She drew lines between them: thin, crooked, smudging where the ground was uneven.
"These lines are riders," she said. "Pigeons. News. Promises. They exist because we have chosen to make them exist. No throne made them. No Heaven blessed them. They can break. They can be cut. The only thing that repairs them is us deciding to keep walking them."
She straightened.
"So. Three questions to start. First: what do we owe each other when one of us is burned like Stone Gate? Second: what do we owe the law we hang, when it is difficult or dangerous? Third: what do we owe in bread, in coin, in time, in risk, to keep this Road from being just a story people tell before going back to bowing?"
She nodded to Ren. "Write. And if anyone thinks of a fourth question after, we'll add it."
For a moment, no one spoke. Then everyone did.
"They burned us because of the sparrow," said Pomegranate Bend's woman. "But it was the Road that sent word ahead, that sent Feiyan's knives and your riders when the bandits tested the decree. We owe you blood, but we also owe you complaint. If the Road City claims us, it should have a word ready for the next Stone Gate before the ash is cold."
"We can't be everywhere," Shuye protested. "We have, what, two dozen decent horses and a handful more that complain?"
"And three dozen halls where the tiles hang," Han said. "Soon more. Ink spreads faster than hooves."
"Then maybe the answer to the first question," Zhao mused, "is not 'send riders' but 'send instructions.' Teach us how to make it expensive for men like Zhang to burn our tiles, so even if you can't arrive with spears you arrive with consequences."
"Consequences written where?" Aunt Cao's nephew demanded. "On clay in some other town? Fire doesn't read."
"Fire doesn't," Feiyan said. "Captains do. Clerks do. Other villagers do. You think you're the only ones tired of being beaten under someone else's banner? Stories travel faster than orders. Make Stone Gate's burning a story about Zhang's fear, not your failure."
Cao Mei spoke up. "We survivors owe you that," she said. "To remember out loud why he burned us. To not let men like Du call it 'bandit trouble' in their reports. If the Road wants to claim us, it must claim our dead too."
Ren's brush scratched. Road owes dead memory. Living owe Road their names.
Lin Chang tapped the board with a knuckle. "Second question," she reminded. "What we owe the law itself."
"Obedience," muttered a Green Dike farmer. "Otherwise what's the point?"
"Not blind obedience," said the midwife from Yong'an, barging into the circle with her staff as if no one had ever told her she wasn't a delegate. "We're not building another throne, we're building a habit. The law should bite us too when we try to cheat with it."
Sun Wei winced. "Haojin's seen that," he admitted. "Man tried to claim Road City protection after cheating half the boats with false weight. Wanted the tablets to shield him from the beating he'd earned. We told him the law didn't care who he was. Only whether he lied. He paid double, under witness."
"So maybe that's the answer," Shuye said slowly. "We owe the law a promise that we won't use it as a weapon to hide behind. That when we hang the sparrow, we allow others to hold us to it."
"Put that on a tablet and watch men choke," Wei muttered. But he looked almost pleased.
Ren wrote: Those who hang the sparrow submit to its rules not only for others, but for themselves. No man may claim Road City protection against a law he has broken.
"Third question," Ziyan said. "Bread. Coin. Risk. You want riders? Shelters? Pigeons? Jars? None of those make themselves."
"We can't pay another tax," Pomegranate Bend's scarred woman said immediately. "Qi bleeds us for levies and 'road repair.' If we hang your sparrow and you start scratching numbers next to it, my people will tear it down themselves."
"We're not the ones with whips," Zhao pointed out. "If you don't contribute, the Road City remains a comfortable phrase in Yong'an while your halls burn alone."
"We need something," Han said. "Three winters from now, you'll have more survivors at your gate, more halls asking for riders, more captains like Du in trouble because they bent for you. If you don't have a way to count who gives what, you'll drown in your own promise."
Ziyan let them argue themselves into a knot. Then she cut.
"No new tax," she said. "Not yet."
They blinked at her.
"We will not ask for coin on top of what thrones already take," she said. "Not while we're still learning how not to waste what little we have. But we will ask this: every hall that claims the Road City must give us a tally, twice a year, of three things—grain, hands, and eyes."
"Eyes?" Aunt Cao's nephew echoed.
"Grain," Shuye said, catching on, "tells us who can spare a sack when another hall starves. Hands tells us who can send riders or masons when we have to rebuild. Eyes tells us who has space and courage to hide records, pass messages, watch captains like Du and Chen."
Ziyan nodded. "No coins to start," she said. "Only honest tallies. If you lie on those, the sparrow will bite you harder than any tax. If you don't send any, don't expect us to know you're there when trouble comes."
Ren added another line: No levy without tally. Halls owe Road truth before grain. Road owes halls not to demand what they cannot give.
"That's still a tax," Pomegranate Bend's woman muttered. "Just one made of honesty instead of silver."
"Honesty was rare even before silver started travelling on wheels," Lin Chang said. "If we're going to call ourselves something grand like 'City,' we might as well be expensive in the right way."
They argued until the light thinned and the cold insisted on being noticed.
At the end, they had no full answers, only beginnings: who could send pigeons for another hall; who had a spare corner where a fleeing family could sleep; which path between Reed Mouth and Haojin could be ridden in a day and which in two. They had promised to send lists. They had promised, more dangerously, to read whatever came back.
"You wanted citizens," Feiyan said to Ziyan as the delegates drifted off, stamping their feet and pulling cloaks tight. "You've given them homework."
"I've given them a measuring stick," Ziyan said. "If they send nothing, we know where the Road is story only. If they send something… then we can start asking more."
"You realise you've just made it easier for Zhang to know where to aim," Wei said.
"He already knows where the sparrow hangs," Ziyan replied. "This will tell us too. If he wants to use our lists for fire, he'll have to steal them. And thieves leave marks."
Ren gathered his tablets, joints stiff.
"I'll need more clay," he muttered. "And more scribes. And more sleep."
"You'll get one of those things," Zhao said. "Not the one you want."
Night fell as if someone had dropped a lid over the yard. The old practice dummies sat under a dusting of snow, listening to this new way of marching.