Tan arrives that night looking like a man who’s been carrying something heavy for longer than he’s let on.
“You wanted to talk,” he says, settling onto the crate across from me with less of his usual easy posture, shoulders drawn tight in a way I haven’t seen from him before.
“Widow Sun mentioned something today.
Tax collectors squeezing farmers two districts over, harder than the official rate should allow.” I watch his face carefully as I say it, and the flicker of recognition there tells me everything before he even opens his mouth.
“You already knew.”
“I’ve known for a while,” he admits, quiet.
“Didn’t think it was my place to bring it to you.
You’ve got enough sitting on your plate already, what with the prince and the conspiracy and the cabbage war.”
“The cabbage war is resolved, for the record.
And I’d rather know things and decide for myself what’s my problem to worry about, thanks.”
He nods slowly, seeming to weigh something, then exhales and starts talking properly, the words coming easier once he’s decided to actually let them out.
“It’s not just one district.
It’s spreading.
Official tax rate’s set by the crown, published, everyone knows what they owe.
But the collectors in three districts east of here have been quietly adding what they call maintenance fees, road fees, granary fees, all sorts of invented nonsense stacked on top of the real number.
Farmers pay it because they don’t know any better, or because they’re scared of what happens if they refuse.”
“And the extra money doesn’t go to the crown.”
“Doesn’t go anywhere official, as far as anyone can tell.
Just disappears into the collectors’ own pockets, or higher up, depending who you ask.” He rubs a hand over his face, tired in a way that makes him look older than his years for a second.
“My own family farms near one of those districts.
That’s how I know.
My uncle sold off half his land last season just to cover what he owed.
Didn’t even fight it.
Just paid, because fighting it meant risking worse.”
Something in my chest goes tight and furious at that, quiet and controlled in the way real anger usually is once it’s had time to settle instead of flare.
“Worse how?”
“Collectors have muscle behind them.
Nothing official happens to those farmers, not on paper.
But things go wrong for them anyway.
Livestock disappears.
Barns catch fire.
Nobody proves anything, and nobody stops paying after that.”
I sit with this for a long moment, feeling the shape of it settle into place alongside everything else we’ve already uncovered, the chest, Minister Zhuo, the Dowager’s faction, all of it converging into something bigger and uglier than I’d let myself fully imagine.
“This connects to the Dowager,” I say slowly.
“It has to.
The money’s going somewhere, and money like that doesn’t move without funding something.”
“I don’t have proof of that part.
Just the part where good people are getting squeezed and scared into silence, and nobody with any real power seems to care enough to look into it.”
“I care.”
He looks up at that, something cautiously hopeful crossing his face.
“I figured you might..”
Casimir, when I bring it to him that same evening, goes very still in the specific way he does whenever a piece falls into place that he’s been half expecting for a while now.
“Show me the numbers you have,” he says, and I hand over what little Tan gave me, watching him cross reference it against the ledgers he’s already been quietly collecting since he first started tracking Minister Zhuo’s old records.
“It’s the same pattern,” he says after a long moment, low and grim.
“Skimmed revenue, funneled through invented fees, disappearing before it ever reaches an official account.
This is exactly how the payments to Minister Zhuo’s silence were structured, six years ago.
Different scale, but the same architecture.”
“So it’s not just old history anymore.
It’s happening right now, to real people, and it’s still funding whatever the Dowager’s building.”
“It would explain a great deal,” he says.
“A faction doesn’t sustain itself on ambition alone.
It needs resources.
Loyal men, bribes, favors called in at the right moments. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
If she’s been quietly draining tax revenue from three districts for years, that’s a significant, ongoing source of exactly that kind of funding.”
I think about Tan’s uncle, forced to sell half his land rather than fight a system stacked against him from every angle, and feel the itch in my chest sharpen into something closer to resolve than curiosity.
“We need to see it ourselves,” I say.
“Not just numbers on a ledger.
The actual district.
The actual farmers.”
“That’s dangerous, Wren.
I’ll have to get my brother’s opinion if we need to go with protection”.
He says..
looking uncomfortable at the thought.
“Then we go quietly.
Same as the market.
Nobody needs to know who we are.” I tell.
He’s quiet for a moment, clearly running through every reason this is a bad idea, and I watch him arrive, reluctantly, at the same conclusion I already have.
“If we’re doing this,” he says finally, “we do it carefully.
No disguises that fool nobody this time.”
“Rude, but fair, given recent history.” I allow myself a small, tired smile despite the heaviness of everything we’ve just uncovered.
“So we’re doing this.”
“We’re doing this,” he confirms, and something in the way he says it, steady and certain, settles alongside my own resolve like a weight I don’t have to carry entirely alone.
Later that night, after he’s gone and Mei’s long since fallen asleep, I sit alone in the garden for a while, looking out at the neat rows of green we’ve built from nothing, the fence, the catchment barrels, the whole quiet, stubborn life assembled one small victory at a time.
It occurs to me, sitting there, that this was never supposed to be my fight.
I woke up in this body with one goal, survive, and somewhere along the way that goal quietly expanded to include a servant girl who deserved better than being told to expect my death, a prince who needed someone willing to actually mean what they said, a chicken with more personality than most court officials, and now, apparently, an entire district of farmers I’ve never met, being slowly squeezed dry by people who assume nobody’s paying close enough attention to stop them.
“Guess I’m paying attention now,” I say out loud, to nobody, to the quiet garden, to the whole strange shape my second life keeps insisting on taking.
Somewhere nearby, Duchess makes a low, sleepy cluck of what I choose to interpret as solidarity, and I sit there a while longer under the stars, already turning the shape of tomorrow’s plan over in my mind, before finally heading in to get what sleep I can before the real work begins.