Casimir has taken over an entire corner of my main room with ledgers.
I’ve decided this is either deeply endearing or a genuine fire hazard, depending on the hour.
“You’ve built a paper fortress,” I observe, stepping carefully around the third precarious stack since dinner.
“Should I be concerned about structural integrity?”
“The system is organized,” he says, not looking up from the page in front of him, quill moving in tight, careful lines.
“The system is a paper fortress.
I respect it, but I want that on record before it inevitably collapses on someone.”
He glances up at that, something dry and amused flickering behind his focus.
“It won’t collapse.
I’ve accounted for load distribution.”
“You’ve accounted for load distribution.
On a stack of tax ledgers.”
“I contain multitudes,” he says, echoing my own line back at me with deadpan satisfaction.
I laugh despite myself and settle down across from him with the bundle of Tan’s uncle’s records we brought back from the village.
“Alright,” I say.
“Compare notes.
What have you got?”
What he’s got turns out to be three months of careful, methodical cross referencing.
Official district tax filings, laid next to the collection records he’s been quietly gathering.
The picture that emerges is worse, cleaner, and more damning than either of us expected.
“Here,” he says, sliding a page toward me, finger tracing a column of neat figures.
“Official rate, published by the crown, for the eastern districts.”
He slides a second page beside it.
“And here.
What’s actually being collected, according to the receipts your farmer friend kept.”
I look between the two.
Even with my admittedly amateur grasp of tax law, the gap is impossible to miss.
“That’s nearly double.”
“Nearly double, consistently, across three districts, for going on four years now.” He sits back, rubbing at his eyes, the particular exhaustion of a man who’s been staring at numbers long enough that they’ve started blurring together.
“And it’s not random skimming.
It’s structured.
Every district uses almost identical invented fee categories.
Road maintenance, granary upkeep, seasonal administration.
“Someone designed this system on purpose.
It’s not opportunistic corruption.
It’s an actual operation.”
“Exactly.”
He pulls out another sheet, older, ink faded in a way that tells me it predates most of what we’ve gathered so far.
“And here’s where it gets interesting.
I cross referenced the collection dates against payments I already had recorded from Minister Zhuo’s old files.
The timing lines up almost perfectly.
Whenever a district’s collection spikes, a corresponding payment shows up months later, moving through the same obscured channels as the bribes that got him killed.”
I sit with that for a long moment.
“So this isn’t just corrupt collectors lining their own pockets.
This is the same faction, the same funding scheme that’s been running since before either of us got tangled up in it.
Just scaled up over the years.”
“That’s my read as well.”
He looks at me across the cluttered table, something grim and focused in his expression.
It’s the particular look he gets when a piece of the puzzle he’s been chasing for years finally clicks into place.
“If we can prove this conclusively, we’re not just exposing tax fraud.
We’re exposing the financial backbone of whatever the Dowager’s building.
That’s not a scandal anymore.
That’s leverage significant enough to actually threaten her position.”
“That’s also significant enough to get us both killed if we’re not careful.”
“Also true,” he admits, with the calm of a man who’s clearly already made peace with that risk a while ago.
“Which is why we need more than what we have.
Enough that even if something happens to one piece of evidence, the rest still stands on its own.”
We work late into the night.
Cross checking figures.
Organizing the village records against the district ledgers.
Building something that’s slowly starting to look less like scattered suspicion and more like an actual case.
Mei falls asleep sitting up somewhere around midnight.
I gently take the papers out of her lap and let her sleep where she is.
Low candlelight.
Papers spread between us.
The quiet, focused intimacy of two people working toward the same goal.
“You’re good at this,” I say, watching him work through a particularly dense section of figures with the same patient precision he brought to negotiating herb prices.
The same skill I first clocked back in the market, just aimed at something with much higher stakes now.
“I’ve had practice.
Six years of chasing threads that never quite led anywhere solid.” He doesn’t look up from the page, but something in his voice goes quieter, more honest than his usual careful composure allows.
“This is the closest I’ve come to something real.
Something that might actually mean my mother’s death gets answered for, instead of just quietly filed away as an accident nobody questions.”
“We’re going to get there,” I say.
I mean it fully.
I reach over and still his hand where it’s been tapping restlessly against the table edge.
“Look how far we’ve already come.
A locked chest in a cellar.
A farmer’s careful records.
Ledgers that don’t add up.
That’s not nothing.
That’s a real thread, and we’re pulling on it together now.”
He goes still at the contact.
He looks up at me properly, something raw and grateful working behind his eyes in the low candlelight.
“Together,” he repeats, testing the word the same careful way he tests everything.
Like he’s still not entirely used to trusting that it applies to him.
“Together,” I confirm.
I don’t pull my hand away.
For a long, quiet moment neither of us says anything else at all.
The paper fortress and the conspiracy and the whole heavy weight of everything we’re building toward settle into something that feels, for just this one candlelit hour, entirely bearable.
Then a stack of ledgers, apparently deciding this moment has gone on long enough without structural collapse, tips over with a soft, inevitable thud.
Mei jolts awake with a startled snort.
“Load distribution,” I say solemnly, not moving my hand.
“I stand by the calculation,” Casimir says, equally solemn.
Neither of us moves to fix the mess for several minutes longer than strictly necessary.
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