Snow clung to the cedar where the arrow had buried itself, a pale flower around a wound. They left it there. Li Qiang walked Ziyan back to the teahouse by side lanes the family never used, Wei floating ahead like a rumor, Wen Yufei behind them, counting corners with the careful hunger of a man who had learned late to be afraid.
Inside, warmth rose from the brazier as if it had been waiting for them in silence. Ziyan did not sit. She reached for water and missed the cup by the width of a quill, then steadied her hand and poured without apology. The cicada bead lay on the table, black and small, its lacquered wings cut with the old copyist's tail-stroke from the Education Ministry.
"Not Xia," Wei said, voice flat. "Not their marks. Home."
Ziyan closed her fingers over the bead until her palm ached. "Then home will answer."
"Word's already moving," Yufei murmured. "Your aunts will say you invited the arrow. Lord Gao will say you shot it yourself. Your father will say nothing at all, and that will be worst."
Ziyan looked up at the men who had followed her into more rooms than she could name. "We'll choose the meaning before they do." She nodded once, a small, deliberate bow to her own plan. "Tonight we set bait where family hands feel safest."
Li Qiang's mouth tugged. "Your father's hall."
"Close," she said. "The Ministry annex."
They moved with the hour. Wei vanished into sleet that turned his hair to iron threads. Yufei slipped toward the river to pass quiet words where quiet words had coin. Li Qiang returned to the Li estate long enough to be seen by the wrong cousins in the right corridor, then returned twice more by routes that did not match the first, leaving scuffed prints where he wanted eyes to follow.
Near midnight, the message Ziyan wanted began to breathe through the servants' lanes: Vice Minister Li would bring a packet at second bell to the annex for inspection—the sort of formal errand a cautious daughter makes when nobles are watching. The sort of errand that a cowardly knife loves.
Ziyan waited in the teahouse until the wet lamps along the Scholars' Quarter began to gutter. She wore rough blue instead of court violet, her hair in the plain knot of a clerk who expects to be ignored. The cicada bead she left on the table, its cold weight a promise to herself.
They reached the annex by the canal's black mirror. A thin red showed at the furnace gate like a heartbeat trying to hide. Scribes drifted past with armloads of old rosters and newer ledgers, their eyes red from smoke and righteousness. Jinrui's men were already in shadow—three on the roof where slate held snow like regret, two by the coal sheds, one at the waterline, a piece of darkness that had learned to float.
Li Qiang placed Ziyan a pace inside the furnace courtyard where the light thinned, then stepped away as if she were alone. Wei disappeared. Yufei leaned his shoulder to a post with the air of a man sheltering from bad weather, lashes beaded with wet.
The first hint was not sound but the feeling when air moves where it ought to hold still. Ziyan shifted a breath. An outline slid between two carts: thin, careful, a bow held low in the left hand as if the right were made for other work.
Wei's whisper came from no direction Ziyan could name. "Roofline, north corner."
A second shape, flatter and slower, crept along the eave as if the building were grass and he a cat who had trained himself not to purr. Jinrui's shadow on the highest ridge did not move. Snow slid from a slate and made a hush where it fell.
The first assassin waited until a clerk passed with a bundle large enough to hide a man twice his size. He lifted the bow. It was not aimed at Ziyan's chest where courage expects the blade, but at her thigh. A good archer knows a slow death buys more time.
The click of Li Qiang's knife on the bowstring sounded like the first clean note of a winter bell. Wood snapped; the arrow went sideways and bit a post meant for notices. Wei came up from the ground itself, a sweep at the ankles that would have taken a slower man. The archer twisted, roll-breaking, and a knife whispered from his sleeve.
It did not get far. Yufei's pry-bar took it out of the air with a sound like a drunk's laugh. The second man dropped from the roof behind Li Qiang with a cord in his hands and found nothing but Jinrui's knee. Slate rattled. Breath burst. The cord fell like a dead snake.
"Alive," Ziyan said, again, and the word cut every choice in the courtyard down to one.
The roof man tried to make an ending of his own and met two of Jinrui's men who had learned to pull breath back into a throat before it can be bitten through. The archer tried to grow wings and instead met Wei's elbow, which had none of a wing's mercy. Li Qiang took the cord and made it a bracelet. Snow melted where bodies struck stone.