By the second morning, the city had learned the sound of stones falling on its own heart.
No one flinched quite as high when the sky growled. Children timed their games between impacts. Merchants covered what remained of their stalls with woven mats and curses, as if that might teach the rocks manners. The law tablets in the granary square stood newly braced, fresh wooden props wedged against their backs like extra spines.
Ren the scribe had not slept. He moved from tablet to tablet with brush and knife, checking, recarving, adding names: Xu Min. The dead from the culvert raid. The steward from the temple, not dead, but listed under "Debts being paid."
Ziyan watched from the edge of the square, cloak still ash-stained from the night raid, hand twinging inside its bandage. People came to read. They traced characters with rough fingers. Some nodded. Some grumbled. One spat and walked away, but even he read first.
"It's holding," Shuye murmured beside her. "Not the stone. The… other thing."
"It will until it doesn't," Ziyan said. "And when it cracks, I want to see where and why."
Feiyan loitered at the base of a broken pillar, eyes apparently half-lidded with boredom. She was watching everything—the way groups formed and broke, who stayed near the tablets, who hovered near alleys, whose mouths moved in other people's ears.
"Luo's been quiet," she said. "Too quiet. Either he's run out of tricks or he's found one I haven't seen yet. I don't like either option."
"Wolves get tired too," Wei said, limping up with a bowl of something that claimed to be porridge. "Sometimes they just curl up somewhere and count their missing teeth."
"Wolves can count?" Shuye asked.
"Their quartermasters can," Wei said.
Han approached, a line between his brows deeper than usual. "Their stones haven't hit inside the last two hours," he said. "All back to the walls. As if they wanted to make a point, then stopped."
"The point landed," Ziyan said. She flexed her fingers. "Now he'll see what it bought him."
Han snorted. "A city that swears at falling rocks, apparently."
"Better that than silence," she said.
They convened the council in the examination hall again, though half the windows now had cracks like spiderwebs. Snow crept through and melted where it fell, leaving small, defeated puddles.
Ren read numbers. Fewer new fevers. Two deaths in the temple, neither from knives. One from arrow. One from the strain of dragging too many buckets.
"Put his name down under the law about stolen grain," the old healer said when she heard. "He died proving the opposite."
Shuye reported on the walls, the drains, the culvert now filled with rubble and two very unfortunate infiltrators. Chen Rui updated them on the western ditches, where refugees still trickled in, faces raw from cold, stories rawer.
"They come because of you," she said to Ziyan. "Not because Yong'an is safe. They know better. They heard what you carved. They want to live in a place where if they die, it's not for someone else's secret."
Zhao lounged as if his bones had never learned worry. "And here I thought they came for my rustic charm," he said.
"You keep my law in your quarter," Ziyan replied. "That's charm enough."
They argued, again, about food and watch schedules and whether to send more runners to the south to beg grain from towns that might by now answer to Xia. Every time someone suggested surrender, three others answered before Ziyan had to.
"That's new," Wei muttered afterward, leaning his head against a cracked pillar. "People telling each other not to give up before you get the chance."
"It can turn," Feiyan said. "Two bad days in a row and those voices will swap places."
"I know," Ziyan said.
Han looked at her over the rim of his cup. "You don't have to carry all of this on your own spine," he said gruffly.
Ziyan glanced at the tablets. "I wrote my name at the top," she said. "That's the foolish part. In big characters. Hard to pretend I'm only a clerk now."
Ren sniffed. "Someone had to. If you'd left it blank, the first man with a brush and no conscience would have signed for you."
They broke up just before noon, each dragging their bundle of worries back to wall, square, temple.
Ziyan climbed the north tower again, more out of habit than strategy. The river lay dull and gray, thin ice clinging to the edges like cheap jewelry. Xia's camp breathed beyond it, its movements smaller today, more contained.
Feiyan watched the distant lattice of tents. "They're thinking," she said.
"About what?" Wei asked.
"Whether we're worth the price," she said. "Or whether they are."
As if in answer, a horn sounded—not the harsh, goad-to-charge note, but a strange, wavering call. Another answered it further down the line. Along the Xia front, flags shifted. A small section of their line stepped forward with something pale raised between spears.
"A banner," Li Qiang said slowly. "White. Or snow, pretending to be cloth."
"Surrender?" Wei said. "Theirs or ours?"
Feiyan's hand had already gone to her knife. "No one hangs out a white scrap this late in a siege without wanting to talk," she said. "Or lie."
An arrow arced up from the Xia side. Its fletching was dyed bright green. It thudded into the parapet not far from Ziyan's boot, quivering, carrying a tiny cylinder of bamboo bound under its head.
Li Qiang's sword moved in the same moment, cutting the shaft so the arrow fell harmlessly inside.
Ziyan bent and plucked the message free.
"Be careful," Han grunted. "Could be something clever. Or something stupid that hurts anyway."
She unrolled the sliver.
The script was familiar now.
To the one your people call Lady and your enemies call traitor, it began.