Prince Ning's courier did not step in. He stood under the eaves with an umbrella too steady for a servant and watched as if measuring a distance not of feet. A heartbeat later, a Censorate clerk who had been "lost" straightened his back, and two officials in modest robes entered as if late to a ceremony they had organized.
"By order of the Censorate," the elder said, bowing to the tablets and not to the chairs, "we observe a reading of Education papers touching the academies."
Second Aunt whitened, as powder learns to do when it meets rain. Second Uncle blustered and made a bridge with his hands that no one wished to cross. Madam Chen's smile turned to porcelain without a kiln. Li cousins arranged their faces into injured merit.
"You may observe," Ziyan said calmly, "so long as you will remember what you saw."
"What we remember is our business," the elder clerk returned, but his eyes had already memorized the ribbon, the sleeve, the uncle's finger where arrogance smudges like a thumbprint.
Li Rou hissed, "You brought them," but Ziyan only bowed to the tablets again, because the dead listen longer than the living.
The clerk asked three questions and watched two uncles answer each other instead of him. He asked a fourth and watched Second Aunt claim a seal she had never been permitted to touch. He asked a fifth and watched Li Cheng glow as he recited a passage he did not understand.
"Enough," Madam Chen snapped at last, "the house will not be made a street show."
"The street," the elder clerk said blandly, "has better manners."
He left with his shadow and his memory. The courier under the eaves folded his umbrella and went where a man goes when he has seen what he needed. The hall breathed, ugly with relief.
"That," Second Uncle declared, "was a test. We passed."
"You took the paper out," Ziyan said. "The Censorate will remember whose hands made a wheel from one sheet of ash."
Second Aunt's fan struck her palm like a stealthy slap. "You would shame us."
"I did not need to," Ziyan answered. "You came prepared."
Madam Chen stood, silk whispering like a snake that has found its tongue. "Leave. Go back to your Bureau. Do not bring officers to the hall again."
Ziyan rose, bowed to the tablets a third time, and left the way a knife leaves a sheath—clean, without apology, knowing it will be needed again.
The corridor beyond the hall ran narrow, its windows wide to a courtyard white with snow. Her breath made a small cloud in the air. Somewhere far off, a bell kept time for people who still believed in gentle ends.
Li Qiang fell in a pace behind her. Wei's shadow slid along the opposite wall; Yufei moved ahead to check corners. It was a habit they had learned in different lives and practiced now as one.
The first arrow hissed past her ear and buried itself in the cedar pillar with a sound like a small animal surprised to be wood. Wei had time to shout. Li Qiang had time to move. Ziyan did not have time to think about anything except that the second arrow would aim lower.
She ducked; Li Qiang's arm closed around her shoulders and dragged her behind the pillar; Yufei's sleeve snapped forward and smothered the lamp so that the corridor turned from a room into a path. The third arrow struck sparks from stone and sang along the floor as if it meant to be a bell.
"Roof," Wei breathed, already moving, feet finding the smaller shadows within shadow. Li Qiang had his knife out with the same quiet he had when pouring tea; he pressed Ziyan behind him without looking.
The fourth arrow did not come. Silence dropped hard.
Yufei slid along the lattice and vanished through a narrow door that most people assumed was painter's storage. Wei reached the far corner and flattened himself against the eave just as a slate tile whispered under a weight that should not have been there.
Ziyan tasted metal. She did not waste what breath she had on fear; fear does not answer the question you will have to ask when your lungs are quiet. She unclasped the simple iron pin from her hair and pressed it into Li Qiang's palm. He adjusted his grip by instinct, as if accepting a sword hilt.
A figure dropped from the roof to the opposite veranda—light, sure, a single fold of cloth masking a face that had learned to be a face in other rooms. The bow turned in the assassin's hands with a lover's familiarity.
Wei lunged first, a low angle meant to knock the knee and break the line of a second shot. The assassin twisted, blade in the other hand like a promise, and would have cut Wei's throat if Li Qiang had not reached the space that opens when death chooses a direction. Iron rang; wood splintered; the assassin's blade bit the pillar; Wei's knife ripped cloth. Yufei reappeared with a short pry-bar from the painter's shelf and swung it like a man who had learned violence too late to love it.
The assassin sprang backward, feet finding the rail, and in that moment a small thing fell from his sleeve onto the snow and lay there like a seed—black, oval, glossy. Ziyan recognized it before she wanted to. A cicada bead, carved from lacquer, the same shape Yufei had painted in ash on the almost-true ledger. Not a signature. A message.
"Alive," Ziyan said, breath steady, voice a blade of its own. "Take him alive."
The assassin laughed once, like ice. He flipped the bow, caught the rope that dangled from the roof, and went up it with a grace one cannot teach. Wei went after and did not catch him. Yufei slammed the door bar up into its cradle a heartbeat too late to matter. Li Qiang stood still as stone until the last roof tile finished speaking.
They breathed together, three and then four when Wei returned with blood on his sleeve that was not his and a ragged anger in his mouth that would do no good just now.
Ziyan knelt in the snow and picked up the bead. Cold bit her fingertips. The cicada's wings had been scored with a mark she had seen twice before in rooms where the air pretended to be warmer than it was: a tiny cross-stroke like the tail of a character, the Education Ministry's old copyist's flourish—Li Wenxu's school paper taught it to boys who wanted to look like men.
She closed her hand. "Not Xia," she said softly. "Home."
Li Qiang said nothing. Wei looked at the roof as if roofs could be forced into talking. Yufei exhaled, old.
"Your trap worked," Wei managed.
"And someone sent a second," Yufei added. "A quieter one."
Ziyan stood. Snow had begun to fall again, lazy flakes choosing shoulders with care. In the hall behind them, her aunts and uncles were likely rearranging blame like screens. In the wider palace, Prince Ning would be at a window that did not frost, watching where the river turned. In the Ministry annex, a clerk would be writing a report that mistook smoke for salvation. Somewhere, the hand that sent the bead would be drying its pen.
"Tell Jinrui," she said. "Tell him the family will sing for the Censorate before dusk. Tell him to listen for the verse that stumbles. And send word to the Hall of Autumn Lattice: I will answer when summoned, but I will name colors before he names rain."
Wei glanced at the bead. "You will accuse your father?"
"I will accuse the house," Ziyan said. "Let the house decide who built it."
They left the corridor. Snow softened their steps into nothing. Behind them, the cicada bead lay in her palm, light as ash. Ahead, the path through the garden looked like paper waiting for ink. The phoenix mark beneath her sleeve warmed—no vision, only the steady heat of a coal that had chosen, at last, which fire it belonged to.