The road is barely a road, North of Lion’s Den, just a scraped ribbon of compacted dirt winding through scrub. The ground is littered with the small trash of war: the ring from a harness, bent out of shape like a mouth after a punch; a snapped arrow shaft half-buried in dust; a sun-bleached boot lying on its side with the toe pointed toward nothing.

  Two riders move through it like they are the only sane people left in a world that has misplaced sanity as a concept.

  Amar looks like she belongs anywhere and hates everywhere. Even on horseback, there is a posture to her disdain—shoulders loose, gaze hard. Her cloak is dark, dust-ground at the hem, and the wind keeps trying to pull it off her like it’s doing her a favor. Meice rides beside her. Her hair is braided tight, not for beauty, but because loose things get grabbed.

  Amar points with two fingers. “This way. It’s the sensible route.”

  Meice turns her head slowly, like she’s trying to see the sense in the landscape and finding none. “There is no sensible route.”

  “There is always a sensible route,” Amar says, tone clipped.

  Meice snorts. “No. There are only routes that kill you slower.”

  Amar’s eyes narrow. “Stop narrating the misery.”

  Meice’s smile is small and sharp. “I’m not narrating. I’m witnessing. This is a public service.”

  Amar laughs. “A public service would be you falling silent.”

  Meice spreads her hands, palms up. “And deprive the world of my valuable commentary? Cruel.”

  They ride on, the wind sawing at them, the sky too wide—an enormous, indifferent dome stretched over everything like a lid.

  Then they crest a shallow ridge and the land opens into a bruise.

  A Hluay caravan lies torn open below them.

  Wagons are splintered and splayed like broken ribs. Canvas flaps in the wind like torn skin. Grain has spilled from sacks and gone dark where blood soaks it, turning the ground into a grotesque meal. There are bodies in the mess—some facedown, some twisted in positions that suggest the last thing they understood was surprise. A horse lies on its side, eyes glossy, legs still harnessed to a wagon that no longer resembles anything useful.

  At the edges of the wreckage, Yohazatz cavalry still prowls. They move like scavengers on horseback, quick and practiced, picking valuables off corpses. One rider lifts a handful of coins and bites one like it’s meat. Another tugs an earring free hard enough to take a chunk of ear with it, then tosses the bloody bit aside.

  Amar’s horse shifts under her, sensing her intent. Meice’s gaze flicks across the riders, counting, measuring.

  Amar says, “They’re still here.”

  Meice says, “They never leave food unattended.”

  Amar’s mouth tightens. “We chase them off. Quick.”

  Amar lifts her bow, arrow already nocked. She aims for horses. The arrow flies and bites into a flank. A horse screams and rears. Its rider curses and nearly falls. Another horse spooks at the sound and sidesteps, knocking its rider’s knee into a wagon splinter with a crack that is almost comedic.

  The Yohazatz turn their heads, see two riders with purpose and the posture of people who do not negotiate with scavengers. For a moment, one of them considers staying. His grin widens, daring.

  Amar draws again and plants an arrow in the ground near his horse’s hoof, close enough to make the horse dance. The rider’s grin falters. He spits, says something insulting, then peel away.

  They laugh as they retreat. They spit over shoulders and toss a stolen scarf. One of them calls something about “sun-god puppies” and “pretty eyes,” and Amar’s face goes hard enough to crack stone.

  They vanish into scrub like jackals that know they’ll eat again tomorrow.

  The battlefield quiets enough to hear flies working.

  Amar rides down first, scanning for movement. Meice follows, eyes catching on details—footprints, dragged marks, the angle of a broken axle. The scent is thick: blood, spilled grain, horse sweat.

  They find a living survivor almost by accident, because he doesn’t look alive at first.

  A Behani monk sits beside the last intact wagon wheel, dust-caked, robe torn at one shoulder. His face is calm in the way of someone who has already made peace with the idea that the universe is a cruel place. His hands are folded in his lap, fingers stained with dirt. A shallow cut crosses his cheekbone, already crusted.

  Beside him stands a donkey who looks unimpressed with mortality.

  Its ears flick back and forth as if listening for better news. It is saddled with two large baskets, covered with cloth and tied with rope. The rope is neat and the cloth is patched, but clean enough to be suspicious.

  Amar’s gaze goes to the baskets immediately. “What’s in those.”

  The monk glances at her, then at Meice, and something in his eyes shifts when he sees her face—recognition, or at least the recognition of shared altitude.

  Meice switches into Behani. Her voice changes cadence—softer consonants, sharper endings, the language of high plateaus and thin air. It feels like a door opening into an older life, and for half a heartbeat she looks younger.

  She bows to him—respectful, careful.

  The donkey brays right over the gesture.

  It is loud, rude, and timed with the precision of an experienced heckler.

  Meice freezes mid-bow, blinking.

  Amar mutters, in the Moukopl tongue, “The donkey has more courage than most generals.”

  Meice straightens slowly, still in Behani, and says to the donkey, sweetly, “If you do that again, I will eat you.”

  The donkey flicks an ear, offended.

  The monk’s mouth twitches. “It does that to everyone,” he says in Behani. His accent is correct. His tone is steady. He sounds like a man who prays for a living, not one who uses prayer as a costume.

  Meice’s relief is visible. “A real monk,” she says, the words half reverent, half sarcastic. “Thank the Law.”

  Amar, who doesn’t understand Behani, hears the tone anyway. “What are you saying?”

  Meice answers in the Moukopl tongue without looking away from the monk. “I’m saying I’m glad you’re not an assassin.”

  The monk raises his brows slightly. “Are assassins common in your travels?”

  Meice smiles. “Common enough that I now judge holiness by whether it speaks the right syllables.”

  Amar’s hand rests near her weapon. “Should we check what he’s carrying?”

  Meice keeps speaking in Behani, because it feels like home on her tongue even here. “Where are you headed?” she asks the monk. “What does our war look like through your holy eyes?”

  The monk glances at the dead around them. His gaze is honest. “War looks like hunger pretending to be politics,” he says. “And politics pretending not to be hunger.”

  Meice’s eyes narrow in appreciation. “Good answer.”

  He inclines his head. “I travel to bring messages. Scripture. Aid, when I have it.” His fingers tap lightly against his knee. “I learned to survive by looking unimportant.”

  Meice’s mouth quirks. She asks another question, then another, but her curiosity is only half the purpose. The other half is that the sound of Behani in her own mouth makes something ache.

  “I want to go home,” Meice says in Behani.

  The monk’s eyes soften, but not with pity. With understanding.

  “Come back with me,” he offers, calm and kind. “The road is ugly, but it goes home.”

  Meice’s throat tightens.

  She looks at Amar.

  It is a small glance, but it carries weight: partnership, obligation, the dull chain of survival that sometimes feels like loyalty and sometimes like a sentence.

  Amar’s gaze is on the horizon, scanning, always scanning, as if the world might stab them from the sky.

  Meice answers the monk with a single word.

  “Eventually.”

  They escort the monk to the Hluay camp.

  The monk speaks as they walk—gentle, plausible, almost boring, which makes Amar suspicious and Meice oddly comforted. He talks about temples turned into granaries, about villages emptied by marching armies, about how compassion is not a feeling but a practice that must be performed even when you hate the people in front of you.

  Amar listens with half an ear. “If he starts preaching at me,” she mutters, “I will throw him under his donkey.”

  Meice answers in Behani, smiling at the monk as she says it, “She threatens animals as a hobby.”

  The monk glances at Amar. “Does she always look like she’s about to bite someone.”

  Meice’s smile widens. “Only when she’s awake.”

  The donkey keeps trying to veer off toward weeds, tugging the rope, angling its head like it has personal beliefs about botany. Meice tugs it back and scolds it.

  “You are walking into a war camp,” she tells it. “Show some discipline.”

  The donkey brays in response, loud and disdainful.

  Amar says, “If you start teaching animals, I’m leaving you here.”

  Meice pats the donkey’s neck. “It’s learning faster than half the Moukopl court.”

  Amar huffs. “Everything learns faster than the court.”

  ...

  The Hluay camp appears like a bruise on the land—rows of tents, stacked supplies, smoke rising from cookfires, guards posted with stiff alertness. The air smells of salt and wet wind even here.

  Guards approach at the perimeter. They eye the monk, the donkey, the baskets. Their suspicion is sharp, but Amar’s presence is sharper. She doesn’t need to show a seal; she simply exists like authority, and most men flinch.

  They let them pass with grudging permission.

  The monk thanks them politely and slips away into a quieter area behind the supply lines.

  “Come,” Amar says Meice. “We have better things to do than babysit a donkey.”

  In the shadow of a tent, the monk kneels beside the donkey.

  His movements are measured. Unhurried. He unties the basket cloths with fingers that do not tremble. He opens the lids.

  And out climb two figures, cramped and expressionless, like cats exiting a box they were never supposed to fit inside.

  Ruo blinks once, eyes flat. Ran stretches his shoulders with a quiet crack, as if the basket is just another inconvenient hiding place in a long career of inconvenient hiding places.

  The monk’s posture changes as if a string inside him is cut and a different puppet stands up. His calm turns sharp.

  His eyes, no longer soft, no longer kind, gleam with serene menace.

  ...

  At night, the tents settle into their lines like tired teeth. Cookfires collapse into red eyes.

  Behind the supply lines, where shadows mind their business, Black-Salt moves like a quiet illness wearing a robe.

  The donkey stands a few paces away, tethered to a peg, chewing with the slow contempt of a creature that has learned humans are temporary. Its ears swivel as if it is listening for the moment the world decides to become loud again.

  Ruo and Ran step out into the dark beside the monk, stretching their legs with minimal complaint.

  Black-Salt murmurs, almost conversational, “No screaming.”

  Ran’s mouth barely moves. “You say that like we’re fond of it.”

  Ruo lifts a hand to adjust her sleeve. “And yet Qin finds a way.”

  Black-Salt’s gaze flicks to the donkey. “Even the donkey knows better.”

  The donkey brays once, softly, as if offering its opinion.

  Ran leans close to Ruo and whispers, “It’s judging us.”

  Ruo slips into the wagon lines first, moving with the loose posture of a laborer going to piss in the dark. He carries a small blade tucked up her sleeve—more tool than weapon. His hand finds harness straps by touch. Leather gives under steel with a tiny sound like a sigh. One strap, then another, cut in places where the damage won’t be noticed until weight is applied.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Ran follows behind, complementing. He kneels by a wheel hub, fingers working in the shadows. He presses a carefully chosen stone into a seam where it will jam only after the wheel turns a few rotations—far enough to feel safe, close enough to fail at the worst possible moment. He smears a thin layer of ash over the disturbance like makeup over bruising.

  Black-Salt moves to the grain stores. The sacks are stacked under rough shelters, guarded in theory by men whose job is to stay awake. In practice, the guards lean on their spears like bored children leaning on brooms. One snores with his chin tucked to his chest. Another watches the fire like it’s telling him a story.

  Black-Salt approaches with the weary gait of a monk. His robe hangs loose. His expression is mild. People see mild and think harmless.

  He murmurs an apology as he passes a guard. “Forgive me. Nature calls.”

  The guard grunts, waves him on, too tired to care.

  Behind the sacks, Black-Salt opens a small pouch. Salt and damp mixed into a paste—enough to spoil grain stores by encouraging rot, enough to make flour turn bitter, enough to make bread sit heavy in the stomach.

  He presses the paste onto seams of sacks, working it in where hands will later grab, where moisture will later spread. He does not need to ruin everything. He needs to ruin enough that the camp begins to doubt its own inventory.

  A horse nickers nearby. Black-Salt pauses, lifts his head, and murmurs something that sounds like prayer.

  Black-Salt steps back into the open and looks toward the darker ridge beyond the camp.

  “Signal,” he says.

  Ruo produces a tiny bundle of oil-soaked cloth and a flint. The flame they light is controlled. A small tongue of fire that flickers three times, pauses, then flickers twice.

  Black-Salt murmurs, “If the wind carries it too far—”

  The fire dies quickly, smothered in a folded cloth like a secret shut back into a mouth.

  They wait.

  Minutes pass. The camp breathes. Horses shift. A guard stands, scratches his ass, and sits again.

  Then—movement.

  Shapes slide out of the dark.

  Hui arrives first, ash-gray braid tight against her skull, eyes calm. She doesn’t greet. Her gaze lifts to the sky, reads the wind by the way smoke drifts off a cookfire, and her jaw tightens.

  Qin comes in beside her, shoulders rolling as if he’s loosening for a dance. He grins—too bright for this dark—and immediately looks at the donkey.

  “Oh good,” Qin whispers, “we brought the war machine.”

  The donkey flicks an ear.

  Qin leans closer, as if confiding. “You smell like oats.”

  Hui, without looking at him, says, “Stop talking. Your breath is loud.”

  Qin’s grin widens. “My breath is loud? Hui, we’re standing in an enemy camp.”

  “That’s why,” Hui replies, finally turning her head. “Breathe less and die.”

  Qin opens his mouth to argue and then, because he enjoys living, closes it again.

  Gao bounds in last. He looks delighted—like someone invited to a festival instead of sabotage. He sees the donkey and almost squeals.

  “My donkey!” he whispers too loud, the words bursting out like joy has nowhere to go.

  Ran’s hand shoots out and smacks the back of his head.

  Gao rubs his skull, offended. “What? It’s a good donkey.”

  Ruo says, deadpan, “It’s the only one here with restraint.”

  Black-Salt’s gaze sweeps them. “Work.”

  Qin sighs theatrically. “No reunion? No hugging? No ‘I missed you, you flammable bastard’?”

  Hui checks a pouch at her belt. “I missed you. Now shut up.”

  Qin looks at her as if moved by poetry. “Thank you!”

  They split without further ceremony.

  Hui moves to the horse lines and does something so small it’s almost insulting: she loosens a knot on a lead rope, then reties it wrong. One horse will slip free at dawn. One will start a chain reaction of spooked bodies and snapping tethers.

  Qin moves to a stack of spare wagon wheels and uses a blade to score a deep line in a crucial spoke. Not enough to break immediately. Enough to break under load. Enough to send a wagon tipping at the moment someone believes they’re escaping.

  Gao crawls under a supply cart and jams a wedge into its axle housing with the earnest concentration of a child building a toy. He whispers to himself, “Cripple function. Cripple function,” like a mantra.

  The Cinder Court moves through the camp like a disease: quiet, efficient, unnoticed—until the fever hits.

  By the time the sky begins to pale at the eastern edge, they are gone back into shadow. The donkey remains, chewing, as if nothing happened.

  Morning arrives.

  The camp wakes and discovers the sabotage in the ugliest way possible: not all at once, but in a cascade of humiliations.

  A wagon driver climbs onto his seat, slaps the reins, and feels the harness give.

  The strap snaps with a bright sound. The horse lunges, half-free, panicking. The wagon lurches sideways, wheel biting a rut—and then the hub jams with a hidden stone Ran planted. The wheel locks. The wagon tips. Sacks spill. Grain bursts onto dirt like a wound opening.

  A man shouts. Another shouts back.

  Horses pick up the panic like it’s contagious. One breaks free—Hui’s loosened knot doing its quiet work—and bolts through the lines, knocking into tether ropes, snapping them. Another horse rears, hooves striking a man in the chest. He goes down without noise, the breath punched out of him like a confession forced out too quickly.

  Officers run toward the commotion and find more.

  Grain sacks are damp in places they shouldn’t be. Flour smells wrong. A quartermaster sticks his hand into a sack, pulls it out, and stares at the paste clinging to his fingers as if it’s betrayal made physical.

  Men begin to pack in clumps. An escape disguised as “tactical withdrawal.”

  A captain screams, “Hold the line!” and no one knows which line he means.

  A lieutenant tries to mount his horse and discovers the saddle girth has been cut. He hits the ground hard enough to crack his pride. He scrambles up, face red, and screams at a subordinate.

  And then, as if the world is not satisfied with internal collapse, an external answer arrives.

  From the scrub beyond the camp, a thunder of hooves. A flash of movement too coordinated to be panic.

  Yohazatz cavalry slams into the chaos like a hammer into a cracked bowl.

  Not a glorious charge, no banners of romance. An ugly capture net. They don’t aim for heroic kills. They cut exits. They herd men like animals into narrow corridors between wagons and supply stacks. They use the camp’s own disorder as a weapon, turning fleeing bodies into obstacles for the next fleeing bodies.

  A Hluay soldier runs with his arms full of stolen food and gets lassoed off his feet. He hits dirt and screams as the rope tightens around his ribs. A rider drags him a few paces just to make the point, then dismounts and ties him like a parcel.

  Another man tries to fight and meets a spearpoint that slides into his belly with intimate ease. He drops, hands pressed to the wound as if he can hold his life in. The cavalry passes over him without looking back.

  Shouts rise. Steel flashes. Horses scream. The air fills with dust and terror.

  In the center of it, Jin Na rides. His posture is controlled. His one good eye takes in the scene with sharp appetite. His soldiers follow his signals.

  Several Hluay soldiers are captured alive, and in the confusion, Amar is taken too.

  It happens fast. She moves through the camp trying to stabilize, to gather, to stop the fracture—because she is the kind of person who hates losing control more than she hates pain. A Yohazatz rider sees her, recognizes value in posture, in armor, in the way men around her hesitate as if she matters.

  So they snatch her.

  A lasso loops. A horse lunges. Amar’s body jerks as the rope bites into her arm. She slashes at it, but the pull is stronger than her blade. She hits the ground hard, rolls, comes up with murder in her eyes—then a boot stamps her wrist and her weapon skitters away.

  Two riders pin her. A third binds her hands. Their movements are efficient, almost bored.

  Amar’s face stays flat. But her jaw clenches once, hard enough to crack a tooth.

  At the edge of the camp, Meice sees it.

  She sees Amar go down. She sees the rope, the hands, the binding.

  For half a heartbeat, Meice’s brain does the sick, clean arithmetic of consequence.

  She had one job.

  The realization is brief and poisonous.

  Meice curses herself viciously. She spits once into the dust as if trying to spit the failure out of her body.

  Then she moves.

  She steals a horse and grabs a tether, yanks hard enough to burn her palm, swings up bareback because there is no time for saddle politeness. The horse dances, startled, and she digs her heels in with a hissed command that is half threat, half plea.

  She rides hard, reckless, teeth clenched, mind running faster than the horse.

  “Don’t be stupid,” she tells herself.

  “Too late,” she answers herself.

  The world narrows to dust, hooves, and the sight of Amar being dragged toward the capture knot like a prize.

  Meice leans forward, hair whipping, eyes burning. She aims for speed, for angle, for the gap between riders. Her hand goes to her weapon. Her body prepares for impact.

  She reaches the capture zone—

  …and is captured as well.

  ...

  Jin Na’s camp is a moving wound stitched into the earth: horses tethered in tight lines, saddles stacked like ribs, cookfires kept low because light is an invitation. The air tastes of churned dust and smoke. Somewhere beyond the pickets, the Hluay coastal wind drags salt inland and makes everything smell faintly like blood that has tried to become clean and failed.

  Captured men kneel in a rough crescent near a half-collapsed wagon that serves as a table. Their wrists are bound with rope that bites, their mouths dry, their eyes darting between riders the way prey looks for a hole in a fence that isn’t there. A few are bleeding from the capture—scrapes, split brows, the common taxes of being outnumbered. Amar sits among them with her spine straight, face unreadable, hands tied behind her back. Meice is nearby, jaw clenched.

  Jin Na watches them. He doesn’t pace. He doesn’t rant. He is not Linh, whose emotions flare like a torch thrown into a dry field. Jin Na is a quieter kind of fire: the kind that cooks you slowly.

  He sits on a low stool, elbow on knee, one good eye calm, the other a closed ruin that looks almost restful. His men stand behind him, silhouettes and weapons and patient breathing. A runner offers him water; he takes one sip, then hands it back.

  He speaks gently.

  “Where are the heirs?” he asks.

  One of the captured Hluay soldiers blinks rapidly, as if he misheard. “The—”

  Jin Na tips his head. “The imperial heirs,” he repeats, voice still mild. “The ones you stole.”

  The soldier swallows. “I don’t know.”

  Jin Na holds the silence for a moment, letting the phrase hang and rot.

  “Let’s try again,” he says. “Where are they?”

  “I don’t—” the man starts, and then stops because a soldier’s hand clamps his shoulder and squeezes just hard enough to make his body remember it has nerves.

  A prisoner is hauled forward and forced to kneel closer. Jin Na asks the question again. The answer comes out the same. A man behind Jin Na produces a short baton—wood wrapped in leather—and taps it against his own palm, almost thoughtful. Then he uses it as a tool for pain. The prisoner’s breath catches. Teeth grit. The body flinches and tries to fold away from the sensation and cannot.

  Jin Na watches. His face doesn’t change.

  Another prisoner is shown a small knife. The man talks faster. He says names. He says places. He says anything that might be traded for mercy.

  Jin Na’s gaze stays steady. “I didn’t ask what you hope is true,” he says. “I asked what is.”

  A third prisoner tries to bargain. “We can— we can help you. We can—”

  Jin Na smiles, small and cold. “You can help me by answering,” he says. “Do you know where they are?”

  “No.”

  The answer lands like a stone in a well. Nothing comes back.

  The bodies betray themselves anyway. One man soils himself. His comrades look away as if the stench is worse than the pain. Jin Na does not react.

  The problem is simple and maddening:

  They don’t know anything.

  Because there is nothing to know.

  Hostages that don’t exist cannot be located, no matter how patiently you rearrange someone’s ribs.

  Jin Na’s men begin to glance at one another. Confusion creeps in at the edges, the way cold creeps under a blanket.

  Jin Na notices. He raises a hand without looking back, and the movement freezes them.

  He leans forward slightly, voice still soft. “You are going to think,” he tells the prisoners, “that because you do not know, you are safe. That is a misunderstanding. You are not being punished for knowledge. You are being used for confirmation.”

  A prisoner whimpers. “Confirmation of what?”

  Jin Na’s smile doesn’t widen. “Of how much waste I am willing to tolerate before I adjust the plan,” he says.

  He gestures, and the questioning continues.

  Eventually, even his patience reaches its edge.

  His eye slides to Amar.

  “Bring her,” he says.

  Amar is dragged forward. Hands grip her arms and haul her into the center. The ropes are tight enough that her shoulders strain. She doesn’t stumble. She makes her captors work for every inch of humiliation.

  Jin Na studies her.

  “You,” he says. “You are not a quartermaster. Not a grunt. Not the kind of fool who carries letters either.”

  Amar says nothing.

  Meice watches, jaw set, eyes flicking between Jin Na and Amar with a contained violence that looks like it might sprout teeth.

  Jin Na rests his elbow on his knee again. “Who are you?” he asks.

  Amar’s mouth tightens.

  “I serve Linh,” she says.

  Jin Na’s brow lifts a fraction. “Serve,” he repeats. “How close?”

  Amar’s eyes do not move. “Close enough,” she says, and the words are deliberately dull.

  Jin Na watches her for a long moment, then asks, still calm, “Where are the heirs?”

  Amar’s nostrils flare once. “We don’t have any heirs,” she says.

  “That’s not what Pezijil says.”

  “Pezijil says whatever keeps it from tearing its own throat out,” Amar replies. There is something almost amused in her voice, a grim humor sharpened by exhaustion. “The Tepr queen arrived in the city before Linh could secure anything. We were thrown out long before any heir could be ‘taken.’”

  Jin Na’s eye narrows. “Where did you meet her?”

  Amar hesitates, and that hesitation is the only crack in her composure.

  “In the Imperial City,” she says finally.

  Jin Na’s expression remains almost unchanged—but doubt begins to seep in around the edges of his certainty, because Amar’s details have weight. They don’t smell like improvisation. They smell like someone reciting the sequence of a disaster that is still fresh enough to burn.

  He turns his gaze to Meice. “And you?” he asks.

  Meice smiles without warmth. “And me,” she says.

  “Tell me she lies.”

  Meice snorts. “Do I look like someone who volunteers to protect your feelings?”

  Jin Na’s mouth twitches. “You look like someone who enjoys being difficult.”

  “I enjoy being alive,” Meice replies.

  Jin Na’s voice stays even. “Where are the heirs?”

  Meice inhales, then lets it out slowly through her nose, as if restraining the urge to spit at him. “If you’re asking whether I have them hidden in my sleeve,” she says, “then I regret to inform you I have very small sleeves.”

  A few riders behind Jin Na chuckle—one quick, nervous laugh.

  Jin Na doesn’t smile. “This is not a comedy,” he says.

  Meice tilts her head. “War is always a comedy,” she says.

  Jin Na’s gaze sharpens. “Answer.”

  Meice’s sarcasm thins, revealing the carefulness underneath. “I don’t know where they are,” she says. “Because I don’t think they exist anymore.”

  The words are a knife thrown without flourish.

  A hush falls. Even the horses seem to lower their breath.

  Jin Na holds her gaze. “That’s a big claim.”

  “It’s an obvious one,” Meice says. “I have an idea of what kind of person this Tepr queen is because my previous boss used to spy on her. She wouldn’t leave potential threats around.”

  Jin Na leans back slowly, the way a man does when his thoughts rearrange into a different shape.

  He looks at Amar again, then at Meice, then at the ordinary prisoners whose bodies keep insisting on their ignorance.

  His doubts rise enough to become action.

  He stands.

  “Enough,” he says, and the interrogators pause immediately, hands halting mid-motion.

  Jin Na turns toward the darker part of the camp where a few shadows stand too still to be normal soldiers. “Hui, Black-Salt” he calls.

  The two figures emerge.

  Jin Na’s voice is controlled. “Go to the Imperial City,” he says. “Find the truth.”

  They leave before dawn.

  ...

  Hui and Black-Salt move through the Imperial City, disguised as a courier with a bent back and a monk with his head bowed. Their clothes are stained. Their faces are made forgettable with dust and posture. They pass burned doorways, cracked courtyards, banners hanging like skin. The smell of smoke is everywhere.

  They walk with the confidence of people who belong nowhere and therefore are questioned by no one. They move through ruined corridors where servants would usually be.

  They reach the sealed palace wing that had been repurposed as the selection hall.

  The doors are shut again now, but the hinges bear fresh marks—recent use. The corridor outside is quiet.

  Inside, the room holds stale air, dust in sunbeams, cushions overturned and crushed. A broken screen lies like a fallen banner. The silence is thick enough to be accusatory.

  Black-Salt moves like a priest reading a shrine for sin.

  He kneels near a dark stain on the floor—not blood fresh, but blood that has dried into wood grain like a secret set into the structure. He leans closer and finds something small near the edge of a cushion.

  A piece of ear.

  Dried. Torn. The bite marks visible in the ragged curve.

  Small. Intimate. Petty in a way battle rarely is.

  He lifts it carefully between two fingers.

  Hui’s gaze stays on the room. “They fought,” she says softly. “No servants to stop them. No rules. Silk animals.”

  Hui crosses to a corner where the floorboards look slightly cleaner, as if someone tried too hard to scrub. She squats, presses her palm to the wood, then to her nose. The smell is faint but there—gunpowder residue, old smoke, something oily.

  She stands and moves toward the courtyard burn site where bodies were supposedly disposed—where “servants” and debris were allegedly cleaned away in the chaos of kidnapping.

  The courtyard is too watched. Statues stare down with blind eyes. The ground is blackened, scattered with ash. The burn pit has been disturbed and cleaned and disturbed again, as if someone couldn’t decide whether evidence should look obvious or invisible.

  Hui kneels near a crack in the stone and pries loose a shard of half-melted jade.

  Green, glossy in spots where heat kissed it. The carving is delicate—courtwork, not battlefield charm. Too personal to be trash.

  She turns it in her fingers. “Not a soldier’s, or a servant’s,” she murmurs.

  Black-Salt steps closer, holding the bitten ear. The two pieces of evidence sit in their hands like matched teeth.

  “No kidnapping,” Hui says quietly.

  They reconstruct without speaking for a while, moving through the room again as if walking backward through time.

  A sealed hall. No servants. Heirs arguing. Fighting. Ear bitten. Blood on wood. Doors open without ceremony. Gunfire in controlled rhythm. Bodies gathered. Burned with other dead. A talisman falls into ash, missed by the hurried cleaning.

  The lie collapses under its own neatness, because kidnapping is messy and this is tidy.

  By the time they return to Jin Na’s camp, the day is sagging toward dusk. The smoke from earlier sabotage still hangs in the air in thin bruises. Captives sit bound, exhausted into silence.

  Jin Na stands when he sees them. He does not ask for greetings. He does not waste language on politeness.

  Hui steps forward, places the jade shard in his palm.

  Black-Salt places the bitten ear beside it.

  Jin Na looks down.

  For a moment, he says nothing. His face holds the stillness of a man whose last hope is being strangled by facts.

  Then Hui speaks, calm as a report, cruel as truth. “No servants,” she says. “A sealed hall. Controlled execution. Burn site staged to erase them.”

  Black-Salt’s voice is almost gentle. “The heirs are not taken,” he adds. “They are gone.”

  The words settle like ash.

  Jin Na’s expression shifts into a cold, satisfied disgust. Betrayal finally matches the shape he expects the world to have. It is almost comforting in its ugliness.

  He spits, literally, into the dirt.

  “I never should have trusted a barbarian.”