Zhù Ying idly stroked the cat, listening to Sheng Ying sitting across from her, talking complete nonsense with no relevance to anything.

That morning, many officials had still been on edge before entering the imperial city. But upon hearing at the city gates that the Emperor had held court normally and that the Chief Ministers and senior officials were at their posts as usual, they all resumed the “measured composure” of pillars of the state. In twos and threes they headed toward their own offices, and as they walked they exchanged oblique remarks and meaningful glances with familiar acquaintances, gathering close friends for a “small gathering.”

Zhù Ying was indifferent to all this. If something had happened, Zheng Xi would in all likelihood have called on her the previous night to help — that man would absolutely not let her sit idle. Since he hadn’t, it meant nothing had happened.

Sheng Ying was different. He had no particularly reliable source of information and felt quite unsettled. The Court of State Ceremonial had no major business these days, and Sheng Ying, making a rare exception, had sought out Zhù Ying. He held an unimportant document — a routine sacrificial text from the Court, for the death of a certain Prefect’s mother; neither a high-ranking nor low-ranking matter.

Zhù Ying said: “You can decide this yourself.”

Sheng Ying said: “How could I act unilaterally? Take a look.”

Zhù Ying glanced at it casually: “Reading all this literary ornateness gives me a headache.”

The two then fell into conversation. Sheng Ying was first to lose restraint: “I really don’t know what happened yesterday.”

Zhù Ying said: “Once the Director gets back from court, we’ll know. If you want to ask him, he’s sure to tell you.”

Sheng Ying said: “The wind is about to rise——”

Zhù Ying played along with nonsense: “No matter how strong the wind, I just go inside, close the doors and windows, and wait for the storm to pass and the sky to clear, then carry on living.”

Sheng Ying looked at her. Zhù Ying said: “Or do you think you and I can stand against the weather? Why rush to get covered in mud?”

Sheng Ying thought: Of course you have no worries — a solitary person of humble origins. However things go, it’s all profit for you. I’m different from you.

Sheng Ying still had a large household to look after. After the new Crown Prince was established and a general amnesty was declared, his father-in-law’s family could finally “return home upon amnesty.” His wife had made his life difficult for half a lifetime over this, demanding that he help bring people back. Sheng Ying had at the time spoken with great righteousness and given all manner of reasons, when in truth he simply had not had the ability to extract them easily. Now things were good — his father-in-law’s family could return home.

But then his wife had begun to think about supporting her family. With perfectly reasonable logic: after decades in a place of exile, even if they had saved something, it was in some remote, harsh land, where houses and furniture would fetch almost nothing, the family had little in the way of portable wealth, and the property in their old home had long since been confiscated. They would still need to live when they got back.

His wife was even planning to bring her family to the capital, the better to provide support close by. Her nephews and grandnephews could study more conveniently here as well.

The children had all grown up; his old wife’s words carried more and more weight. Sheng Ying felt his head might split in two.

Zhù Ying watched him trail off mid-sentence and was quite content with the silence. A while later, Luo Sheng came back from court. Zhù Ying noted the time — Luo Sheng was back slightly later than usual.

Sheng Ying noticed too. Seeing Luo Sheng, he immediately asked: “You’ve had a hard time of it, Director. Did you encounter some great matter?”

Luo Sheng’s expression was not very pleasant, and he said: “Come — let’s talk inside.”

The three entered Luo Sheng’s rooms. Luo Sheng waited for both to sit, then said: “His Majesty… His Majesty… has lost his sight.”

Sheng Ying was startled: “His Majesty has disappeared?”

Luo Sheng said: “Sit down!”

Zhù Ying asked: “His eyes?”

Luo Sheng nodded: “Yesterday he suddenly fainted. When he came to, he could no longer see.”

Zhù Ying felt a weight lift from her chest. With this, everything from yesterday made sense. No major problem.

Luo Sheng added: “Liu Songnian has been appointed Chief Minister.”

“Ah?” This time both Zhù Ying and Sheng Ying were surprised simultaneously. Not that there was anything wrong with Liu Songnian — in Sheng Ying’s view, Liu Songnian was the supreme literary authority of the realm, which was excellent. In Zhù Ying’s view, Liu Songnian had a wonderful temperament and his mind was sound. But Chief Minister? It simply felt too sudden.

Luo Sheng’s tone held a note of hesitation: “I also find it a bit odd, but he has prestige throughout the realm, and the Emperor said it was appropriate, and the Chief Ministers raised no objection.”

Zhù Ying thought: Liu Songnian had been in the capital for a good twenty years, holding high position but no real power, having neither been tempered in local governance nor worked his way through central administration. What was the intent?

Wait! She suddenly recalled something Zheng Xi had once said about Liu Songnian, and in her heart an idea suddenly arose.

Luo Sheng said: “We should all prepare congratulatory gifts for the new Chief Minister. For now, let there be nothing else, and let nothing else happen.”

Zhù Ying and Sheng Ying both agreed. Zhù Ying said: “Let me go have a look outside — there have been more spring rains these past few days, and a few places are leaking.”

Luo Sheng said: “Do you really need to go yourself? What are those people doing their jobs for?”

Zhù Ying said: “Not the Hall of Ten Thousand Peoples — it’s at the Crown Prince’s old residence.”

Luo Sheng said: “Oh, oh, then go.”

Sheng Ying still wanted to extract more information from Luo Sheng, so he produced the document again. Zhù Ying rose and headed out, but had barely taken two steps when a small eunuch came running over. He was slightly unfamiliar to her; Zhù Ying raised her voice: “Who is that? Someone go and ask.”

Sheng Ying and Luo Sheng fell quiet. One of Luo Sheng’s clerks stepped forward hurriedly, glanced at Luo Sheng, who nodded. The clerk ran over, then came running back: “Sir, the Prince of Qiyang and the Princess Consort are arriving shortly.”

Zhù Ying paused her steps. Together with Luo Sheng and Sheng Ying, she waited for the Prince of Qiyang, and thought: What a clever person.

For a prince to go running around to the Six Boards and Nine Courts would be inappropriate. The Prince of Qiyang bringing his little wife to see her father-in-law — the Emperor would not fault him for that.

It was also Zhù Ying’s first clear look at Luo Yi. The little girl was rosy and lovely, dressed in embroidered silks, her hair no longer in a young girl’s style but gathered up with hairpieces into a married woman’s bun. She was not in the grand bridal makeup of the wedding day; today she walked without attendants supporting her on both sides. Her small face wore a trace of fatigue, but seeing Luo Sheng, it blossomed into a reassured smile.

The two parties exchanged courtesies. The Prince of Qiyang both stopped all three from bowing and moved to return half-courtesies. Luo Yi waited until the formalities were done, then called out: “Father!”

Soft and crisp — the Court of State Ceremonial had never before heard such a sound. Luo Sheng was delighted and stretched out his arms as if to hold his daughter, then halfway retracted them, and laughed: “Oh, here you are.” Then to the Prince of Qiyang: “Physician, you’ve really…you’ve really…”

The Prince of Qiyang said: “Yesterday she was quite frightened — she cried half the night.”

“I did not,” said Luo Yi.

Both men laughed.

Luo Sheng said to Sheng Ying: “Let’s handle that matter from earlier the way we discussed.” Seeing this, Zhù Ying also took her leave: “I’ll step out for a moment. I fear I won’t make it back for the midday meal.”

Sheng Ying had no desire to go but had no choice except to leave reluctantly. The Prince of Qiyang kept his gaze on Zhù Ying; yesterday, though nothing had ultimately happened, the situation had been dangerous. He still remembered it was Zhù Ying who had hinted that he should stay inside the palace — and had he not done so, he would have missed the whole thing. He wanted to say a few more words to Zhù Ying, but she gave him a bow, gave Luo Yi a bow, and walked away without looking back.

The Prince of Qiyang felt a slight deflation. Since his father had become Crown Prince, he hadn’t been so ignored. Well, perhaps…perhaps…

Tomorrow he would bring the little Princess Consort to visit her father again.

……——

Zhù Ying left the imperial city, first went to the Crown Prince’s old residence to look at the roof, and then went to the Office of the Capital Governor.

Zheng Xi had finished all his meetings. The Governor’s Office was fairly busy today; following yesterday’s “keep watch over the capital,” Zheng Xi had deployed people further. From today onward, he was strictly controlling the movements of all factions within the capital’s jurisdiction. Monitoring all nobility and high officials specifically was not quite possible, so Zheng Xi had taken a different approach: rather than monitoring specific individuals, he selected several key roads leading to the imperial city. He deployed personnel at several critical points along these roads, to patrol and raise the alarm immediately if any situation developed.

When Zhù Ying arrived at the Governor’s Office, Zheng Xi was studying a map of the capital and had not turned around even at the sound of footsteps.

Zhù Ying was equally unceremonious. She walked to his side and looked at the map with him. Besides the ward and city walls, the map had several locations circled. Zhù Ying recognized them at once — these were the residences of the various princes and senior officials.

Zheng Xi turned to look her up and down: “Not bad — you can still keep your composure.”

Zhù Ying said: “There’s nothing to put me on edge.”

“Nothing and you’d still come out? Is it a foreign envoy, a tributary king? Or someone filing a complaint on their way to the capital?”

“Oh — I went to the Crown Prince’s old residence to check on the leaky roof.”

Zheng Xi curled his lip. Zhù Ying added: “And someone’s daughter and son-in-law had come to visit her father — it would be a bit tactless of me to keep sitting there getting in the way of the family reunion.”

Zheng Xi said: “Physician is a clever one.”

The two then looked at the map together. Zheng Xi said: “I never expected — another Chief Minister added.” His tone carried some feeling. He had thought that a few more years of diligence might bring him to the Grand Council himself; no one had expected Liu Songnian to take that place first. Before the second marriage, relations had been fine on the surface. After it, with Liu Songnian being something like a half father-in-law, he had looked at Zheng Xi as though he were no nose and no eyes.

Zhù Ying said: “You’ll be next.”

“Enough of that.” Zheng Xi gave a light rebuke, with a hint of laughter in his voice. He extended a finger and pointed at several places, lowering his voice: “If anything changes, watch these.”

Zhù Ying said: “Will anything change? The Crown Prince and Prince of Qiyang are both in the palace.”

After the former Crown Prince had passed away, the Emperor had not established a new one. The princes, though not particularly capable, were still the Emperor’s sons. A great many people attached themselves to them, and each had developed his own sphere of influence. If no Crown Prince were established and the Emperor died one day, these various factions might genuinely come to blows. This was also why the ministers, after much deliberation and patience, finally could not hold back any longer and pressured the Emperor to establish a Crown Prince.

Before that appointment, Zheng Xi’s concerns had been well-founded — there truly could have been unrest in the struggle for succession. After the Crown Prince was established, princes with influence were no longer a great problem. She had also given the Eastern Palace a stratagem, keeping the Prince of Qiyang inside the palace as well. If the Emperor were to die, with the Crown Prince in the palace and the Prince of Qiyang there to take decisive action, things would proceed smoothly.

If yesterday were taken as a rehearsal, the actions inside the palace had been quite orderly. If something truly did happen, as long as the palace gates were sealed, the death kept secret at first, and the various princes and ministers summoned in the Emperor’s name and lured into the palace, then the new emperor could ascend before the coffin and proclaim the accession to the realm.

No major problem. Even easier to manage than Prince An’s rebellion of years past. That was forty years ago, when the country was still relatively young; Prince An at that time had also supervised the suppression of rebellions and had troops under his command. Now the princes only had the guards of their individual estates on paper, all untested in battle, none of whom had seen blood.

Zheng Xi said: “You don’t understand. Better to be careful. If something does happen, you must be on guard too. If I can’t get word to you in time and you can’t find me, make your own decisions. If you happen to encounter Thirteenth Young Master and his people on the way, do not hesitate — move swiftly and decisively…”

“Understood.” Zhù Ying memorized these several locations.

Zheng Xi pointed out more spots: “During the Prince An affair, that was the entry point…” He went on at some length, and at the end asked whether she had been to Liu Songnian’s house yet.

Zhù Ying said: “I’ll go a little later — it’s not my turn yet.”

Zheng Xi said teasingly: “Not your turn? Don’t you often go to his house and stay half the day? You’ve even spent the night there a few times. You two get on very well! Go — when he tires of everyone else, who knows how he’ll torment people.”

Zhù Ying said: “It’s not like that.”

“Hm?”

“When I was in Wuzhou in the past, I’d occasionally return to the capital and go to his residence, and we’d exchange a few more words. Lately, seeing each other often, we’ve run out of things to say. Now we mostly sit in quiet company.”

Zheng Xi said: “That he lets you sit there is itself remarkable. Go then — this man is not simple. Don’t think of him as just an old grandfather who teaches children nursery rhymes.”

Zhù Ying smiled: “Though I don’t know much of his past, seeing how Wang Yunhe and Shi Kun’s generation treat him, I can tell he is not simple. Since I cannot see through him, I am simply grateful for the help he has given me over these years. The rest is not my concern.”

“Find time to come sit at my home more often, or come here to find me. Ah, in troubled times, we must keep in contact.”

“Yes.”

……

Zhù Ying left the Governor’s Office and first paid a visit to Old Ma’s tea shop. Though Old Ma was dead, customers had grown accustomed to the name, and still called it Old Ma’s Tea Shop. The new proprietor had also come to be called “Old Ma” through this misnomer, and the new proprietor had simply accepted it.

Zhù Ying entered the tea shop and called out: “Old Ma.”

“Old Ma” hurried to greet her: “Young Master Zhù.”

Zhù Ying smiled and asked: “Business flourishing?”

Old Ma smiled faintly: “Thankfully, thankfully.” And it was truly a fortunate thing. This tea shop was not high-class, selling ordinary tea. Since Zhù Ying had returned, Old Ma could get his tea directly from Wuzhou, cutting out a middleman and saving money that would otherwise have gone to a wholesaler. And with Zhù Ying’s good relations with the Capital Governor’s Office, Old Ma was spared no small amount of trouble.

The tea was served. The one who brought it was Old Ma’s younger sister, who placed a cup of “good tea” on a tray and offered it first to Zhù Ying. She then went to fill a large tray with bowls of ordinary tea, and carried it over for Hu Shijie and the other attendants to drink.

This woman and Zhù Ying had a history of some sort between them. Zhù Ying asked curiously: “Doesn’t your family have farmland in the country? Is the spring plowing finished? Why are you here helping out?” If she remembered correctly, this woman had been married off. The young couple, though not well-off, had had a small holding in the countryside outside the city.

The woman’s eyes reddened. She sniffed and said: “Hmm. Just getting by.”

Zhù Ying said: “Something’s wrong. Have you run into trouble?” The capital region hadn’t suffered any great disaster in these years. Ordinary folk who didn’t meet with any major illness or injury, fire or theft, could scrape by on what they dug out of the earth — not freezing or starving to death. To abandon spring plowing and run to the city to help, before it was even finished — something was off.

Old Ma quietly said: “Their family…”

Zhù Ying said: “Go on.”

Old Ma said: “They opened a bit of new land. It had all been cultivated, and Prince Lu wants to enclose the wasteland…”

Zhù Ying heard the words “enclose the wasteland” and understood the whole thing at once: “The land was never registered.”

The woman’s eyes reddened further: “Yes. Still hadn’t gotten around to it. Several good harvests hadn’t come in yet, and when you register it you have to start paying taxes, so we thought we’d save up another two years’ grain first. Who could have known — all gone at once. My husband tried to reason with them, and he got beaten too. He’s ill at home now, and the children…”

The court encouraged reclaiming wasteland, but opening new ground in the capital region was not easy. The capital had many capable people, nobles and powerful clans everywhere. Any plot worth having had long been taken by those with the means to take it. For ordinary small people, they were the ones being “taken from.” It wasn’t that there was no decent land in the capital region — it was that none had been left for the poor. What could be done if one needed to survive? Go further out to harder conditions and open new land there.

This produced a paradox. Opening wasteland meant reclaiming wasteland. Wasteland, by definition, was not recorded in the land registers as farmland — that was precisely why it could be opened. Before it was properly cultivated, no one would report it as farmland; not having reported it meant it had no record. Having no record, even while being actively cultivated, meant that on paper it was still a tract of wasteland.

Saying all of this sounded like a mouthful of circular nonsense. But the “open stratagem” that Prince Lu — or powerful clans in general — used was hidden precisely within this circular nonsense.

A tract of wasteland, before being turned into productive farmland, was nominally still wasteland with no official record. No official record meant no grounds for a complaint even if you wanted to file one. This place that was in practice already capable of producing grain was, in the government’s ledgers, “wasteland.” You say it is the farmland you cultivated? Where is the proof? You didn’t file a report with the yamen; do you think you’re in the right? Wasteland has no legal protection.

If Prince Lu were to say he wanted to enclose civilian farmland, an upright censor might impeach him, an honest Capital Governor might hound him with criticism. But if he said he wanted a tract of wasteland, he would certainly get his wish.

It was difficult to reclaim land. Not reporting first meant not having to pay taxes. What Old Ma’s sister had done was not without reason. To start paying taxes before having even recouped your investment in opening the land would mean opening it for nothing. Even with the government’s incentive of exempting newly reclaimed land from tax for three or five years, if counted from the moment the first shovel of earth was turned, three or five years was pinched and barely enough for ordinary people. So most would delay registration for a few years.

Old Ma’s sister’s family had the misfortune of running into this precise situation.

“If you don’t register with the yamen and pay taxes, I won’t recognize your claim” — Zhù Ying had done this very thing every day in Wuzhou. Encouraging the opening of wasteland, she did that in Wuzhou every day too.

She was all too familiar with these tactics. Only she never used them to squeeze ordinary people; her hand was light. She could wait for people to have a proper livelihood before tallying things up, and she collected taxes at a low rate.

Here in the capital, now managed by Zheng Xi, he was not a harsh man either. But if this lawsuit against Prince Lu landed on his table right now, he would only smooth things over. Compared to governance, Prince Lu’s bit of “wasteland” was nothing worth speaking of.

Perhaps Zheng Xi also had a belly full of irritation: not registering land reclamation — what were they thinking? Concealing farmland? Loss of revenue?

Zhù Ying sighed, reached into her coin purse, and extracted a handful of coins: “Take these for now.”

Old Ma moved to decline. His sister looked deeply awkward, but she genuinely needed the money. Zhù Ying smiled and placed the coins on the table, then fished out a small ingot of gold and placed it on top of the copper coins.

The brother and sister both knelt down. Zhù Ying said: “Get up. You have done nothing terribly wrong; it isn’t right that you should lose everything all at once. I cannot promise you anything right now. Take this first for the immediate need. Get up — I have questions for you.”

Hearing there were questions to be asked, the brother and sister scrambled to their feet. Zhù Ying first asked how much land they had, then asked how many others were in a similar situation, and then asked how many people altogether had met with comparable circumstances, and so on.

Having learned approximately what she needed, Zhù Ying led Hu Shijie and the others out. Leaving the tea shop, she felt a pang of regret: she should have brought Qingjun and the others along just now.

The emotions of Hu Shijie and the others were a mixture of anger and low spirits. They had not seen people treated this way in a very long time. Compared to this, Wuzhou truly had been a land of peace and plenty.

Ah, but it was no longer so peaceful now, either. I wonder how the Censors’ investigation went…