Wu Shuang stood at the foot of the dais, hair braided in a loop that caught and held the breath of anyone who looked too long. She studied her brother's profile as if it were a edict written in a language no one had taught her. "He won't say it here," she murmured. "Words are made of air. He trusts paper."
"Paper can be burned," Wu Jin said.
"So can air."
He wanted to ask her what lay beneath that line, but the usher's voice interrupted: "Envoy of the Great Zhou."
The court's silence was a porcelain thing that did not tolerate cracks. The envoy entered the way men do when they are certain that doors open for them because geography itself prefers it—slow, unarmed, eyes lowered in deference that kept count. His robe was white in the fashion gathered from northern snow: unblemished to show stains. He carried no gift, only a traveling staff wrapped in sutra-printed silk and a narrow case at his belt.
He bowed. "Under Heaven, the Emperor of Zhou greets the He Lian court." The titles he used for them were exquisitely correct; the tone was not. "I come with letters and condolence."
Wu Jin smiled thinly. "For which?"
"For the end of an age," the envoy said. He lifted the narrow case, unlatched it, and drew out a parchment folded longwise, old paper that had never been creased until now. "Our Emperor remembers treaties and roads. He remembers a river we did not cross and a pledge we did not break. He remembers, too, the mountain where a northern general broke a seal that was not his."
A susurrus went through the court like a sleeve brushing rushes. Wu Jin's fingers tightened on the arm of the throne.
Wu Shuang's gaze did not leave the envoy's face. "Your Emperor remembers many things," she said. "Memory is a country. Men get lost in it."
The envoy's eyes flicked, once, to the floor—as if checking the pattern of the mosaic against a map. "Men are not the only travelers."
He turned the parchment so they could see the seal impressed over its lower edge: an archaic lotus, not the twin of He Lian, but its ancestor, petals closed like a fist. "We ask for audience," he said. "Private. We offer terms that spare provinces from mistakes."
"What terms?" Wu Jin asked.
"A listening," the envoy said. "And an answer."
"From whom?"
The envoy's gaze lifted, at last, to meet the dais. For a heartbeat the room lay plain upon his irises: the banners, the smooth faces, the still air, the twin lotuses. Then something else passed there—like a shadow made of winter. "From the one who can speak to what breathes beneath us."
Wu Jin did not look down. He would not.
He rose. "Tomorrow," he said. "At dusk. Bring only your staff."
The envoy folded the parchment, slid it back into its case, bowed so precisely that the angle might have been measured, and withdrew, leaving behind the faint scent of cold.
Wu Jin sat again and did not breathe for a count of eight. Wu Shuang remained motionless, a statue pretending to long for life.
Finally, she said, "They knew."
"They guessed," he said, and wanted it to be true.
"The mountain. The seal."
"Stories."
"Stories that always end with a door," she said, and turned her face toward the floor, toward the throb below. "And we are standing on its hinge."
The hinge creaked.
Wu An took the last of the forgotten stairs. They didn't lead anywhere; he made them end. At the point where stone must have stopped, the dark yielded, a skin pricked by thought. He walked through. The air on the other side tasted of snowmelt and ink.
He entered a chamber not built by hands. No tool marks. No worship scars. Only the geometry of things that have always wanted to be born. At its center stood a column of not-light, a vertical wound around which the damp had decided to condense. Voices whispered from it in dozen pitches: river, gate, oath, bread, son.
"Did you send for him?" Shen Yue asked behind him, and she didn't know if she meant the envoy or the father.
"I don't send," Wu An said, and let the echo answer for him: come.
He placed his palm upon the not-light. For a moment his outline vanished and the room kept only his absence. The scars across his chest flared and turned red to white, then cooled.
"He wants to speak with me," he said.
"Who?"
"The Emperor," he said, and when she flinched he added, "Not ours."
Shen Yue crossed herself in a manner belonging to a faith that hadn't been taught within a thousand li. "What will you say?"
Wu An's mouth opened as if to answer, and instead a breath came out. The room darkened with it. She thought she saw a figure in the breath like a man seen across winter fields: broad-shouldered, head bare in the snow, hand resting on the pommel of a sword. It turned toward her and away in the same motion.
His voice was his own when it returned. "I will ask him," he said, "what he remembers of hunger."
Night unstitched itself into hours that refused to line up. The messenger from the Hei lay sleeping in a barrack he had not chosen, his knuckles white around a prayer he did not know. In the envoy's guest quarters, a small brazier burned with smokeless flame that produced a thread of sound like a wire drawn endlessly tight. Wu Jin reread a dispatch he had not opened, lips moving without sound. Wu Shuang sat on the windowsill with her knees folded to her chest, watching the false sun sag toward the palace roof as if tired of pretending to be celestial.
Below, the city's roots tightened. The First Bloom's shadow narrowed, pointing not to the throne, but to a place four halls behind it, one level down, where a basin remembered a promise and a son remembered a bridge.
At the very edge of the capital, the north gate breathed in and out, the old iron complaining as if awoken from a winter sleep. A rider waited there in the dark, his horse's sides lathered, his satchel heavy with pages that had learned to keep their ink in a siege. When the gate exhaled, he slipped through. He did not look up at the sky. He did not have to. The light on the horizon did not belong to any moon.
He turned his horse toward the palace and rode. His news could have no words. Everyone would know it anyway.
And far beneath all of them, Wu An pressed his forehead to cold stone and listened to the hinge of the world.
"Open," he whispered, and the city answered like a door that had never been closed.