Yong'an's weather had not improved.
Rain needled the square as Ziyan, Li Qiang, Han, Zhao, Wei and Ren huddled under the eaves with the latest scraps of silk spread between them. Pigeon droppings decorated the beam above Ren's head; he ignored them with the focus of a man used to indignity.
"Ji Lu," Ren said, tapping the first hand.
"Wang Yu, by the ink," Ziyan said, tracing the second.
Messages had multiplied lately: Ren Kanyu's cautious updates from the Xia side; Li Shi's weary reports of a front held together with rope; Sun Wei's humorous complaints about fish; Feiyan's rare, sharp notes from shadows between courts. Now these two: warning of a move on Haojin, naming Du, naming the word "sedition."
"The Regent wants Haojin to crack," Han said. "Shears to test the cloth."
"More than that," Ziyan murmured. "He wants us to defend it with steel. Give him a story to tell Xia."
Wei swore under his breath. "We can't just leave Sun Wei and the others," he said. "Du's men will push. Someone will push back."
"Du didn't sound eager to smash bowls," Zhao observed. "If Ji Lu bothers to name him, he thinks the man can hesitate."
"Hesitation breaks under orders," Han said.
Ziyan looked out at the rain-slick square. At the tablets, their carved words shining dark.
"Inside the door," she said.
Ren glanced up. "What?"
"Du's terms in Haojin," she said. "He let our law stand inside Lin Chang's hall as long as we didn't nail it to the public walls. He drew a line. We stepped back from it. Now Zhang wants that line moved."
"He'll order Du to cross the threshold," Chen Rui said. She had slipped in from the fog, cloak dripping. "Force him to break his own bargain."
"Du can obey the ink," Li Qiang said, "or the line he drew with Sun Wei. Not both."
"Zhang is betting he'll choose ink," Zhao said. "And that we'll choose fury."
Ziyan's hand closed around the jade ring at her thumb until its character bit skin.
"We will not give him his neat story," she said. "Not on his timing."
Wei stared. "So we let Du smash the tablets?" he demanded. "Let him drag Sun Wei out by the hair while we sit here carving new ones?"
Ziyan shook her head. "We send a different story," she said. "Before Du arrives."
Ren's brush hovered. "Dictate," he said.
"Not to Du," she said. "To Sun Wei."
She took the scrap, the ink cold in her fingers.
Hold the hall, she wrote. Hold the law inside. Do not fight Du in the square. If he crosses the door with steel, weigh him as you would any other man. Require witness. Require record. Make him choose in front of his own. If he smashes the tablets, let him. Then carve new ones on the broken pieces when he leaves. The Road is not stone.
She paused, then added:
If lives are the price of one stubborn line, do not pay it for pride. Save it for a place we choose. You are Road work, not bait.
Wei read over her shoulder and scowled. "You're telling him to yield," he said.
"I'm telling him to bend," she answered. "Zhang wants us stiff. Stiff things snap. I would rather be the rope that frays and ties again."
Han grunted approval. "Walls are not only stone," he said. "Sometimes they are habits. Break the right ones."
Li Qiang's eyes flicked to hers, dark and steady. "And when Haojin sends its refugees?" he asked. "When Du decides even a bent hall is too much and drives them toward us?"
"Then we open the gate," she said. "And we put bowls in their hands and law in their ears. Zhang thinks he pushes pieces on a board. Let him. He forgets we stand on the table."
Ren snorted softly. "He'd call that treason against furniture," he said, but his brush flew, copying the message.
"Title for the tablet?" he asked as the pigeon fidgeted in his hand.
Ziyan watched the bird's restless wings.
"On Traps," she said. "And on who chooses which teeth to step between."
Ren grinned and tied the silk.
The pigeon shot up into a sky heavy with other people's plans.
Below, in Yong'an's square, children splashed in the puddles and scolded one another for getting mud on the sparrow carved by the gate.
Far south, in Haojin, Captain Du watched rain bead on Lin Chang's eaves and felt a weight in his pocket: a sealed order with the Regent's sharp-edged characters, and beneath it the memory of a man who had once stood in another hall of ash and heard a different kind of law.
Between the two weights, something in him shifted.
The Road Under Heaven ran through that space too, unseen, waiting to see which way he would lean when hoofbeats and ink came due.