Such a policy clearly favored those commoners who possessed little or no land. As for the fertile holdings already in the mouths of the great families — the Emperor, having taken the cautionary lesson of the Sage Virtue Emperor to heart, made no move to touch those.

Han Yi had initially believed that resistance from the noble families would thus be somewhat reduced.

Unfortunately, those meddlesome fathers who held sway over every corner of the court were not about to watch their future prospects for enrichment be cut off. Every one of them behaved as though their entire estates were about to be confiscated, weeping and wailing before the throne, passionately denouncing these policies that flouted the laws laid down by their ancestors as certain to bring catastrophe upon the Great Wei.

Cultivating wasteland? The mountain ridges and dragon veins of the realm — how could those refugees be allowed to hack at them at will?

Though Luoyun was confined to the Eastern Palace, word reached her that certain individuals had been quarreling endlessly in court — so endlessly, in fact, that even after the hour for adjournment had passed, the assembled ministers had still not dispersed.

It was said that two elderly officials, convinced the new policy spelled the end of the Great Wei, had been so overcome with fury that they attempted to hurl themselves headlong into one of the hall’s pillars to demonstrate their resolve — only to totter a few trembling steps before being intercepted by others, whereupon each collapsed in a convenient swoon and was carried out on a stretcher.

Han Yao was also in Luoyun’s chambers, listening as the palace attendants sent to find out when the Crown Prince would leave court reported back on the tumult within. Hearing all of this, Han Yao let out a long, slow breath of relief.

As she peeled the rind off a green tangerine for her sister-in-law, she said with heartfelt gratitude: “My imperial brother is truly wonderful. He found out that Guibei had gotten himself into trouble, so he rushed to announce the new policy today on purpose — to draw those old ministers’ fire, didn’t he?”

Luoyun had been quietly fretting on Han Linfeng and her father-in-law’s behalf, and hearing Han Yao say this, she was simultaneously exasperated and amused. “Your imperial brother has had his mind buried entirely in matters of farmland lately — he doesn’t have the spare attention to manage anyone’s run-in with the law. Go back and tell that husband of yours, he absolutely cannot go charging into things so rashly and impulsively in the future.”

The trouble Zhao Guibei had stirred up was, in the strict accounting, neither very large nor entirely trivial.

Two days before this grand assembly, Zhao Guibei had forced his way into the Junguogong estate and given the Duke of Junguogong a proper beating that left both his eyes blackened.

The Duke’s disciples had written a furious memorial demanding that Zhao Guibei be impeached and punished. But today, the disciples’ complaint had been entirely drowned out by the clamor of the officials trying to throw themselves at pillars.

And so Zhao Guibei had, by a stroke of luck, narrowly escaped the punishment he deserved.

In truth, the Duke of Junguogong himself was quite the aggrieved party — he had simply been sitting at home, knowing nothing whatsoever about the situation, when a young general came storming in and gave him two black eyes out of nowhere.

The reason for Zhao Guibei’s reckless outburst traced back to Princess Yuyang’s visit to the Empress Dowager Wang in the Cold Palace on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival.

While the palace banquet had been in full festive swing, Yuyang had walked through the cool moonlit night, guided by the Crown Prince’s servants, to visit her mother in the Cold Palace.

She had tried to see her mother on several previous occasions, only to be turned away at the palace gates each time. This meeting between mother and daughter had not come easily.

The Queen Wang who had once wielded such dazzling power was now aged and withered, wearing nothing but a coarse linen nun’s robe, seated alone in a bare, empty room.

When she looked up and saw her daughter — the frost already spreading through her hair — grief rose within her unbidden. She held it back with quiet effort, and said: “Yuyang… is that you, Yuyang? Why has so much of your hair gone white?”

It had been so long since mother and daughter had been able to meet. There should have been endless things to say.

Yet when Yuyang opened her mouth and, just like Zhao Dong, immediately asked about the cause of Huiniang’s death, Queen Wang closed her eyes for a brief moment, then said gently: “Come here, sit closer to me.”

When Yuyang drew near, Queen Wang suddenly raised her hand and struck her hard across the face. “Your mother has been reduced to this state. Your brother is imprisoned with his life hanging in the balance. Instead of thinking about how to ease our difficulties, you are still dwelling on those worthless matters of love?”

Yuyang pressed a hand to her cheek and said quietly: “I have already settled the divorce with Zhao Dong. I came to ask only because I wanted to know the truth.”

Queen Wang looked at this daughter of hers who was beyond saving, and felt her heart go cold with resignation. At last she said: “That peasant Zhao Dong — I never had half an eye’s regard for him. If he had been the sort to covet power and influence, and you had been set on marrying him, I could at least have managed things — found a way to make him take you. As long as you were a princess, he would have treated you decently enough out of respect for what that rank could offer him. But in time I saw through him clearly — he is a blockhead, with no instinct for reading the situation. Even if you had married him, how would he have known how to treat you well? A man of that sort — would he really have been worth my effort to scheme against that country wife of his? You think too little of your own mother.”

Her daughter — what rarified and precious stock she came from. And yet she had turned up her nose at every son from the great families.

Queen Wang had been unable to sway her daughter back then, unable to persuade her to consider a proper match. In the end, she had simply consoled herself: even if her daughter refused to marry, she was a princess of the realm — she could live freely and indulge herself however she liked for the rest of her days.

Better that, at any rate, than her own fate as Empress — married to the sovereign, yet confined within the walls of the inner palace, bound to a man she did not love, locked in a ceaseless and exhausting struggle with a court full of scheming rivals.

But then Zhao Dong’s wife had died, and Yuyang, watching him collapse in grief, had decided she simply had to go and offer herself as a stepmother to his son.

She and the former Emperor had tried to dissuade her, and when that failed, had simply thrown up their hands and let her be.

Looking at her daughter’s circumstances now, it only confirmed what she had thought then — what could there be to gain by marrying a man who did not love you? It was simply another stretch of bitter sea that could never be crossed.

But Queen Wang’s mind had been tempered in the fires of inner palace intrigue, and it needed only a moment’s turning, after listening to her daughter’s sorrow, to find the crux of the matter.

She let out a series of cold laughs and said: “When your father the Emperor and I were at the temporary palace, urgently in need of reinforcement, Zhao Dong led his troops to our aid — his arrival was of the utmost importance. I naturally expected him to stand with his own mother-in-law. At the very least, I assumed he would come to our defense. Yet when this filth was thrown at my name, Zhao Dong nearly became the Prince of Dongping’s weapon against me. The testimony and witnesses all lined up so perfectly — it is clearly someone’s carefully constructed scheme. It is better that you divorced him. Were you still married to him, a man like Zhao Dong would never have treated you well. And do not come here again. Move far away from this city of troubles. If you still regard me as your mother, then hear my last words to you: from this day forward, live the rest of your life for yourself. You are past forty now, and gray at your temples — it is time to put your feet on solid ground. Love and men are the most useless things in the world.”

Grief welled up in Yuyang as she listened. She wanted to throw her arms around her mother and weep herself empty one more time — but Queen Wang gave her a sharp push away, and said coldly: “You are nothing like a daughter of mine. Not a trace of backbone in you. I grow weary just looking at you. Get out of here quickly, and do not trouble me again.”

Her mother was so cold and unyielding that Yuyang could only bow in farewell and leave.

But after Yuyang had gone, Queen Wang turned to watch her daughter’s retreating figure, and let a single silent tear fall.

How could she not miss her daughter? But if she did not speak with such cutting finality, she feared her daughter would keep coming back to see her.

With her current position as deposed Empress, staying too closely connected could only mean inevitable trouble for Yuyang in the end. The Han father and son had promised the former Emperor they would treat the members of that line with care and dignity. But the prerequisite was that those members understood how to keep their heads down and live with humility.

Her entire life, she had fought and clawed for the sake of her two children. And yet when it was all over, she had fought herself into complete and utter defeat — was that not its own kind of bitter irony?

What she could do now, in this small and sparse room, was tap her wooden prayer block and pray in silence, beseeching Heaven to leave her children some road on which they could survive.

As for the exchange between mother and daughter, it was naturally transcribed in full and delivered to Han Linfeng. After all, a visit to a deposed Empress required a listener posted behind the wall to monitor what was said — to supervise conduct and ensure that no one with ulterior motives could use such a meeting to pass harmful information or scheme against the stability of the court.

But at the very moment Han Linfeng was reading through that record, Zhao Guibei happened to be before him, making a plea on his own behalf.

For these past several days, the business of his mother had left him so distressed he could barely eat.

His mother had persistently refused to see him, and his father had refused to explain why. So he had come to Han Linfeng, his exceptionally capable brother-in-law, to ask whether he might think of some way through this.

Han Linfeng noticed the raw sore on his brother-in-law’s lip, then looked at Queen Wang’s definitive words on the record, and felt instinctively that there was something crooked running beneath the surface of this whole affair.

Out of consideration for Guibei’s earnest plea, he had his people look into it.

In truth, the case was not difficult to investigate — except that after confronting Zhao Dong, the elderly palace attendant had suddenly fallen into a lotus pond on her way home and drowned. And the midwife, after being kicked into unconsciousness by Zhao Dong, had simply vanished without a trace.

The drowned attendant’s route home bore no proximity to any lotus pond whatsoever, and her family could make no sense of how she could have fallen in. When the body had been examined, the old woman’s face and neck showed injuries — it looked very much like she had been silenced by someone.

Yet by that point, Queen Wang had already been imprisoned. Where would she have found the means to order someone’s death?

When Han Linfeng’s people quietly questioned the midwife’s family, they heard almost by accident that after the midwife’s disappearance, a steward from the Junguogong estate had come by several times, asking repeatedly about her whereabouts.

Han Linfeng had initially been asking out of mild curiosity, but the moment the name of the Junguogong estate reached his ears, his interest sharpened considerably.

The land tax reform had been obstructed by the great families at every turn, and the Duke of Junguogong had long been acting as a vanguard for the Lu family’s Fang faction. Collecting evidence against them was something Han Linfeng currently found extremely satisfying.

And so he dispatched capable agents to dig deeper.

Following the trail from one clue to the next, his people very quickly located that Junguogong estate steward — who had left the estate during the chaos of the war and not yet returned.

At first the steward refused to crack, insisting stubbornly that he had gone looking for the midwife on personal business, as she had once worked at the Junguogong estate.

In the end, he could not hold out against the iron-fisted methods Han Linfeng’s agents employed, and confessed everything.

It turned out that this decades-old case — one that had altered the course of lives and the fate of the realm — had its origins in nothing more than jealousy between women.

The matter of the Duchess of Junguogong scheming against the Zong family and trying to break off the engagement had originally been known only to the two households directly involved.

But Princess Yuyang, never one to stay out of things that were not her business, had taken it upon herself to write to her close companions and defend the Beizhen Princess Consort, stirring up the story until every noble household in the capital knew of it.

The Duchess of Junguogong ended up branded with a reputation as a scheming and venomous woman, and the business of finding a marriage for her third son became an uphill struggle.

At the time, the Duchess had been beside herself with fury. To simply swallow this insult, she felt, would be to let Princess Yuyang look down on her entirely.

As for how to make the Princess uncomfortable — well, that was easy enough. That insufferable princess had spent her entire life revolving around Zhao Dong. She could work from that angle, sending some gossip out in kind.

The midwife who had attended Huiniang’s delivery happened to be the older sister of the Junguogong estate’s cook — a woman who had also come out of that household.

Though when the Duchess sought her out, she had been unable to get anything concrete out of her, the Duchess did not actually care in the least why the General’s wife had died in difficult labor. Rumors vaguely along those lines had been floating around for years.

What she wanted now was simply to irritate Yuyang. She only needed to reheat those old embers and serve them up again.

She instructed the midwife to let it slip among her acquaintances that Huiniang’s difficult labor had, as far as she remembered, looked like it might have involved some hidden interference by Princess Yuyang.

The midwife had relationships with servants across various households, and still made her rounds attending deliveries at noble estates from time to time. She needed only to drop a few strategically ambiguous comments, leaving enough room for speculation, and the rumors would take on a life of their own.

The Duchess carefully timed the slow burn — letting the gossip smolder quietly like autumn leaves catching fire underground — and simply waited for Zhao Dong to return to the capital from the front. Once he did, she would find her moment to ensure the General heard the whispers too.

All the Duchess had wanted from this was to cause Yuyang some aggravation — to seed a little suspicion and discord between her and Zhao Dong, and vent some of her own pent-up resentment.

After all, the capital was never short of rumors without foundations. She was merely adding a little wind, a little fuel. And if the Princess was capable enough to track the trail back to her and confront her directly, the midwife could simply deny having said anything — what could Yuyang do then? Besides, with the Ninth Prince’s faction ascendant and the Empress’s camp losing ground, what power did one washed-up princess have left to press her with?

But then the midwife had come to her sister in secret and told her that someone had approached her out of nowhere, offering a great sum of money, and wanted her to swear without deviation that it was Queen Wang who had caused the General’s wife’s death.

The stakes were too high, and she was frightened. She had said a few words to her sister about it. The cook sister panicked upon hearing this and ran to tell the Duchess of Junguogong.

The Duchess was jolted upright — she had no idea who would want to arrange something like this. It seemed the rumors she had so carefully planted had inspired someone else to use them to stir up something far larger and more dangerous.

Terrified of being dragged into a disaster of her own making, the Duchess sent the steward at once to find the midwife and bring her to her senses — she absolutely could not let greed lead her to go along with this scheme.

But when they went looking, the midwife had already vanished. Even her own family had no idea where she had gone.

The more the Duchess thought about it, the more agitated she became. After all, the midwife had once come from her household — if this thing really unraveled into something connected to the palace coup, she would have no way to wash herself clean of it.

And then the capital had descended into chaos and upheaval, and the Junguogong household fled in a panic, each one looking after themselves with no spare attention for anything else. The steward had made his own way back to the countryside to wait out the turmoil.

After Han Linfeng had pieced all of this together, he laid it out plainly before Zhao Guibei. Guibei listened from beginning to end with eyes that had gone completely blank.

After a long silence, he finally asked: “…So it really was my mother… who killed… my mother?”

It was a sentence only someone who knew his history could have parsed. Han Linfeng, however, felt that clarifying the full truth of it was not difficult.

Though years had passed since the events in question, it would still be possible to track down the physician who had attended Huiniang during her illness, and the lady’s personal maidservant.

Han Linfeng had his people locate the addresses, then passed them on to Zhao Guibei and told him to go and get to the bottom of it himself.

Han Yao went together with Zhao Guibei.

The physician remembered the General’s wife very clearly. At the time of Huiniang’s difficult labor, the cause had simply been that the infant was positioned incorrectly — feet first. The General’s wife, though this was not her first pregnancy, was no longer young, and such a situation was extraordinarily dangerous. The midwife had tried every method she knew and could not resolve it, and eventually the physician had been summoned. He had wanted to ask whether they should save the mother or the child — but the General was not at home, not yet returned to the capital.

It had been the General’s wife herself who had gritted her teeth and said that no matter what, the child must be saved. In the end, the child was delivered — but she hemorrhaged badly afterward, and that was how she died.

If another cause were suspected, some form of deliberate interference might have been a possibility. But a malpositioned infant — there was simply no way to explain that as anything other than what it was. The lady’s personal maidservant had been present at the birth as well, and had witnessed it all with her own eyes.

The day Guibei returned to the capital, he was already reeling. His parents had abruptly divorced. His mother had already slipped away without a word, leaving the city. And now he had just learned the full circumstances of how his birth mother had died in labor — the realization that his mother had chosen to give up her own life to protect him sent something in the young general’s chest splitting apart with unbearable pain.

His mind then leaped suddenly to the moment when he had pulled the Duchess of Junguogong from the river — and the words she had murmured in her half-conscious state.

So the Duchess of Junguogong had been the one responsible for sowing chaos in his household.

Han Yao lost her grip on him for a split second, and the young general was already running — he charged straight to the Junguogong estate, and proceeded to give the completely unsuspecting Duke of Junguogong two resounding black eyes.

As luck would have it, the court was in such uproar that day that the Duke’s complaint had no room to be heard. Otherwise, the private family matter of the Zhao household would have been aired before the entire court for all to know.

However, if the son had gone and given someone two black eyes, when the father arrived, it was with the manner of a man intent on tearing down the gate itself.

When Zhao Dong kicked open the Junguogong estate gates, he strode in sword in hand, seething with killing intent, to find the Duchess and settle accounts.

The estate guards and household servants rushed to block him. Even the prefect of the capital received the report and arrived with men.

In the end, both parties were summoned into the palace and subjected to a thorough dressing-down by the Emperor before the imperial desk.

Since the chaos of the Shang Ru Rebellion, the capital’s security had only just been painstakingly restored. For Zhao Dong to lead men barging into the gates of a peer’s estate in this manner was a clear violation of military law. He was naturally due severe punishment.

And the Duchess of Junguogong, for her careless and reckless tongue — for instigating a servant to fabricate and spread slander, nearly allowing the rebel Prince of Dongping to exploit it as a weapon against the foundations of the Great Wei — had committed an offense that was equally inexcusable.

On that day, the doors of the imperial study were closed. Afterward, Zhao Dong, having led troops into the capital without an imperial summons, was stripped of a year’s salary and sent home for half a month’s reflection on his conduct.

When the Duke of Junguogong came out of the imperial study, his face was the color of ash, and his teeth were rattling together.

He had never in his life imagined that his wife had been carrying on with such schemes behind his back.

Had the matter been confined to petty quarrels between women — a bit of mutual mud-slinging — he could have overlooked it. But this affair had grown to such proportions. When the Duke thought about the implications, cold sweat prickled at him.

When he returned home that day, he immediately shut his doors and put his wife to rigorous questioning.

The Duchess had been in low and listless spirits ever since her attempt to drown herself in the river. When one carries a ghost in the heart, there is no peace of mind. From the moment the midwife from her household had gone missing, she had known that trouble was coming. And then when the news spread of Zhao Dong flying into a fury and leading troops to storm the temporary palace — and then of Zhao Dong loudly seeking a divorce from Yuyang — while others might not have made the connection, the Duchess had slowly understood. The words she had put in the midwife’s mouth had been used by someone with far larger designs.

Watching the world change around her, the Duchess had been living in a state of constant dread, not even daring to tell her own husband what she had done.

Now that the Zhao father and son had made two scenes in succession, she actually felt something close to relief. The matter had finally been brought into the open, and she no longer had to keep it buried and hidden.

After all, the current Emperor had benefited from the whole sequence of events. The Prince of Dongping was dead with no one left to corroborate anything. At worst, she was guilty of spreading malicious gossip — she had not actually shaken the foundations of the state.

But the Duke of Junguogong was grinding his teeth in fury, hating this wife of his for ruining his most important plans.

The Emperor’s current push to implement the land equalization reform had met with fierce resistance from the great families. The patriarchs of the major families had privately agreed among themselves to present a united front — to silently occupy the court at the next morning assembly, prostrating themselves before the throne in coordinated protest until the Emperor was compelled to reverse his decree.

But then, in the imperial study just now, the Emperor and the Crown Prince had worked in seamless tandem, producing witnesses and physical evidence from who knew where, and somehow managed to draw a line of connection between the Junguogong estate and the rebel Prince of Dongping.

By the time it was over, the story had been turned into one in which the Duke of Junguogong had directed his wife to spread the slander, collaborating with the Prince of Dongping to deceive Zhao Dong and betray the Emperor Above.

That this injustice had been visited upon him was enough to make the heavens themselves weep blood.

The Crown Prince had said in a tone of cutting coldness that once this charge was confirmed, not a single head in the Junguogong household would be spared.

And then Zhao Dong, standing to one side, had actually stepped forward to volunteer — saying that if His Majesty should wish to have the Junguogong estate searched and seized, he would be willing to atone for his own offense by leading the search party personally, and could guarantee that no one would be overlooked.

Faced with such a situation, the Duke of Junguogong had no recourse beyond mentally cursing everyone’s ancestors. When the Emperor produced the document signifying agreement to the land equalization reform and set it before him, the Duke weighed the costs and benefits, and decided that losing some portion of his landholdings and paying heavier taxes in the future was considerably preferable to his entire family losing their heads.

And so, trembling, he finally did what no great family member had done before — became the first traitor among the noble houses, and in the blank space at the foot of the document, wrote out his name in one sweeping stroke and pressed his handprint beside it.

Imagining the denunciations the other great families would heap upon him when they found out, the Duke of Junguogong was consumed with bitter self-reproach. That entire ball of seething resentment erupted in one concentrated burst, and landed directly on his troublemaking wife.

This time, no amount of intercession made any difference. The Duke of Junguogong took up his brush and, in one decisive stroke, wrote a letter of repudiation, and sent his wife of many years back to her family.

It was said that after the Duchess returned to her family home, she made several scenes of trying to end her life, frightening the maids and matrons so badly that none of them dared leave her side for a moment, and all of them simply stood guard around her at all times.

That day, when they came out of the imperial study, Han Linfeng had patted Zhao Dong on the shoulder and told him that the year’s salary he had been stripped of would be made up by the Eastern Palace out of its own funds. But Zhao Dong’s expression remained dark and heavy. He asked Han Linfeng whether he knew where the Princess had gone.

After Han Linfeng finished telling him, Zhao Dong left without another word.

By the time the next court assembly came around, the great families had believed everything was settled and locked in — their patriarchs had spoken, the agreement had been made, and it was as firm as a nail driven into wood. They would all sit in silent protest together when the Emperor came to court, kneeling until he reversed his orders.

When Han Yi took his place on the dragon throne and looked down at the ranks of stony-faced ministers below him, he had a fairly clear sense of what this day was going to look like — they were going to roast this new Emperor alive over an open flame.

Enough, the Duke of Lu led the charge, calling out: “Your servants speak on behalf of the people, and implore Your Majesty to hold sacred the laws and customs of the Great Wei’s ancestors, and not to rashly alter the land system and undermine the very foundations of the realm.”

When those words were spoken, every official of noble family — with the exception of the small contingent of scholars of humble origin led by Li Guitian — sank to their knees one after another, crying out together that they implored His Majesty to reconsider.

Han Yi furrowed his brow slightly, looked out over the kneeling officials below, and said in a resonant voice: “Regarding the land equalization reform, the proclamation has already been issued. The matter on today’s agenda ought to be the settlement of farmland in the northern territories. Do any of you have anything else to report?”

The kneeling officials sat completely still. Not one of them made a sound. This was a silent work stoppage — a wordless declaration that they were withdrawing their services. State affairs were so numerous each day that even when the Emperor did not consult his ministers but issued commands directly, he still required those ministers to carry them out. By doing this now, they were throwing down their responsibilities and showing the new Emperor exactly what power they held.

Since the founding of the Great Wei, strict observance of the proper conduct between ruler and minister had always been paramount. If Han Yi did not wish to earn a reputation as a tyrant the very moment he ascended the throne, he was effectively powerless against ministers who had banded together to sit in silent protest.

Han Yi had learned early that morning that they intended to embarrass him today, and was thus not surprised. He exchanged a quick look with his eldest son, then spoke slowly and deliberately: “Since you gentlemen wish to sit here and press your position upon Us, it would be Our fault not to accommodate you. And yet the intention behind Our land equalization policy has always been simply this: to ensure that the common people of this realm each have a bowl of warm rice to fill their stomachs. Nothing more. But those who have never gone hungry have no way of knowing what hunger truly feels like. Today, We will simply sit here with you gentlemen, and experience together what it is to be a starving subject. Guards — close the hall doors. We intend to share in the hardships of the common people with Our beloved ministers.”

At that command, the great doors of the hall swung shut with a long, resonant groan. On the dragon throne, the Emperor closed his eyes with perfect composure, and settled in for a leisurely pretend-nap.