◎ Crabapple Blossoms ◎

Wu Fen seemed about to clap Zhou Tan on the shoulder, but Zhou Tan smoothly stepped back, avoiding his touch, and cupped his hands politely instead. “Prefect.”

“Younger brother, I heard your party ran into bandits just outside the city?” Wu Fen said, taking no offense, lowering his hand and looking him up and down with an eager expression. “Were you hurt at all?”

“Not at all,” Zhou Tan said.

Watching from a distance, Qu You caught Zhou Tan glancing back to wink at her.

The man had clearly been holding back for far too long in the capital—now he seemed positively itching to put on a show.

Zhou Tan adopted an expression of lingering fright mixed with faint distaste and said to Wu Fen, “We only lost a bit of property… I’d long heard that the bandits of the Western Frontier had been wiped out entirely. How is it, then, that people still dare block the road and rob travelers? I wonder—is it the same within Ruozhou city itself?”

Wu Fen suppressed a laugh inwardly, thinking that this man was clearly someone who’d grown too accustomed to a life of gold and jade back in the capital, unable to stomach the sight of such rough, violent bandit business—he must have been badly shaken.

He’d heard rumors before that this man had wielded a heavy hand at the Ministry of Justice and even brought down Peng Yue, but Wu Fen privately knew Peng Yue’s downfall had simply been the outcome of factional infighting among the ministers. Besides, Zhou Tan had only ended up at the Ministry of Justice because he’d been implicated after the Lantern Tower case—at heart, he was still just a civil official.

The capital and the Western Frontier were worlds apart, with news traveling poorly between them—there had surely been some exaggeration in what he’d heard.

Sure enough, sending men to pose as bandits and frighten him earlier had been an excellent decision—it had immediately revealed the man to be all bluster.

Easily rattled. Easy to handle.

“Young Lord Zhou may not realize,” Wu Fen said, leading him and his party into the city, past townsfolk who watched timidly before being driven off by soldiers, “Ruozhou lies far too close to Xishao. No matter how thoroughly I patrol day and night, it’s simply impossible to prevent Xishao men from slipping in to frighten the common folk outside the city walls. General Wang, who guards the city, is eager enough to root out the bandits, but he doesn’t have enough men under him, so the two sides can only stand at a standoff… There’s a great deal to manage in this city, truly difficult to handle.”

“I see…” Zhou Tan nodded thoughtfully, then added, “I heard the previous vice prefect died while transporting grain to the frontier camp. This place truly isn’t peaceful. Prefect Wu, I’ve only just arrived and may need some time to adjust—perhaps we could delay the formal transfer of authority for now. My wife was badly frightened and has fallen ill; I need to look after her for a while before I can properly take up my post.”

“No rush, no rush at all,” Wu Fen said quickly. “Young Lord Zhou should simply go and rest. There’s no hurry to come to the prefectural office for the handover until your wife has recovered. While you’re in Ruozhou, aside from myself and General Wang, the only other person you’ll need to call on is the Marquis of Xiangning—though the old gentleman rarely receives guests, so a calling card with proper courtesies will suffice.”

Zhou Tan seemed uninterested in the Marquis of Xiangning and asked no further questions. After exchanging a few more pleasantries, he took his leave and returned to the carriage to attend to his frail, delicate wife.

Standing by the roadside, Wu Fen watched the dozen-odd carriages pass by on their way to the residence he’d arranged in advance, and let out a small laugh.

The aide beside him asked quickly, “What does my lord make of him?”

Wu Fen turned the question back. “What does Adviser He make of him?”

He Yuankai’s eyes flickered as he weighed his words carefully. “He’s a civil official through and through—carries himself with real presence, seems quite learned. But no matter how much book knowledge a man has, it’s useless out here on the frontier.”

Wu Fen laughed heartily. “Well said.”

He glanced once more toward the mouth of the alley. “Demoted and sent here from the capital—naturally he’s unwilling and resentful about it. If he’ll just behave himself, that’s fine. But if he turns out as stubborn as that Lin He fellow before him, we can simply find someone new to take over the grain transport.”

He Yuankai said with a smile, “My lord is wise. So our earlier plan…”

“No need to go to so much trouble,” Wu Fen said. “Just have them go through the motions. I doubt he’ll notice anything.”

He Yuankai said, “Understood.”

Back in the carriage, Zhou Tan noticed Qu You smiling at him and asked, “What are you so pleased about?”

“It’s rare to see my husband in such a mood,” Qu You teased. “Quite entertaining to watch.”

The residence the two of them were staying in had belonged to the previous vice prefect and sat in a relatively prosperous part of Ruozhou city. It wasn’t large, but it suited their household perfectly.

Nanny Yun, well practiced in the art of settling in a household, soon had everything arranged properly. Qu You rested for a few days, and Zhou Tan stayed at the residence the whole time, never once going out.

“How much longer are you planning to play this waiting game?” Qu You asked, sprawled across the desk, watching him, looking rather glum. “We’ve rested plenty these past few days—why don’t we go out and look around the city today?”

Zhou Tan checked the date and said, “All right. But you’ll need to wear a wide-brimmed hat.”

Qu You didn’t understand. “Why?”

“The Western Frontier rarely sees a young lady as lovely as you,” Zhou Tan said with perfect seriousness. “Besides, I told Wu Fen you were confined to bed with illness—it wouldn’t do to be caught in the lie. I’ll ride out with you in the carriage, and then you can take a maid and wander about on your own while I wait for you there.”

His tone was so perfectly ordinary that Qu You genuinely couldn’t tell, for a moment, whether he was being sincere or teasing her.

So the two of them had a carriage rented from outside. Qu You put on her wide-brimmed hat and, taking He Xing with her, got out to wander around, picking up some candied fruits along the way, as well as some of the gauze scarves and small trinkets peddlers sold that were unique to the Western Frontier.

Zhou Tan accompanied her through three streets before they finally headed home as dusk fell. Watching her, thoroughly absorbed in picking out little trinkets in the carriage, he suddenly asked, “Does anything strike you as odd?”

Qu You turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”

Zhou Tan leaned back at ease. “You’re not usually this fond of shopping.”

“Ugh, you’re so sharp, it always makes me feel like I have no secrets left at all,” Qu You sighed, setting down the things in her hands and scooting closer to him. “Honestly, I just wanted to see what the local customs of Ruozhou were like, and chat up some of the street vendors—see if I could get anything useful out of them. But by the third person I spoke to, something felt off…”

Zhou Tan’s brow twitched. Qu You went on, “Every single shop owner—every vendor, everyone who came up to greet me—wasn’t speaking with a Ruozhou accent at all. From what I could tell, it sounded much more like accents from the Central Plains or the Jiangnan region.”

“Do you know why?”

Zhou Tan, as though performing a magic trick, produced from his sleeve a somewhat weathered wooden token. It was exquisitely carved, shaped like a flower, with some faint, hard-to-make-out characters etched into it.

He’d assumed Qu You likely wouldn’t recognize such a thing. Instead, the moment she saw it, she snatched it up, thoroughly shocked, turning it over and over in her hands, murmuring, “The Crabapple Decree…”

She was so stunned her hands were trembling. Zhou Tan looked rather surprised. “You actually recognize this? I would have thought… at your age, you’d rarely have come across such a thing.”

How could she not recognize it—this very object was still on display in a museum in the capital, even in her own time!

“During Emperor Xuan’s reign, the Yellow River breached its banks, and men were sent east from the capital to manage the flooding and control the disaster. The flood drove a great many displaced people west into the Central Plains, and to pacify them, Emperor Xuan issued two decrees.”

She recited the provisions as though reciting from a textbook—after all, this finally touched on the very heart of her field of study.

“The first ordered the Western Frontier camp to build two sections of city wall along the edge of the eleven prefectures—the still-unfinished walls at Lishao Pass. Displaced people who volunteered to help build the walls would be provided for by the court and granted residency in the northwest. The second was the issuing of this ‘Crabapple Decree’—merchants who hired displaced people to work for them would receive one token for every ten workers hired, and this token could be used to reduce commercial taxes, up to a limit of fifty percent.”

Zhou Tan was quiet for a moment, then said slowly, “You remember this more clearly than I do.”

“How did you come to have this?” Qu You said, gripping his hand with the Crabapple token pressed between their palms. “This matters a great deal to me… I can’t explain the details right now.”

“It’s all right. I trust you,” Zhou Tan said, stroking the back of her hand, easing her agitation somewhat. “This Crabapple token in your hand—Xiao Yan gave it to me.”

“Why would something like this exist out here in the Western Frontier?”

“That’s exactly the question,” Zhou Tan said, his expression turning faintly wry as he studied the wooden token. He asked abruptly, “Do you know who issued the Crabapple Decree?”

Qu You didn’t understand the point of the question. “Wasn’t it the Late Emperor?”

Zhou Tan shook his head. “Someone still had to draft the decree for him.”

Qu You suddenly seemed to understand something, her head snapping up as she gasped, “It—it was Chancellor Gu?”

“These two decrees were drafted and submitted by my teacher while he was overseeing the flood work,” Zhou Tan said, his tone distant, as though recalling something from long ago. “It was highly effective—it nearly solved the problem of displaced people caused by the flooding entirely. The first batch of Crabapple tokens were distributed by my teacher himself, and he earned a great deal of praise for it. Then, not long before the Lantern Tower case, an old friend of his out in the Western Frontier sent him a letter.”

“Once the displaced population had mostly settled, the Crabapple Decree nearly vanished east of the capital—it survives now only as a curiosity merchants show off. But at some point, without anyone quite noticing, this decree, meant to apply only in the east, made its way out here to the Western Frontier—where the land is full of displaced people originally recruited to build those walls… With the emperor so far away, merchants here, in collusion with local officials to reduce their taxes, have deliberately obstructed these displaced people from ever obtaining proper household registration, ensuring there would always be displaced laborers here, and that the Crabapple Decree would always remain in effect. Merchants across all eleven prefectures have flocked here for it, forcing these people to labor not only on a wall that will never be finished, but also to work for them—practically keeping them as slaves… for three or four years now, day after day.”

Qu You felt a chill run down her spine. She closed her eyes, and in an instant, understood almost everything—why Gu Zhiyan had fought to the death to protect Zhou Tan’s life, and why Zhou Tan had so meticulously arranged everything to have himself demoted here to the Western Frontier.

This was the unfinished business between the two of them.

This was also where the name of the Flower-Cutting Decree came from.

The one matter Gu Zhiyan had left unresolved before his death was surely this—a policy meant to save lives that had, over the years, been twisted by distant, unsupervised officials into a decree of bondage.

Without proper household registration, and with their original temporary relocation papers long since expired, these displaced people had nowhere to turn and no one to appeal to—trapped here, living lives that were neither free laborers nor outright slaves.

Even if they managed to flee beyond the eleven prefectures, they’d be caught by the authorities elsewhere as unregistered “black households.”

“You happened to want to go out today of all days—it’s the Flower Festival, and the merchants will surely be out enjoying the spring scenery too, leaving this group of people behind to mind their shops.”

“A decree issued to save lives, and out here on the frontier, they’ve twisted it into this,” Qu You said, feeling her wrists tremble with anger. “Are these displaced people meant to serve as private slaves for the officials? I only wandered around casually and already saw so much of it—there’s no way Wu Fen doesn’t know. He’s certainly never done anything to stop it, and may well have colluded with others to make it even worse.”

She was still fuming by the time they returned to the residence. Zhou Tan walked in with her, and just as they reached the main hall, the man in black came hurrying over carrying a sack full of rice. “My lord, when I was just seeing the driver out, I ran into a scrawny child at the gate. He was clutching this rice, saying he couldn’t sell it and would have nothing to eat today if he didn’t. Something seemed off about it, so I took it upon myself to buy it.”

Qu You reached out and grabbed a handful, curious. “What’s off about it?”

Zhou Tan, however, was staring straight at him. “Go on.”

The man in black rolled back the top of the sack, revealing a mottled ink mark near the opening—almost illegible now, but faintly recognizable as some kind of symbol, along with a string of numbers.

“This is military grain,” the man in black said.

Zhou Tan’s expression changed instantly. Qu You glanced at him and immediately decided, “Hei Yi, take a few of the household servants and head toward the market near the gate. See if any of the stalls or grain shops still have sacks like this one—if you find any, buy up as many as you can.”

The man in black understood the gravity of the matter at once and left immediately.

“Well, well,” Zhou Tan said, not angry so much as amused, hands clasped behind his back as he walked into the main hall. He Xing dismissed the servants from the hall and shut the carved wooden doors. “What nerve… Convenient timing—Wu Fen’s wife’s birthday is coming up, and an invitation just arrived for us. In three days, we’ll go pay him a proper visit, with a fine gift in hand.”