Traveling incognito with a prince, it turns out, is a completely different exercise than traveling incognito by myself, mostly because Casimir has apparently never once in his life had to think about what shoes look like on a person who’s supposed to have walked several miles for a living.
“Those boots are going to give you away before we’re even out of sight of the palace wall,” I say, eyeing his footwear..
“Nobody who actually works a farm owns boots that clean.”
“They’re the only plain boots I have.”
“Then we’re scuffing them up before we leave.
Sit down.”
He sits, bewildered, while I rub dirt into leather that’s clearly never touched dirt on purpose before in its life, and by the time I’m done he looks appropriately, believably rough around the edges, which is more than I can say for his posture, which still reads as someone who’s never once had to worry about where his next meal is coming from.
“Slouch more,” I instruct.
“I don’t slouch.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
The village, when we finally reach it after a long, dusty walk that Mei complains about exactly as much as I’d expect from a sixteen year old dragged along on a covert fact finding mission, is smaller and quieter than I expected, a scattering of modest homes clustered around fields that should, by this point in the season, be thick and green and thriving.
They’re not.
Half the plots we pass look thin and underworked, patches left fallow that shouldn’t be, the unmistakable signs of farmers who’ve stopped investing effort into land they’re not sure they’ll be allowed to keep.
“This isn’t drought,” I say quietly, crouching at the edge of one field to check the soil.
Damp enough.
Workable.
“This is neglect.
Deliberate neglect, or at least the exhausted kind.”
“Why would anyone neglect their own crop?” Mei asks.
“Because if you know most of what you grow is going to disappear into an invented fee the minute the harvest comes in, there’s not much incentive to work yourself to exhaustion for someone else’s profit.”
I straighten up, looking around at the quiet, worn down village with a familiar, uncomfortable ache in my chest.
“I’ve seen this pattern before.
Different world, similar cause.
People give up trying when trying stops paying off.”
We find Tan’s uncle’s old farm easily enough, a modest plot now half the size it used to be, worked by a thin, weathered man who eyes the three of us with the wary suspicion of someone who’s learned the hard way that strangers rarely bring good news.
“Tan sent us.
He’s worried about you.”
Something in the man’s posture eases slightly at Tan’s name.
“You know my nephew?”
“Well enough that he trusts us to look into what’s been happening out here.” I gesture at the half worked fields around us.
“We heard about the extra fees.
The road tax, the granary fee, whatever they’re calling it this season.”
He laughs, short and bitter, nothing warm in it at all.
“Whatever they’re calling it.
That’s exactly it.
Changes name every few months, but the number only ever goes up.” He sets down his hoe, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of one calloused hand.
“Paid nearly half my harvest last season just to that.
Sold two mu of land the season before to cover what I couldn’t scrape together in coin.”
“Have you tried reporting it?
To anyone above the local collectors?”
“Tried once.
Man who tried before me had his barn burn down two weeks later.
Convenient accident, they called it.” He looks at me carefully, sizing me up in a way that makes me wonder exactly how much he’s guessed about who we actually are, despite our best efforts at looking unremarkable.
“You’re asking a lot of questions for strangers passing through.”
“We’re trying to help,” Casimir says, and something in the quiet authority of his voice, even scuffed boots and all, makes the man’s eyes narrow further.
“Help,” he repeats, testing the word like it might be a trick.
“Nobody with real power’s ever offered that before.
How can you lot help?”
I glance at Casimir, at Mei, weighing how much truth this moment can safely hold, and decide, in the end, that this man’s earned more honesty than a careful cover story.
“It’s going somewhere it shouldn’t, funding people who’ve already hurt others to keep it quiet.
We’re trying to find enough proof to stop it.
That starts with understanding exactly what’s being done to people like you.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, studying the three of us with an expression I can’t quite read, somewhere between disbelief and cautious, exhausted hope.
“You’re sure?,” he asks finally.
“Extremely.”
“Then you’d best come inside,” he says, glancing around like he’s checking for eyes that shouldn’t be watching, “because if you want proof, I’ve been keeping records.
Every fee, every date, every collector’s name.
Wasn’t sure it would ever matter to anyone.
Didn’t hurt to keep it anyway.”
The records, spread out on his kitchen table an hour later, are exactly the kind of methodical, damning detail we’ve been missing, precise dates, exact amounts, names of collectors who’ve grown bold enough over the years to stop even bothering with subtlety.
“This is incredible,” Casimir says, scanning the pages with the focused intensity of a man who’s spent months chasing exactly this kind of solid ground.
“This alone could support the numbers I’ve already pulled from the district ledgers.”
“Wasn’t much else to do most winters besides keep good records,” the farmer says, something like quiet pride flickering behind the exhaustion.
“Figured someone, someday, might actually care to look at them.”
“We care,” I say, and mean it fully, feeling the weight of everything this village has quietly endured settle heavy and purposeful in my chest.
“This isn’t going to fix itself overnight.
But we’re not walking away from it either.”
He studies me for a long moment, something in his weathered face finally, cautiously softening.
“You’re not what I expected, whoever you actually are,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, thinking of every single person who’s said some version of that to me since I woke up in this borrowed body, “I get that a lot.”
By the time we head back toward the palace as the light starts going gold and low, I’ve got a bundle of records tucked carefully under one arm, a heavier heart than I walked in with, and a sharpened, certain sense that whatever quiet garden I’ve been building for myself, it was never going to be enough to just tend it and stay small.
Some fights find you whether you go looking for them or not.