Ziyan took the case.
Inside were three scrolls, each bearing Zhang's familiar, arrogant hand. The first ordered her capture on sight should she return to Qi territory. The second ordered her execution if captured alive, without public trial—"for the sake of stability." The third was shorter, written later. It was addressed not to a local commander, but to Ren himself, back when Zhang still thought he could hire Xia's teeth instead of bare his throat to them.
Ren watched her face as she read. "He offered to cede three border counties," he said, "if I would help him 'tidy' this region. He called you 'a necessary sacrifice to ensure the weak understand their place.'"
Feiyan's jaw clenched. Wei made a low noise that would have been a curse if it had found a word sharp enough.
Ziyan rolled the last scroll closed again with careful hands. "Why show me this?" she asked quietly. "He is dead. His contempt for me is ash on the floor of a hall you have seen."
"Because your men think you fight only Zhang's shadow," Ren said. "And mine think they fight only Zhang's heir. I would prefer they both understood what was actually at stake."
She studied him. "And what do you think is at stake, General?"
Ren's gaze flicked past her, up to the battered walls, the ragged banners, the silhouettes of archers and bucket-haulers and boys with sling-stones. "A way of ruling," he said simply. "Yours. Mine. Theirs. If I win, Xia's law comes here. It will be strict. It will be efficient. Many will prosper. Some will be crushed. That is the shape of empire."
"And if I win?" Ziyan asked.
Ren's eyes returned to her. "Then something new happens," he said. "And men like me do not enjoy 'new'."
"And yet you came yourself," Feiyan said. "Not a man who loves predictability, clearly."
Ren's mouth twitched. "The Emperor sent me here to take this city and put down a rebel before she gathered worse around her. I expected a warlord with romantic slogans. I find… this." His gaze flicked to the walls again. "Children with arrows. Old stones held by new promises. A code being written in the ruins of a throne room. It complicates the map."
Ziyan felt cold in a way the wind could not explain. "Are you asking my permission to withdraw?"
"No," Ren said. "I cannot. To retreat now, without having taken the city, would invite my Emperor's suspicion. And his suspicion is more fatal than your spears."
"Then why?" Wei demanded. "You topple our gates, we topple your towers. You show us we were despised by the man we already killed. Useful, but late."
Ren looked at Ziyan and, for the first time, something like respect sharpened his gaze.
"Because," he said, "I wished to see if the stories were true. That you meant what you say. That you would die before you knelt. That you would not trade one overlord for another, no matter how clean the ledgers he keeps."
"And have you decided?" Ziyan asked.
"Yes," Ren said. "You are as dangerous as my Emperor fears."
Feiyan's knife hand twitched. "This is where, back home, you would be killed," she said calmly. "He'd never risk letting an enemy commander walk away after saying that."
Ren nodded. "I am aware."
Ziyan weighed the sword at her side, the jar at Xia's flank, the city breathing behind her, the army massed beyond him. "You came under truce," she said. "If I kill you, I unmake my own law before it's dry."
Ren's shoulders eased, just a fraction. "Then perhaps," he said, "we will see each other a while longer."
She closed the scroll case. "You will attack again," she said. A statement, not a question.
"Yes," he said. "But not today. My men are as cold and tired as yours. They need sleep. They need food. And they need to think about a city that did not open its gates when offered their lives."
He swung into the saddle with the unthinking ease of long practice. "I will give you one night, Lady Li. In the morning, we resume."
Ziyan nodded. "In the morning, we show you that this city is not Ye Cheng. And that this road is not Zhang's."
Ren hesitated, then inclined his head. "If you survive this," he said quietly, "our world will not look the same."
"If I do not," she replied, "it won't either."
He turned his horse. As he rode back, Feiyan exhaled. "He likes you," she said. "In a professional, terrified way."
Wei scowled. "He likes respecting his enemies. Makes them easier to kill."
Ziyan's grip on the scroll case tightened. "Or harder," she said.
They walked back to the gate. The city's eyes were on her as the doors closed behind them—not just soldiers, but water-bearers, errand children, the old woman with the strong voice.
Feiyan touched her wrist, light as breath. "Well?"
Ziyan lifted the scroll case. "He showed us how little Zhang thought of us," she said. "And how much he values what we could become."
"And what do you make of that?" Li Qiang asked.
She looked up at the wall, at the people who had chosen not to sell each other, not yet. At the faint glow of lamps beginning to kindle as evening came early over the siege.
"I think," she said slowly, "that Xia is not the only one deciding what kind of empire it wants to be."
Feiyan's mouth curved. "And you?"
Ziyan's smile was thin and hard and real. "I'm deciding what kind it will have to live beside."
Night fell. For the first time in days, no arrows rose with it.
In the quiet, as men bound wounds and re-strung bows and children dozed against walls too cold for dreams, Ziyan unrolled Zhang's letter to Ren again. She read the line about "a necessary sacrifice" and felt no surprise. Only a clean, precise anger that fit her bones like a blade fits its sheath.
Last time, she had burned for someone else's ambition.
This time, if fire came, it would answer to her.