Naci moves through the porcelain shop like a curator of silence, her fingers hovering over curves of impossible whiteness, her gaze measuring the soul of each piece not by its paint but by its emptiness. Borak, meanwhile, is a bull in a room of frozen milk. His restlessness is a low hum that vibrates against the serene shelves.

"This one," he declares, pointing a finger at a flamboyant vase painted with coiling golden dragons chasing their own tails. "It has spirit. It shouts its importance to the room. A khan's piece."

Naci does not look at it. Her attention is on a simple, profound tea bowl, its glaze the colour of a sky just after the sun has vanished. "It shouts, Borak. Horohan would prefer a whisper."

Borak grins. "The great unifier, brought low by the domestic tyranny of conjugal aesthetics." He leans conspiratorially against a case.

A faint, almost invisible smile touches Naci's lips. She finally lifts the bowl, holding it as if it were a bird's egg. "This is the one. It does not ask to be admired. It expects it."

The transaction is swift and silent, the merchant bowing so low his forehead nearly kisses the polished wood of his counter. When Naci instructs him to deliver it to the residence of Ambassador Shi Min, her voice is not that of a customer but a sovereign issuing a decree that happens to involve ceramics.

They step out of the sanctuary of clay and into the market's roaring cataract. The silence left in their ears is instantly filled with the cacophony of commerce and chaos.

Borak squints into the swirling human current. "No sign of the children. They must have really gotten into it. I give even odds on who drew first blood. My coin is on Jinhuang. She has her aunt's temper and her grandfather's tragic sense of humour."

"Stop spinning fantasies and start finding them," Naci commands, her eyes already scanning the crowd with the predatory focus of a raptor.

They push through the press of bodies, the crowd instinctively parting before Naci's unwavering advance. And then, the sea of strangers parts to reveal a familiar shore.

Kai Lang stands like a calm eddy in the market's flow. Jinhuang's mother is a woman whose elegance is a form of quiet defiance. She wears her years and her station with a grace that makes the garish market silks look cheap. Her eyes, sharp and intelligent, find Naci's and light with genuine warmth.

"Sister," Kai Lang says, her voice a soothing balm after the market's screech. "The winds brought you back. I received your letter." She embraces Naci.

Her gaze then sweeps past Naci, past Borak, searching. A tiny, almost imperceptible line of worry appears between her brows. "But where is my fierce little storm cloud?"

Naci offers a reassuring smile, a rare and genuine expression that transforms her face. "She is near. I sent her and Fol to secure provisions. They are likely arguing over the merits of salted beef versus spiced lamb and will return any moment, laden with enough food to siege a small fortress."

Kai Lang's smile is gentle but insistent. "Then you must all come to the house. Let us feed you properly. The ambassador's cooks may know the politics of a dozen nations, but they do not know the way to my daughter's heart through her stomach."

"We would not wish to impose—" Naci begins, her political reflexes engaging.

"Nonsense," Kai Lang interrupts, her tone leaving no room for argument. "You are family. And I see my child once a year if the gods are kind. You cannot refuse a mother this. You, of all people, cannot refuse me this."

The words are soft, but they carry the weight of a mountain. Naci sees the love and the quiet steel in her sister-in-law's eyes and knows she is conquered. She inclines her head, a gesture of surrender that is also one of respect. "We would be honoured."

At that exact moment, the crowd ripples and tears open. Fol emerges first, his expression grim, his usually impeccable coat torn at the shoulder. Jinhuang is a step behind, brushing dust from her sleeves with an air of theatrical nonchalance that doesn't quite hide the excited gleam in her eyes.

And in Fol's arms, limp as a sack of grain, hangs the battered, unconscious form of Meicao.

Kai Lang's hand flies to her mouth, her eyes wide with a mother's instantaneous horror. "By all the spirits… what is this? Jinhuang! What have you done?"

Jinhuang stops her brushing and offers her mother a bright, dangerous smile. "Hello, Mother. We found a stray."

...

Grey teeth of rock gnaw at the Red Cliff Survivor's wounded flanks as the tide, with a final, contemptuous shove, beaches her on a shingle of bleak, black stone. The sound is a long, agonized shudder of wood yielding to granite, a death rattle that sets every woman's teeth on edge. The ship lists to starboard, a great, wounded beast finally run to ground, its prayer-rag flags drooping in the damp, salt-heavy air.

For a long moment, there is only the suck and hiss of waves on the pebble beach. Then, the complaining begins.

"My deck," Na'er moans, running a hand along a fresh, foot-long scar in the timber. "That Seop bastard and his pet fire-pot… I just sanded this!"

"You sanded it two years ago with a rock and a prayer," Auntie Fang grunts, heaving a coil of rope over the side. "Now it has character. And a hole. Mostly a hole." She eyes a gash near the waterline, her face a mask of professional disgust. "Big enough to toss a cat through. A fat one. A very contented fat one."

Shan Xi stands amidships, one hand resting on the splintered capstan. Her expression is one of profound, metaphysical boredom, as if the universe has personally disappointed her by allowing such a mediocre landing. "Next time," she says, her voice a dry rasp that cuts through the griping, "let us endeavor to dock using the part of the ship specifically designed for docking. The bottom. A novel concept, I grant you."

Lizi, clutching a broom with which she had futilely attempted to fend off the rocks, brightens. "Captain, what do you call a ship that's friends with the shore?"

"Stolen," Shan Xi replies without looking at her.

"No! A shore thing!" Lizi beams, immensely pleased with herself. A damp rag, thrown by Pei the Drummer, smacks her in the side of the head.

The repair begins. It is a symphony of incompetence and bickering. Na'er and another sailor argue over the correct angle to brace the foremast, which now possesses a "new and artistic bend," their debate culminating in a dropped hammer that narrowly misses Auntie Fang's foot. A pot of tar, intended for the hull, is left too close to a driftwood fire and begins to bubble ominously, threatening to add a fresh layer of disaster.

"Food," Shan Xi declares, pinching the bridge of her nose as if warding off a divine migraine. "Na'er, find some. Something that isn't salted to the consistency of wood, and preferably something that isn't us."

Na'er salutes with a chisel. "I'll see if the seagulls are feeling charitable."

"And the rest of you," the captain continues, her gaze sweeping over the chaotic scene, "try to look less like the primary reason we have a hole in our home. Auntie Fang, make it float. The rest of you, try to look useful. Or at least pretend."

The crew disperses, a motley collection of women grumbling and scouring the barren cove for anything salvageable.

It is Pei who finds it. While the others bicker, she moves along the water's edge with a quiet, rhythmic purpose, using a sharpened stick to probe tidal pools for reluctant shellfish. Her rhythm falters. She straightens, squinting at the far end of the cove, where a finger of rock creates a sheltered, smaller pool.

"Captain," she calls, her voice low, lacking its usual drumbeat cadence.

Shan Xi follows her gaze. The rest of the crew, sensing a shift in the air, drift over.

Beached in the tranquil pool, as if placed there by a fastidious god, is a small rowboat. It is a thing of absurd beauty amidst the bleakness. Its hull is lacquered a deep, rich black, inlaid with mother-of-pearl that depicts coiling carp and crashing waves. It is pristine, untouched by storm or struggle.

And in its bottom, curled like a sleeping cat, is a boy.

He is young, thirteen at most. His clothes are of the finest, driest blue silk, embroidered with silver thread in intricate, familial patterns. His face is pale, peaceful. He does not look shipwrecked; he looks as though he has dozed off during a poetry lesson.

The ring of battered, salt-stained pirates stares in baffled silence at this perfect, sleeping youth.

Lizi is the first to break the spell. She leans in, cupping her hands around her mouth, and shouts directly into his ear. "WHAT DO YOU CALL A BOAT WITH NO CREW?"

The boy does not stir. Lizi grimaces like he is a disgrace to the world.

Na'er, ever practical, reaches into his silken robes. "Maybe he has snacks." Her fingers emerge with a small, wax-paper-wrapped honey cake. She unwraps it, sniffs, and takes a bite. "Still good," she announces through a full mouth.

Auntie Fang prods his shoulder with a calloused, tar-stained finger. "Is he dead? Rich people die quietly."

"He breathes," Shan Xi says, her voice quiet. She has not taken her eyes off him. He is an anomaly, a wrong note in the symphony of their ruin. Too clean. Too peaceful. Too expensive. "He is neither treasure nor trouble we can use right now." A long pause. "But he is too pretty to feed to the crabs." She turns. "Fetch the witches. Let them earn their air."

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When the crew hauls the unconscious boy into their lair and drops him unceremoniously onto a stained pallet, both twins stop what they are doing—Pragya grinding a foul-smelling root into paste, Pragati stitching a sail with the same brutal efficiency she'd suture a wound—and turn their identical, unblinking gazes on the intrusion.

"Another one?" Pragya asks, her voice a dry rasp. "Did you lot get bored of plunder and start collecting pretty things instead? Is he a souvenir?"

"He's not pretty, he's aristocratic," Pragati counters, not looking up from her stitching. "Look at that jawline. Pure inbreeding. Probably has soft bones. They break like sugar." She pulls a thread taut with a vicious yank.

The crew shuffles nervously. It is Lizi who finds her voice. "We found him. In a little boat. He won't wake up."

"Maybe he's smart," Pragya says, finally stepping forward. She pinches the boy's cheek between thumb and forefinger, then pulls up an eyelid to peer into the vacant eye beneath. "Unconsciousness is a valid life choice around this lot."

Pragati abandons her sail and joins the examination. Her fingers probe his skull, then his neck, with a clinical roughness that makes the onlookers wince. "No visible trauma. No fever. Pupils are even. He's not unconscious; he's avoiding you. Can't blame him."

"It's a deep sleep," Pragya concludes, prying his mouth open to look at his teeth. "Shock. Or a very light poison. A nobleman's tonic, perhaps. Something to keep him compliant during an inconvenient journey. Or he's just lazy. The rich are exceptionally good at that."

Their diagnosis is delivered as a duet of insults. They begin to strip his expensive, sodden outer robe with the pragmatic indifference of women skinning a rabbit. The fine silk is tossed onto a pile of soiled rags.

It is then that the first clue clunks onto the deck. A heavy, cool weight of polished jade falls from an inner pocket of the boy's tunic. Pragati picks it up. It's a seal, masterfully carved into the form of a coiled sea dragon, its eyes picked out in tiny flecks of jet. It is a thing of immense, silent authority.

Simultaneously, Pragya's searching fingers find a slender cylinder of lacquered bamboo tucked into his sash. She uncaps it and shakes out a scroll of finest vellum.

The usual stream of insults dies in their throats.

Pragya unrolls the scroll. The script is elegant, precise, written in the formal court language of Seop. It is not a letter; it is a proclamation. A lineage. A desperate plea for protection addressed to any "loyal subject of the true tide." It names the boy. It names his father, the slain king. It names the purges.

Pragati's hand closes around the jade seal, her knuckles white. The coiling dragon seems to pulse with a terrible significance. The chaotic noise of the ship—the cursing, the hammering, the thock-CHUK of the pump—fades into a distant hum.

The twins look from the seal to the boy's peaceful, sleeping face, then at each other. For the first time in living memory, they are utterly, completely speechless. The weight of the thing is physical, a country-sized anvil dropped into their sour, little kingdom.

Pragya finally breaks the silence, her cynical rasp replaced by a low, awed whisper.

"Well. Shit."

Pragati's eyes are wide, fixed on the boy. She finishes the thought, her voice barely audible, all the medical certainty drained out of it.

"She's not going to like this. This isn't treasure." She holds up the jade dragon, its jet eyes gleaming in the gloom. "This is a country-sized problem."

...

The war room of the Crimson Citadel is a sanctum of calculated ambition, a place where the air is thick with the scent of ozone, old blood, and cold stone. Sunlight, fractured by narrow, high windows, cuts through the gloom like a blade, illuminating a massive table of polished black obsidian. Upon it, a map of the known world is inlaid in precious stones and metals. A quarter of it—the Bos region and its hard-won expansions—glitters with a disturbing, visceral redness, carved from blood-jade. This is the heart of the Hluay dynasty, and it is still beating, still growing.

Linh leans upon his eagle-skull staff at the table's head, its bone pale against the dark wood. Eight years have not been kind to his body; they have been meticulous. The ruins of his face are a topographical map of his suffering, the scars polished smooth and tight, one side a grotesque mask of divine wrath, the other a tired, handsome melancholy. His empty sleeve is pinned. His single eye, the color of a winter storm, is fixed on the map, but it sees far beyond the inlaid jade and gold.

Li Song stands opposite, a stark contrast in Moukopl austerity. His fingers, clean and precise, trace a supply route north. "The Iron Seed Legion reforges itself at Pezijil's gates," he states, his voice devoid of alarm, a mere report of weather. "But their forge is cold. Their new emperor plays with eunuchs and ghosts, not legions. He looks east."

One of the Siza warlords, a mountain of a man named Gorok with a beard woven into iron rings, grunts. "Let him look. The sea is far. Our swords are close."

"Geography is a language, Gorok," Li Song replies without looking up. "And you are illiterate. The Moukopl look east because the Seop has stopped sending tribute and started sending heads. Their revolution is a distraction we must learn to read." He places a small, black stone—representing the Seop revolutionary fleet—in the eastern sea. "A valuable, noisy distraction."

Gorok scowls. "Peasants with pitchforks and stolen boats. They will be crushed by the Moukopl navy before the next moon. What use are they to us?"

Li Song allows a thin, cold smile. "The anvil does not need to be sharp, only strong. While the Moukopl hammer beats the Seop anvil, their back is turned." His finger stabs north, toward a jeweled city on the map. "Pezijil. The administrative heart. The brain. And it will be left virtually unguarded."

A ripple of grim anticipation moves through the other warlords. Linh remains silent, his gaze now on the black stone in the sea.

"The Seop are ideologues," Linh's voice rasps. He finally looks up, his single eye pinning Li Song. "They beheaded their king for an idea. They will not embrace another emperor, even one who offers an alliance."

Li Song meets the gaze evenly. "We do not ask them to embrace you. We ask them to hate the Moukopl more. We offer them guns, powder, a common enemy. Their belief is their business. Their war is our opportunity."

"And when our 'allies' the Shag'hal-Tyn see us marching north instead of reinforcing their grudge against the Yohazatz?" Linh asks. "Will their Khan still be happy with his defensive pact?"

Li Song gestures to the west of the blood-jade territory, where a figurine of a coiled serpent represents the Shag'hal-Tyn Khanate. "The goat-herders, as Gorok so eloquently calls them, are happy so long as we continue our purification of the Yohazatz within our borders. It amuses them and weakens their old rivalry at no cost to themselves. They see us as a useful, brutal dog. Let them. A dog can bite the hand that thinks it holds the leash."

Gorok laughs. "I like being a dog. Dogs eat well."

Linh's scarred face twitches, the ghost of a smile that never finds completion. He looks from the fervent, simple brutality of Gorok to the chilling, complex calculus of Li Song. He is the nexus between them, the prophet who must sanctify the butcher's work. "Then we will write the letter to the Seop Directorate. Offer them the guns. Let them be the anvil." His tone is final, but his eye lingers on the map, on the countless unseen souls represented by each jewel. "Just ensure our name is not on the hammer that breaks them afterward. Revolutions have long memories."

He pushes himself upright with his staff, the meeting clearly concluded. The weight of the decision, the sheer scale of the bloodshed it will necessitate, settles on his shoulders like a mantle. He turns and limps toward the great balcony, needing air that isn't thick with the smell of ambition and impending death.

The balcony offers a view of Linh's creation, and tonight, it smells of cinders and compliance. The city of Sarqad, once a Moukopl jewel, now lies subdued under the stark white banners of the White Mother, their black suns hanging like dead stars against the twilight. The air, still faintly acrid with the memory of countless purifications, carries the distant, rhythmic chant of Nahaloma's faithful from the great temple-square. Each prayer from below feels like another stone laid upon the sepulcher of the man he used to be.

His single eye scans the streets below, not with a ruler's pride, but with the weary assessment of a sculptor regarding a statue that has grown monstrous. The people move with a predictable, hushed efficiency. Siza and Moukopl enforcers patrol in pairs, their eyes sharp for any deviation from the imposed order. It is peace, yes. But it is the peace of a grave.

A flicker of irregular motion snags his attention. In a narrow alleyway below, a small, ragged figure darts between the stalls of a near-deserted market. A Shag'hal-Tyn boy, by the look of the rough-spun tunic and trousers, face smudged with the distinctive red dust of the western steppes. The performance is good, the movements a perfect mimicry of a feral, hungry youth. But Linh has made a study of fear and deception; he sees the too-precise calculation in the darts and weaves, the performance within the performance.

The boy—the girl—is fast. She moves like a sparrow hawk, all sharp angles and desperate energy. She snatches a loaf of dark bread from a distracted baker's stall and melts back into the shadows with the fluidity of smoke. But the baker is not so distracted. A large man with the thick shoulders of a miller gives chase, his roar of anger cutting through the evening quiet.

Linh watches, impassive. This is the natural order of his domain: theft, pursuit, punishment.

The baker corners the thief against a wall of scarred brick. "Yohazatz rat!" the man snarls, his voice carrying clearly to the balcony. "Think your Shag'hal-Tyn rags fool me? I can smell your scorpion blood!"

The girl presses herself against the wall, the stolen loaf clutched to her chest like a shield.

"Your nose is as dull as your wits, you lumbering oven-tender! If you could smell anything past your own rancid breath, you'd know your bread is so stale it could be used to mortar these walls! I did you a favor! I was taking it to the masons!"

The audacity. The sheer, ridiculous, brilliant flamboyance of the insult. It is so utterly out of place in this city of terror. It is a spark struck in a room full of gunpowder.

The baker, enraged beyond reason, raises a meaty fist. The girl flinches, but her amber eyes—amber eyes—burn with a defiant fire that does not extinguish.

Linh's breath catches.

…a northern barbarian with eyes of fire…

Mihin's prophecy coils in his mind. The vision he had dismissed. It is here. It is now. It is this filthy, magnificent, doomed child.

The baker's fist begins its descent.

"Stop."

The word is a low, resonant command, spoken with the absolute certainty of a god who knows the very air will obey. It rolls over the alleyway, freezing the baker mid-swing. Every head in the vicinity turns upward toward the balcony, then instantly bows, faces pressing into the dirt.

Linh turns from the railing. His limp is pronounced as he moves inside, his staff tapping a grim rhythm on the stone floor. He descends the citadel's grand staircase. Guards snap to attention, their eyes wide with confusion. He does not acknowledge them.

He emerges into the alleyway. The crowd parts before him, a human sea yielding to a leviathan. He walks until he stands before the scene. The baker is prostrate, trembling. The girl is still standing, backed against the wall, her chest heaving. Up close, the disguise is thin. The delicate bone structure beneath the grime, the faint curve of hips the baggy clothes cannot fully conceal, the raw, intelligent fear in those astonishing amber eyes.

He circles her slowly, the tap of his staff the only sound in the suffocating silence. He stops in front of her. With his free hand, he reaches out. She recoils, but there is nowhere to go. His scarred, calloused fingers gently wipe a streak of dirt from her cheek. The skin beneath is bronze.

"You are not from the western plateau," he rasps, his voice intimate and terrible. "And you are not a boy."

Her defiance returns in a desperate surge. "So what if I am? You gonna burn me too, Your Holiness?"

The cold dread of the prophecy wars with a sudden, overwhelming fascination. This is not a cowering victim. This is a fighter. This is a mirror held up to his own past, to the furious, desperate boy who would have spat in the face of a god to claim a moment of defiance.

A faint, horrifying smile touches his ruined lips. "What is your name, little spark?"

She glares, her knuckles white around the bread. "What's it to you?"

"It depends if you wish to keep breathing. And if you are as clever as you seem." He turns to the captain of his guard, who stares in stunned silence. "Bring her. Bathe her. Feed her. She is to be given quarters in the citadel."

The captain dares to question. "My Lord? She is Yohazatz sc—"

Linh's voice drops to a deadly whisper that cracks like ice. "She is not. She is Shag'hal-Tyn. Can't you recognize her clothes?"

He turns his chilling gaze back to the bewildered girl, who is now staring at him as if he is the most terrifying and fascinating thing she has ever seen.

"You wanted bread," Linh says, the ghost of that smile returning. "I am giving you a dynasty. Try not to burn this one down too quickly."

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