ice. "We cannot silence every frightened tongue," she said. "And if we try, we become the thing we killed." She turned back. "But we can give them something better to say."
"How?" Li Qiang asked.
"Truth," she said simply. "Tonight, we speak to them. Not from the palace steps, not from the wall. In the streets. In the alleys they think are too narrow for us to enter."
Wei stared. "You mean to walk the city while an army sits at our door?"
"Yes," Ziyan said. "If I die because I trusted my own people more than their fear, then I misjudged the road I claimed to build. Better I learn that now than under a different flag."
Feiyan's expression flickered—anger, concern, something almost like pride. "I'm not leaving your side," she said.
"Good," Ziyan said.
She waited until the second wave from Xia began to form—until she could see, from the wall, that they were massing toward the eastern quarter this time, feinting near the river, sending sappers to test the old culverts. She left Han there with command of the line, trusting his scars more than any oath.
Then she descended into the city.
They walked through streets that still smelled of old smoke and fresh fear: Ziyan, Feiyan, Wei, Li Qiang, and a handful of guards who had been chosen more for steadiness than skill. They stopped at a crossroads where three alleys met, each lined with leaning houses whose upper stories seemed to prop each other up out of habit.
People watched from behind shutters, from doorways, from stoops where they sat shelling the last of dried beans. Children froze in mid-game. A butcher's knife paused over bone.
Ziyan stepped into the center of the muddied snow. "You've heard they offer to spare you," she said, no preamble. "If you open a gate. If you sell each other. If you let them claim the ashes we're standing in."
No one spoke. A dog shook itself, collar jingling.
"They will not spare you," Ziyan went on. "They will spare what they can use. Your hands, your backs, your fields. They will take your sons to die on other borders and call it destiny. They will take your daughters to soften other beds and call it tax. They will tell you it is an honor."
An old man with a carved walking stick scowled. "And you ask something different?"
"Yes," she said. "I ask you to fight."
A bitter laugh came from a doorway. "With what? My broom? Her soup pot?" A woman gestured with her ladle.
Ziyan inclined her head. "If that's what you have. Hit them when they do not expect it. Trip them when they think themselves sure-footed. Hide the children where no soldier can find them. Shout warnings. Throw water on burning roofs. Throw stones from second stories. It is all war."
A younger man—face tight, hands chapped—snorted. "Stones and soup against an empire."
"Against two," Ziyan corrected. "We've already broken one."
He opened his mouth, closed it. The old man with the stick said after a moment, "Zhang starved us. You killed him. Xia starved Ye Cheng. You refused them. If we fight and lose, will you die with us, girl?"
"Yes," Ziyan said.
No hesitation. No adornment.
Feiyan watched her, profile unreadable.
The old man nodded. "Then we'll risk it," he said. "I've lived through three emperors. None of them ever promised to die with me."
The laughter that followed was thin, but real.
As they turned to leave, a child's voice piped up behind them. "Lady!"
Ziyan looked back. A small girl in an oversized padded jacket held up a piece of broken slate with something scratched onto it in clumsy strokes. A bird with flung-out wings.
"Is this right?" the girl asked. "For the bird?"
Ziyan took the slate, thumb brushing the chalk lines. "Close," she said. She adjusted one wing, lengthened the tail, added a small curve to the head. "There. That's how a phoenix looks when it hasn't decided whether to fly or burn."
The girl beamed. "I'll draw it everywhere," she said.
Feiyan laughed once. "You're going to be very hard to forget," she murmured as they walked on.
By the time they returned to the wall, the second assault was underway.
Xia had learned from the morning. Their ladders came in fewer, more protected waves. Their archers targeted sand buckets, not men. They sent a small unit of picked soldiers with hooks and ropes to try the unguarded sections near collapsed buildings.
They found Feiyan waiting.
She slipped through the half-fallen stones like smoke, cutting ropes before they tautened, leaving men dangling like trapped minnows. Wei's reserve squad hit them from behind, silent until the moment of impact, then full-throated and jubilant.
At the main gate, Li Qiang organized a brutal, efficient defense, using short, sharp counter-charges to throw back any attempt to mass at the base. No glorious pushes, no reckless heroics. Just work.
From his distant knoll, General Ren watched, frown deepening.
He had expected courage. He had expected stubbornness. He had not expected this—a defense that flexed rather than cracked, led by a woman who did not cling to walls the way other commanders did, but used them as one more tool among many.
By dusk, the field belonged to neither side.
Xia had not taken the city. Qi had not crushed the invader. Both had lost men. Both had learned.
On the wall, as the last horn of recall sounded from the east, Ziyan let herself exhale. Not victory. Not relief. Something else. Endurance.
Feiyan's eyes scanned the dimming horizon. "They'll come again at first light," she said. "With new ideas."
"Good," Ziyan said. "So will we."
Below them, in the streets and courtyards, people began to light small lamps. Not many. Just enough to keep the dark from pretending it had won.
Ziyan looked down at her city—scarred, hungry, half-ruined—and felt, for the first time, that it was looking back with something like intent.
"Tomorrow," she murmured, more to the stone than to any person, "we show them what it means for a road to fight."
The snow, falling soft but inexorable, seemed to nod.