Ziyan stepped to the archer. His eyes were close-set and clever. His hands had the thickened knuckles of a man who writes more than he farms. She crouched until he could see her face without lifting his head.
"You aimed low," she said, evenly. "Not mercy. Time."
He spat pink into the snow. "Orders."
"Whose." Not a question. A line to hold.
He smiled with two teeth more than he needed. "Silver's."
Wei's voice came hoarse. "Who paid."
"Silver," the man repeated, more careful now, as if tasting the word for poison. "And a letter. A bead for proof."
Ziyan opened her palm. The first cicada lay there, absurd in its small perfection. "Like this."
His eyes flinched. Not away—from it. Towards another in his sleeve he no longer had. A habit betrayed him. Yufei's bar flicked; a second bead fell to the snow with a soft knock. The same cut wings. The same old tail-stroke. Home.
"Names," Li Qiang said, and the steadiness in it was a mercy the man had not earned.
The archer hesitated. Men who sell their hands do not like to sell their tongues; a secret has more value unspent. But his breath was getting shallow, and the red in it was not silver. He looked at Ziyan's plain clerk's knot as if surprised to find no jewels. He looked at the annex where smoke wrote slow poetry against the night. Then he closed his eyes as if to put his face out of the room and said what his mouth had been taught.
"Li Shide."
The snow heard it first. Then Wei. Then Yufei. Li Qiang did not move.
"Say it again," Ziyan said softly, not leaning in, not pressing. Stillness draws more truth than steel.
"Li Shide," the man repeated. "Second Uncle. He does not pay with his hand. A steward does. A man named Wu. He liked the roof. He watched the first bead fall. Told us not to miss the second time."
"How did he call you," Yufei asked, quiet as ink on a dry brush. "What name."
"The Hall of Inner Bamboo," the archer said. "We go to the side gate. Sugar water on the sill means yes. Salt means wait. Today it was sugar."
Ziyan felt, absurdly, the memory of childhood sweets on a holiday her aunts had soured with talk. She let the feeling pass through her and out into the cold.
"Who told you I would be here," she asked.
He laughed then, small and mean. "Everyone. The city is not blind. A girl who loves records will come to see them burned."
Wei's knife made a noise inside his sheath and stopped. Li Qiang tightened the cord and lifted the man to sitting so the blood could run the right way and not the fatal one.
The roof man coughed. "We don't know faces," he whispered. "He wore his hat low. But he smelled like clove and old plum."
Madam Chen's perfume. Ziyan did not blink. She did not speak the name. People who carry fans into winter always make rooms smell like excuses.
"Take them," she said. "Jinrui will want the story before dawn. And a physician—not enough to ease, enough to keep talking."
Wei looked at her as if to measure whether the choice to keep them breathing would cost more later. Yufei nodded once, the acceptance of a man who no longer believed mercy and strategy were different tools.
They moved fast. Jinrui's men unmade the scene the way rain undoes a careless footprint. By the time the last ember in the furnace gate died to black, the courtyard was only a courtyard again. A clerk yawned; another complained about smoke beneath his breath; nobody noticed that the night had held its breath and let it go.
Back at the teahouse, Ziyan sat without remembering how she reached the chair. The bead sat again on the table where she had left it, now with its twin. She rested her fingertips against them. The lacquer was cool. The marks were exact. It would be satisfying to call the house a single mouth and be done.
"Li Shide," Wei said, tasting the name like a new blade.
"Or a name put on a blade to make it sell," Yufei countered. "Assassins do not love their patrons when the rope tightens. They love stories that put a higher roof between them and the gallows."
"Second Uncle owns the Hall of Inner Bamboo," Li Qiang said. "He likes sugar. He tells servants to sweeten tea before guests ask."
Ziyan's throat closed for the length of a breath and then loosened. "If it is a lie, it is a lie my father can easily correct in the morning by showing the steward alive and free of rope. If it is truth, he will do the same and call me mad. Either way, the Censorate will open its ears."
Wei's gaze cut to the door. "Then we move first."
"They are moving," Yufei said, and the way he turned his head told them he heard feet on the stair a heartbeat before the knock came.
Li Qiang reached the door and slid it open with his left hand, the right empty but ready. A junior runner stood there, soaked to the knees, eyes too wide and too proud for the hour.
"From the Censorate," he blurted. "A summons at first bell. All members of the Li household named in the Education ledgers to present for inquiry. Witnesses to be… to be Vice Minister Li and… and—" he checked the strip, swallowed—"and Steward Wu of the Hall of Inner Bamboo."
Ziyan's skin felt suddenly too tight for her bones. "Alive?"
"Yes, my lady," the boy said, scared of the word without knowing why. "He presented himself at the Censorate gate just now. Said he wished to… to cleanse his name."
Wei cursed once, quiet. Yufei closed his eyes and breathed through his nose, as if smelling for clove beneath wet wool. Li Qiang's jaw set.
Ziyan looked at the beads. Two small wings. One house. Too many hands.
"Second Uncle will weep," she said, voice level. "Steward Wu will tremble. Madam Chen will faint into a clean sleeve. My father will not change his breathing."
"And Prince Ning," Wei asked, "what does he do?"
Ziyan thought of the umbrella that tilted too precisely under the cypress, of a man who liked to let rivers choose their banks while he measured which stones would hold. "He watches," she said. "And waits to call it judgment."
She rose. The room swayed once and steadied. She tucked the beads into a small pouch and tied it with the careless knot thieves think means nothing.
"First bell," she said. "We dress the truth and bring it to a hall that prefers costumes."
Yufei reached for her sleeve and stopped before he touched it. "If the assassin lied—"
"Then someone coached him," Ziyan said. "And the lesson began long before tonight."
They did not sleep. When the dark began to thin to that weary color that pretends to be dawn, a drum sounded from the Censorate yard. The city shivered itself awake.
As Ziyan stepped into the cold, snow caught in her lashes like ash. She left it there. It felt honest.