It’s rotten,” Mei says, staring into the jar with deep suspicion.
“You’ve made us rotten cabbage.”
“It’s fermented, not rotten, there’s a very important difference.” I pry the lid off further, releasing a sharp, tangy smell that fills the whole kitchen, and watch Mei recoil like I’ve personally offended her nose.
“Trust me.
This is basically a revolutionary technique from my old life.
Give it two weeks and it turns into something incredible.”
“You want us to wait two weeks for cabbage to finish rotting.”
“Fermenting.”
“That still sounds like rotting with extra steps.”
I’ve packed the cabbage tight into three separate jars, layered with salt and a paste of ground chili and garlic that took embarrassingly long to approximate from local ingredients, and set them in the coolest corner of the storeroom where they can do their slow, mysterious work undisturbed.
It’s not exactly kimchi, not with what I’ve got to work with here, but it’s close enough that if this goes the way I remember it going, we’re about to introduce this entire century to something it has absolutely no idea it needs yet.
“Two weeks,” I say again, sealing the jars.
“Then you eat your words, along with some very good cabbage.”
Tan turns out to have connections I hadn’t fully appreciated until we actually needed them, a cousin who works kitchen supply for a minor noble house, a friend of a friend who trades dried goods near the eastern gate, a whole quiet network of people willing to move product without asking too many questions, provided the product’s good and the price is fair.
“You’re better at this than I expected,” I tell him, watching him negotiate a trade for dried herbs with the easy, unbothered confidence of someone who’s clearly been doing small scale deals under the radar for a while now.
“Guard pay’s not great,” he says, shrugging.
“A man finds ways to supplement.”
“A man of many talents, apparently.”
“I try, my lady.”
Casimir, when he joins us for the actual negotiating sessions, turns out to be a surprise in an entirely different direction.
My first instinct was that a prince would be useless at haggling, too used to people simply giving him what he wants without argument, but it turns out the second he stops trying to act like a customer and starts acting like what he actually is, a man who’s spent his whole life reading political leverage, he’s terrifyingly good at it. This chapter is updated first at NovelPing.
“Their asking price assumes we need this trade more than they do,” he says quietly, watching a merchant hem and haw over dried herb rates.
“We don’t.
Let the silence sit.”
I let the silence sit.
The merchant, unable to bear it, drops his price within thirty seconds.
“How did you know that would work?”
“The same way you know which weed’s edible and which one will make Mei sick,” he says.
“Pattern recognition.
I’ve just spent my life reading rooms full of people trying not to say what they actually want, instead of gardens.”
“That’s a genuinely useful skill to have hiding under all that royal composure.”
“I contain multitudes,” he says, echoing my own line back at me with a small, satisfied look that tells me he’s been saving that one up for a while.
By evening we’ve got three separate trade agreements lined up, dried herbs for cloth, surplus grain for coin, and a tentative deal for the fermented cabbage once it’s finished doing whatever mysterious thing it’s doing in those jars, and the three of us end up crowded into the kitchen together, sorting the day’s proceeds and prepping tomorrow’s inventory in the easy, comfortable quiet that’s become normal between us over the past few weeks.
Mei hums something while she works, some tune I don’t recognize, and Casimir’s sleeves are rolled up, hands steady as he sorts dried herbs into neat bundles with the same careful precision he brings to everything, and I find myself watching him do it for a beat longer than I probably should, the low kitchen light doing something unfairly generous to the line of his jaw.
He looks up.
Catches me looking.
Neither of us says anything about it, but something warm passes between us anyway, quiet and private, and I go back to my own sorting with a small smile I don’t bother trying to hide, not from him, not tonight.
“You two are doing the thing again,” Mei says, not even looking up from her herbs.
“What thing.”
“The thing where you stare at each other and pretend you’re not.”
“We were discussing herb ratios,” Casimir says, with the perfectly straight face of a man who has gotten remarkably good at lying about very small things while remaining completely honest about everything that matters. This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
“Sure you were,” Mei says, entirely unconvinced, and goes back to humming, leaving the two of us to our shared, unspoken amusement and the quiet, comfortable work of the evening.
The first real trade goes through three days later, dried herbs for a decent bolt of proper winter cloth, delivered quietly through Tan’s contact near the eastern gate, and I stand in the storeroom afterward looking at the cloth, at the coin pouch heavier than it’s ever been, at the whole small, stubborn operation we’ve built out of garbage vegetables and spite, and feel something settle deep and satisfied in my chest.
“We did it,” Mei says, delighted, running a hand over the new cloth like she can’t quite believe it’s real.
“We did it,” I agree, and for a second, just a second, everything feels solid.
Safe.
Like maybe this strange, borrowed life is actually going to work out.
That feeling lasts exactly until Tan comes through the gate that evening looking considerably less relaxed than usual.
“There’s a problem,” he says, without preamble.
“Someone at the eastern market recognized the prince.
Two days ago, during the herb trade.
A merchant’s apprentice, apparently, used to work near the palace stables, knew his face despite the hat.”
The satisfied warmth in my chest turns cold fast.
“Recognized him how thoroughly?”
“Thoroughly enough that it’s already being whispered about among a few of the market regulars.
Nothing official yet.
But it’s out there now, and whispers have a way of traveling toward exactly the wrong ears eventually.”
I think about the Dowager, about Lord Xu’s failed scheme, about how carefully we’ve been guarding this whole fragile arrangement, and feel the ground shift slightly under everything we’ve built.
“Well,” I say, exhaling slow, already turning the problem over the way I turn over everything else, “guess we’d better figure out our next move before the wrong ears catch up to us first.”