Pezijil's market shakes itself awake like a warhorse. Brass gongs count the hours, hawkers cut the air into ribbons, knives kiss whetstones with a sound like small threats. Perfume hangs over fish-guts. Silk streams from poles like rivers that learned to stand upright. And in the churn of it, people notice the woman who moves as if wind made an agreement with her spine.

Naci Khan wears no crown, only a plain felt hat and a braid weighted with bone. It is enough. Stall-keepers smell status the way wolves smell rain. They surge.

"Wind-Khan! Look here—daggers that fold like apologies."

"Majesty of the north, crossbow bolts that match your color!"

"General, a stallion, salt-flat bred, never tires of running!"

Her three shadows glide a step ahead and half a step behind, the cordon that keeps the world from bruising itself on her.

"No daggers today," Fol says, palm up, cool as shade.

"We don't need bolts," Borak adds, eyes bright. "Besides, that color turns her enemies nervous."

"We sell the horses, dumbass," Jinhuang says. "Who do you think breeds those stallions?"

The crowd laughs. The sellers try again with bowls, saddles, jars. The warriors parry every offer. Naci accepts praise and dust in the same breath, pausing to weigh a jar's heft, to tap a saddle's nail-head with one knuckle like a drummer keeping the army's heart on time. She buys nothing.

Fol and Jinhuang orbit each other like blades left on the same table. He walks straight, no wasted sway. She drifts, shoulders loose, eyes always a finger from rolling. They collide at the edges.

"Your stance droops," he observes.

"Your face droops," she answers without looking at him.

"Faces have nothing to do with swords."

"True. Yours would lose without one."

"Mine has never needed help."

"Oh? I thought your mother braided your first victory into your hair so you wouldn't forget it was borrowed."

Borak snorts. Naci does not rebuke; she looks amused, the way a falcon looks amused at a field full of rabbits. She throws oil on the fire with two words: "He's right."

Jinhuang's head turns sharp. "About what?"

"Your stance," Naci says, considering a spool of thread fine as spider legs. "You give away the kill a heartbeat early. Watch Fol. He wastes nothing."

Jinhuang smirks at Fol. "I will waste you last."

"Learn to waste properly first," he says.

They reach the porcelain quarter where light turns thoughtful. Kiln smoke drifts sweet and mineral. Naci's feet slow without thinking. Half-hidden behind a beaded curtain and two potted pines stands the shop she remembers: snow caught in solid form and taught to act like clay.

Eight years have made the place larger. The merchant's new sign glows with careful gold. The door chimes a thin music as they enter. Shelves rise with plates so thin the sun shows through them, cups with rims like winter, a tea boat etched in a pattern that can only be read by steam.

The merchant appears—older, richer, posture humbler than his success requires. He recognizes Naci and composes himself quickly into someone who will not gush. He bows. "Great Khan."

She touches the rim of a fluted cup, testing the life in it. "Your snow still falls."

"It falls where you let it," he replies.

Borak leans close to a tray with cranes painted so delicately the birds almost hop from the glaze. "If I breathe wrong, they fly away."

"They fly at a certain note," the merchant says, pleased. "But only for old men who cannot help humming in their sleep."

"Then Fol will never see it," Jinhuang says.

"Niece," Naci murmurs, driftwood calm.

"What? I am encouraging him to age."

Naci drifts from case to case like someone walking a battlefield after winter. She picks up a cup, sets it down. Lifts a tea caddy, listens to porcelain talk to her blood, shakes her head. The merchant trails without hovering. Time passes. The market outside continues to roar like the sea.

Jinhuang's stomach growls like a polite tiger. Fol hears it.

"You sound stupid," he says.

"You sound boring," she answers.

"Boredom is a kind of fullness. You should try it."

"Come closer and I will."

Borak coughs into a fist to hide a laugh. Naci sighs, affectionate, exasperated, entertained. She fishes in her sash and produces a small leather purse.

"Food," she says, dropping the purse into Fol's hand. "Two bowls for me. Three if it smells good. Take her."

"I can walk myself," Jinhuang says.

"You can," Naci agrees, eyes on a tea set with a lid carved in the quiet geometry of falling frost. "But watching you and Fol negotiate noodles will teach him patience or get him killed. Either entertains me."

Borak bounces on his heels like a boy who hears drums. "Let me come," he pleads, meaning: let me watch them attempt to murder each other with chopsticks. "I have a scholarly interest."

"You will stay," Naci says, not looking up. "If they die, I will need a witness I trust."

"We can bring back pieces," Jinhuang offers. "Fol's best side. His back."

"I have no bad side," Fol says.

"Ha." She taps her knuckles lightly against his shoulder as if testing steak before purchase.

The merchant pretends to straighten a row of cups that already stand at attention. He is a man who knows when the room carries weapons.

Naci sets down the frost-lidded caddy and finally looks at Jinhuang proper. The aunt and the Khan look out of the same face for a heartbeat. Naci steps in close and bends her head; perfume of fired clay and kiln ash threads the air. She fits the whisper into the shell of Jinhuang's ear like a blade returning to a sheath.

"Behave," she says.

Jinhuang nods solemnly. She counts the coins in Fol's palm, counts the steps to the door, counts the lies she will tell. She does not plan to respect it.

They step from the cool porcelain hush into the market's clamor, and the noise climbs them like ivy. Smoke lifts from grills, sweet and greasy; knives drum bone; a butcher laughs the way a dog shows teeth. Steam bells from noodle vats.

"We find broth," Fol says. He moves as if the crowd were a chessboard already memorized.

"You would," Jinhuang says.

"Discipline for the stomach," he replies.

"Your stomach can enrol in the army if it wants." She points with her chin at skewers lacquered red.

"Smells good..."

"Finally, something we agree on," she says, and peels off toward the skewers.

He catches her sleeve with two fingers. She twists.

"Do not waste coin," Fol says.

"I never waste," she says.

They glide, collide, separate. A dumpling seller hustles them with a tray like an altar. Fol declines with a bow. Jinhuang accepts a sample, chews, and tells the woman three ways it could be improved; the woman laughs and tells Jinhuang three ways she could be improved.

They reach a noodle stall squatting under an awning patched with old campaign flags. The broth's surface trembles. A boy snaps dough into long strings.

"Thick," Jinhuang orders. "Spicy. Red."

"Thin," Fol tells the master. "Mild. Clear."

The bowls arrive. Jinhuang dumps a fist of chiles into Fol's with courtly grace.

He watches the red bloom like an omen. He plucks her chili oil and slides a clean spoon through it. She jabs a chopstick at his wrist. He turns the bowl; the chopstick spears air and a passerby's sleeve. The passerby yelps, sees who did it, yelps again and flees.

"Children," the noodle master mutters, not softly.

Fol takes a measured sip. Jinhuang slurps loudly. She squints. "Acceptable. For plain water."

He tilts his head. "Dogs who bark have no bite."

Her chopsticks stop. "Say that again."

"You are painted fear."

She sets the bowl down with a sound like a gauntlet. "Stand up."

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"I am already standing," he says. He is not, quite. He stands.

They shift. Fol's hands are empty and ready. Jinhuang's left heel kisses dirt.

The noodle master lifts his pot with both arms. "Not near the stove," he says. "Take your apocalypse elsewhere."

Jinhuang feints at Fol's center and flicks up instead, a knuckle to his chin. He answers with a shove that brushes her shoulder and moves her a pace, polite as an usher, absolute as a verdict.

"Better," she says, grinning.

She sweeps; he hops. He cuts in low; she frames his wrist with her chopsticks and almost makes a brace of his bones. He rolls with it, lets gravity pay the bill, and the two of them tangle into a sack of cabbages.

Bystanders scatter with pleased noises. This is the kind of trouble markets understand.

Jinhuang snatches a skewer from a fallen tray; Fol lifts a tray for a shield. The steel clacks on the bamboo. She stabs for his ear; he tilts; the skewer tattoos the tray with a neat hole. He whips the tray's edge and kisses her knee with it. She hisses and kicks the tray from his fingers; it frisbees into a pile of ginger.

"Pay for that!" the ginger man cries.

"Get lost," Jinhuang says without looking.

Fol catches her next thrust, spins her wrist, and sets her palm against his sternum. The push is modest. She uses the momentum to cartwheel over a basket, lands on the rim, and bows as if accepting applause.

"Showy," he says.

"Memorable," she answers, and springs.

They meet in the narrow lane like weather fronts. He parries with forearms. She crowds, laughs, snarls, changes height. A man carrying a stack of lacquered trays becomes an obstacle; she runs up the stack two steps before the man sits down without meaning to. Fol grabs a cloth banner from a rack and snaps it like a flag; it wraps her ankle; she rips free, leaves the banner to limp like a defeated speech.

"THIEF!"

The word knifes the lane. Both heads turn in the same cut.

A teenage girl splits the crowd as if she has been practicing since birth. Bare feet hammer stone. She has a leather purse clamped in one fist and Fol's sash ringing from her other wrist.

Jinhuang pats her belt. Empty. She pats Fol's. Also empty.

"You had one job," she tells him.

"What about you?" he says. "Didn't you have to behave?"

"New job," she says.

"Naci will skin us," he says.

"She will skin you," Jinhuang says, already crouching. "I am family."

"I am family too," he says, but he is moving.

The girl glances back once, measures them, and shows a smile that does not waste muscle. She cuts between a spice stall and a shrine, knocks a bowl from a beggar's hands, does not look at the spill, does not slow. The market opens for her the way doors open for fire.

Fol and Jinhuang look at each other for the length of a blink.

"Left," he says.

"Up," she answers.

Fol cuts left into a seam between spice stalls; Jinhuang kicks off a barrel and runs the awning line like a cat that wants the whole roof. The thief glances back once and finds two kinds of pursuit: his, a straight sword; hers, a thrown stone that keeps choosing the right window.

"Stay low," Fol calls.

"Stay funny," she answers, clearing a string of drying fish that slap her boots.

The market thins where cobbles forget they are supposed to be flat. They pass a shrine the size of a kneecap and three gambling rugs that all insist they are winning. People move aside when they see Fol's eyes lined on the thief.

The girl dives under a yoke, slides beneath a mule, vaults a fruit stall, kicks a pomegranate to its death. Fol threads the gaps without touching anything that doesn't deserve it. Jinhuang knocks a stack of clay cups.

A memory Brailles Jinhuang's spine as the alleys narrow: eight years ago, a ring of children in this same part of Pezijil, their leader in clean cuffs and clean nails, chain singing against stone like rain trained to bite. She had sworn she would break them and instead they laughed and swallowed her vows like sugar. That was the day she met Ta and Dukar. She banished the recollection with a hiss of breath. She will not make that face in front of Fol. She would rather eat the chain.

Fol's own past walks with him at a different angle. He remembers the same girl spinning her blade as if calling down a harvest; remembers Meicong's voice naming a sister with pride and warning in the same syllable.

The streets narrow to the outskirts, where grandeur runs out and leaves brick behind to fend for itself. Lamps sulk in doorways. The thief cuts a hard right down a lane that pretends it isn't a dead end, and vanishes. Fol and Jinhuang follow the echo of her breath around a corner and find quiet.

A courtyard waits, ringed by buildings that lean toward each other for warmth. Wash-lines cross it.

Children love the middle of a trap. They pour from the shadows and stack themselves into a loose circle, more bones than boots, faces striped with dirt. Some carry sticks; one has a kitchen knife; one keeps both hands on a stone he would never let go first.

At the circle's heart a girl stands with a tool that is also a warning. Eight years ago she wore better cloth, kept her hair with temple neatness, and the chain in her hands moved like the moon. Now the chain is kinked and snapped a handspan from the scythe's neck; the blade's hook is chipped; her coat is a rag that used to brag. Hunger has made maps of her cheeks. Yet, her eyes haven't changed.

Jinhuang stops and bares her teeth in something very like greeting. "Give the pouch," she says. No courtesy title. No cushion. Her hand lifts, palm up, not asking.

Fol registers three details while the children try to look taller: the tremor in the girl's right wrist, the way her left foot favors the outer edge, and the fact that she has put herself between the smallest kids and the two of them without thinking. He hears Meicong's name touch the back of his teeth and finds the other syllable.

"Meicao," he says.

Her eyes flinch at the sound as if someone threw a coin. She does not look at him. The thief they chased—the younger one—edges behind a ladder and clutches the leather purse like the last dry loaf in a wet winter.

"Give the pouch," Jinhuang repeats, a degree flatter. "Or keep it and we take fingers too."

"Careful," one of the boys mutters.

Meicao rolls her shoulder and the scythe winks once in the dim. The broken chain clinks the way a bracelet does when it wants its twin. Her mouth stretches without humor.

"I know you," Jinhuang says, stepping so the circle has to move with her. "Eight years ago you played at being a blade. You took from people who had less than the people who took from you. I told you to stop. You didn't. I was polite then. For how long have you kept doing this?"

Fol lowers his hands, weaponless, palms open. "You were cleaner," he says to Meicao. "You had a patron's silk and a place to sleep. What happened?"

Meicao finally lets her eyes land on Fol. Nothing in them opens. "Who are you?" she asks, not curious.

"A friend of someone who would have put a roof over you and burned anyone who tried to tell her no," he says. "Meicong."

The name walks across her face and doesn't find purchase. The scar at her throat—new—tightens when she swallows. She glances at Jinhuang, at the wall, at the smallest kid who pretends not to shake.

"You think name-dropping buys bread?" Jinhuang says. "I will buy bread. After you return what you stole." She points at the purse. "Now."

"Eat us first," a child says, voice pitched to be brave.

"Do not volunteer volunteers," Jinhuang says, and gestures to the space in front of her. "Send your better. Meicao."

Meicao's knuckles go whiter on the haft. She turns the scythe once and the chipped hook draws a crescent in the air.

"Give the pouch," Jinhuang says for the last time.

Meicao moves.

She closes the space with a starving beast's economy, scythe whipping in a ragged arc. The broken chain sings a hard note. Fol shifts; Jinhuang tilts; sparks jump from stone where the hook misses by a whisper.

Meicao comes in. The chipped scythe chews the air; the broken chain hisses its short song. Fol slips to the inside and draws steel. Jinhuang cuts right, empty-handed, smiling.

Meicao's hook kisses Fol's guard and screeches down the blade; sparks spit. Jinhuang steps into the blind side and drives a palm toward Meicao's ribs. The scythe's haft blocks—hard, practiced—sending heat up Jinhuang's forearm. Children swarm at Meicao's hissed word. They act fearless and are not; their chests hitch on the draw, but their feet do not stop.

"Eyes," Fol says.

"Hands," Jinhuang says.

They split the work. Fol stays tight to the scythe, denying arc. Jinhuang bounces the pack, tripping legs with ankles, tapping wrists numb, clipping ears. She doesn't break their bones; she bruises their idea of attacking again.

Meicao tries to take Fol's right—Jab—drag—hook. He answers with a short cut that opens the air by her elbow. She sacrifices skin, lets the metal taste, and keeps the scythe moving. The hook finds his coat; cloth rips; he leaves it and steps through, point kissing her throat before she bats it away with a back-fist that would have cracked a softer jaw.

"Better than I expected," Jinhuang calls, ducking under a broom-sweep and flicking two knuckles into a boy's stomach in the same motion. She turns the boy as she withdraws so his fall earns him a safe piece of dirt. "Worse than I remember."

"Trade partners," Fol says.

They trade. Jinhuang ghosts past Fol's shoulder and digs three fast strikes into Meicao's thigh, liver, jaw. Meicao eats the first, leans off the second, rolls the third along her cheekbone and spins out, chain slapping Jinhuang's wrist. A girl with a rock leaps at Jinhuang's back; Jinhuang scoops her midair and sets her down gently as a threat.

"Run," Jinhuang tells her.

The girl doesn't. Her chin lifts; starvation makes stubborn look like honor.

Meicao presses. She beats the scythe on Fol's blade until the metal hums and tries to numb his hand; he simply changes grip and gives it a smaller target. She feints high, kicks low; he lets the kick take his shin and pays the receipt with a cut that tags her shoulder. A thread of blood draws itself down her arm and drips. The children see it and shout, brave now.

"Back," Fol warns them.

They don't listen. Sticks clap his ribs. A knife slides for his flank and meets his sheath; Jinhuang's heel stamps it away. It skitters under a crate and sulks.

"Do not stab my partner," Jinhuang says, slapping a boy's ear. "Not yet, anyway."

"Your partner?" Fol says, parrying, turning the point, keeping Meicao's hook from finding his eyes. "Since when?"

"Since your hair started obeying," she says, then takes a broom to the shin and grins.

The next exchange is not funny. Meicao feels a seam open and hurls herself through it—scythe out, teeth bared. The hook scrapes Fol's cheek. He rides the hit and steps in elbow-first, blunt, ugly, effective. The strike folds Meicao's breath but doesn't stop her; the chain bites for his wrist; he rolls, drops his sword, traps the chain with his forearm, and wrenches.

Jinhuang is suddenly knee-deep in children. They commit together, a failed shield wall made of bones. They grab her ankles and wrists, climb her like a tree. She peels them away without breaking them.

"Off," she warns, voice low. "Last time."

A boy with a skillet swings for her temple. She stares him still, takes the hit on her forearm, and then steals the skillet and hands it back by the handle.

Meicao tries to finish Fol while Jinhuang is padded with children. She flurries: hook, butt, chain-slap, knee. Fol's answer is smaller and colder. He changes speed.

For three breaths the two of them look like something that eats gods. Her hook hums for his throat; his blade kisses the haft and rides it down; his off-hand slaps the chain's stub and cages it; his knee bumps her stance; his shoulder fills her ribs. The scythe clatters. Fol's sword returns to his palm as if it had been loaned.

Meicao's hands go for his eyes. He lets one pass and pins the other, twists, presses, and puts her down on a kneecap with an efficiency that gives no theater. Steel sits under her chin with courtesy.

He draws breath—and then the glint catches his eye on the ragged cord at her throat.

Bone. Carved. Tepr pattern. No, Jabliu. Frost lines, tiny horse, a wind mark that hides a name in its strokes.

Fol stills. The courtyard's sounds stretch thin.

He keeps the point where it is and speaks. "Remember who gave you this."

Meicao blinks, thrown, eyes losing their fight for a heartbeat. "It's mine," she snaps, reflex and hunger and pride.

"Not first," Fol says. "Naci Khan."

The name hits her gut. She flinches as if struck, curses, and tilts her head away from the sword. "I took it from a dead beggar boy's body!"

Jinhuang finally shrugs free of the kids with a twist that sends them sliding but not bleeding. She sees Meicao on her knees, Fol's blade fixed, the bone token glinting, and she does not pause.

"Move," she tells Fol, and when he does not, she moves him. One step. Enough.

She surges. The punch she throws is a clean, mean thing. It lands back of jaw, side of neck. Meicao's eyes roll, and she crumples.

"Idiot," Fol says.

"Which one?" Jinhuang says, shaking out her hand.

"Yes," he says.

They stand over Meicao. The smallest children edge closer, then stop when Jinhuang lifts two fingers. Fol kneels, rolls Meicao, slips the bone token free, and tucks it back under her collar rather than pocketing it. He takes the leather purse from the thief girl—who pretends she doesn't shake—and loosens his sash from her wrist with a cut that doesn't nick skin.

"Food," he tells the circle, and tosses three coins that will buy soup if the seller has a heart. Two kids dive; one holds his ground and catches, eyes wide, distrust beating hope by a nose.

"That was Naci's," Jinhuang says, looking at the token's outline under torn cloth. "She threw it away?"

"She gave it to her as a token of friendship," Fol says. "But she said she took it from a dead boy's body." He checks Meicao's pulse with two fingers; the beat is stubborn. "I don't understand. Something is wrong with her memory."

Jinhuang snorts. "She remembers charity when it needs a necklace." She points at the purse. "Count."

He weighs it. "Enough for what Naci told us to do and a fine we will not pay."

"And now you're going to leave her there, right?" Jinhuang sighs, knowing what her partner has in mind.

Fol looks at the children, then at Meicao's knuckles, split and old-scarred, then at the broken chain. The disgust on his face is not for her. "No. She is Meicong's sister."

"I knew it! Fucking dumbass!" Jinhuang curses.

He sheathes his sword and lifts Meicao. "We take her to Naci."

Jinhuang throws her hands up. "Of course we do," she groans. "Because why eat lunch when we can adopt another problem?"

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