Chapter 30: This Road Is Mine

Miantang smiled and said, "I'm happy. I couldn't help it."

Mama Li gave her a look of genuine puzzlement. The merchant association had treated her with open condescension and awarded her nothing. How was this a cause for humming?

Miantang's good mood showed no sign of abating. She explained, still smiling. "You heard them talk about the royal porcelain order this year — very large, and they need high-quality clay from Gaoling, which is fifty li out. The usual water route is clear enough, but Prince Huaiyang's new canal project has the boats tied up. They'll have to go around two mountains, transferring cargo between carts and boats."

Mama Li did not immediately see where this was going. "What's so exciting about that?"

"If they need boats and there are no boats," Miantang said, "whoever can provide boats — or better yet, whoever can get the clay there without boats at all — will have every one of those gentlemen coming to her very politely. Even the canal construction has pulled the fishing boats into service. There's hardly anything available. I noticed the fish prices have gone up."

Mama Li acknowledged that the fish prices had indeed gone up. She still found the leap to acquiring a fleet of transport vessels rather optimistic, given that Miantang had neither the connections nor the funds such an operation would require. It sounded like the kind of idea that was interesting to think about on a walk home and would not survive contact with practical reality.

But Miantang was not in the habit of stopping at interesting ideas. By the time they returned to the shop, she had a donkey cart prepared for a trip to the canal construction site.

Mama Li, who had been accompanying Miantang on enough countryside excursions to know what happened when you didn't plan for meals, packed boiled eggs and meat buns. She also brought a small portable stove for keeping water warm.

Miantang noticed the stove and said, with light amusement, "Mama, you're being very attentive. Is it the wage increase?"

Mama Li, efficiently fitting the food into its box, did not look up. "You tripled our wages the moment you had money. That's generous, and I won't pretend otherwise. But what happens if profits drop? A household mistress cannot behave like a mountain bandit every time an idea occurs to her. There should be some method to it."

The wages were not, truthfully, what moved Mama Li. She had received greater rewards during her years in the prince's household, and she owned farmland in her home province. What concerned her was Miantang's stomach, which had a history of suffering when meals were skipped, and Miantang's future, which was harder to protect than a stomach.

A woman with that face and those instincts, with a dowry behind her from the prince once the Yangshan matter concluded — she would attract suitors. If she found an honest one, well and good. If she didn't, her current impulsiveness could undo whatever she had built. Mama Li felt the obligation of experience pressing on her and delivered her thoughts accordingly.

Miantang sipped the white fungus and red date tea Mama Li had prepared and listened without interruption. She had come to understand that beneath Mama Li's severe exterior lived genuine concern, and she was old enough to know that well-meaning lectures from people with more experience than you were worth attending to, even when they weren't entirely welcome.

Besides, Mama Li wasn't wrong that household management was its own complicated subject. Having no memory of her married life before the illness, Miantang was effectively learning as she went. She paid attention.

Before they departed, she spent time alone in her locked room working on something she kept to herself.

---

Over two days, she explored almost every road and bridge between Lingquan Town and Gaoling. On the second day, she went directly to Shuangling Village, spoke briefly with the village head, and bought land.

Mama Li watched her purchase a large sloping field and a fish pond — ground the farming families considered marginal and effectively worthless — at a price well above what anyone would have expected, without hesitation or negotiation downward.

She did not comment. She had already offered her advice on impulsive spending and been listened to politely. There was a limit to what a servant's counsel could accomplish.

The return journey was unpleasant. The riverbank roads had been churned up by the canal excavation and were deep with mud. At one point their cart wheel sank and refused to move.

Mama Li helped Miantang to higher ground while the driver worked at the wheel. The middle stretch of canal was visible from where they stood, and Miantang looked out at the work in progress.

Then she looked at a figure standing on the far bank.

"Husband!"

Prince Huaiyang, conducting an informal inspection with a small group of trusted advisors, heard his name in a voice he recognized. He turned.

Miantang was picking her way toward him, Mama Li behind her. He had come without official robes today, and she seemed to notice nothing unusual — she was looking with more interest at the group standing at a respectful distance behind him.

He signaled his military aides and the water management officials to wait, and walked toward the cart to intercept her before she could engage with them.

Miantang peered over his shoulder at the group. "What are you doing out here, husband?"

Cui Xingzhou replied without visible strain. "Enjoying the scenery with some friends. What brings you here?"

"I came with Mama Li to look at the canal. I've been thinking about clay transport." She was still looking past him with mild curiosity. "Enjoying the scenery? Are you composing poetry? Painting?"

Cui Xingzhou, finding the sustained maintenance of this particular fiction mildly wearing, said in a flat tone, "There are workers everywhere and the ground is in poor condition. It isn't a comfortable place for a woman. If you have no urgent business, you should go home."

He said this with more abruptness than he intended. The truth was the day had not gone well before Miantang appeared. The progress reports and financial accounts presented by the water management officials that morning had been deeply unsatisfying — costs inflated beyond reasonable explanation, timelines stretched, and three workers dead in an incident that should not have happened. The canal was essential. Its completion would free Zhenzhou's grain and military supply lines from dependence on routes the imperial court could close. Delays were not merely inconvenient. They were strategic vulnerabilities. And many of Zhenzhou's officials were his father's old subordinates — proud men who had learned to manage upward and exploit the gaps in oversight. He had come out here personally, with people he trusted, to see what was actually happening before he moved.

Miantang picked up his mood and decided this was not a moment to linger. She would go, and she would be the kind of wife who went graciously rather than making things more complicated.

But before she turned to leave, she looked at him with a slight frown and said, "Be careful, please. They're using explosives in the excavation. It looks faster but the debris clearing afterward is more trouble and the risk during the work is real."

Cui Xingzhou, who had not expected this from a woman who sold porcelain, looked at her. "You understand canal construction?"

Miantang shook her head. "My eldest uncle had an interest in it. He runs water transport contracts and used to study different methods. I remember him saying once that explosives are a shortcut that creates more work later and more danger during. There are better approaches, but I was young when he explained them and I don't remember the specifics." She paused. "If you wanted, I could write to him—"

She stopped.

The next thought arrived with the particular sharpness of something that had been waiting. Where was her grandfather's family now? She had a sense of having married away from them, of them having moved — a dissolved business, a different province. In the year since her illness, no letters had come. She had not, until this moment, stopped to notice that no letters had come.

The headache arrived without warning, sudden and splitting, and she was already falling forward before she registered it happening. Cui Xingzhou's hands closed around her before she reached the ground.

She could not open her eyes against the pain. "My head—"

He assessed the situation quickly. The donkey cart was still stuck in the mud. He made a decision, lifted her, and carried her to one of the carriages belonging to his inspection party, settling Mama Li in alongside her with instructions to take her back to North Street.

He had seen these headaches before. They could leave her gray-faced and unable to eat for the better part of a day. He thought, not for the first time, that he should ask Zhao Quan whether the medicine was doing what it was supposed to do.

---

By the time they reached the North Street residence, the worst of the pain had eased enough for Miantang to lie still without pressing her hands to her temples. When Mama Li brought the medicine, she drank it and then asked, carefully, "Mama Li — did my maternal grandfather's family send any letters after I married?"

Mama Li, who did not know the answer and was not certain it was her place to speculate, told her to drink the medicine while it was warm and ask the master when he returned.

When Cui Xingzhou came in that evening, Mama Li had already told him what had been asked.

He answered with the particular confidence of someone who has had time to construct a credible explanation. "Your grandfather's family moved a considerable distance away, which made correspondence difficult. Beyond that — given the scandal around your father and brother's situation, which became widely known, they may have kept their distance to avoid appearing connected to it."

Miantang was quiet for a moment. "Do you know where they went?"

Cui Xingzhou, who had picked up the papers on her desk and was examining them absently, replied, "I'll have someone look into it and try to find them." He turned one of the papers over. "What are these?"

"A map of clay transport routes." She said it without much energy.

He looked more carefully. The sketches showed an overland path through the mountain terrain — not the water routes everyone used, but a direct crossing by land.

She recovered herself by degrees, the way she always seemed to, and sat up slightly. "Husband, look at this stretch below the ridge — it's all farmland and fish ponds. If that ground were filled in and flattened, it becomes a shortcut. Direct land passage."

Cui Xingzhou kept his expression neutral. "If this route is so convenient, why hasn't it occurred to anyone before?"

"Because before the canal project, water routes were naturally better for heavy cargo. Boats carry more. No one needed to think about land alternatives." She gestured at the map. "Now the boats are all in service for the canal work and there are almost none available. The water route is effectively closed. But the land route — no one has thought of it yet, because they're all still thinking about boats."

He studied the drawings again. His brow moved slightly. "Farmland has owners. Even if you've identified the path, the landowners won't simply let you pass."

This was the moment Miantang had been building toward and was, simultaneously, the moment she was most uncertain about. She looked at him with careful eyes. "Husband — I spent a large amount of our money today. Are you angry?"

Cui Xingzhou looked at the slight disturbance in the floorboards under the bed. The edge of the newly replaced board was not quite flush.

"You dug up the buried silver," he said, "and bought the farmland and the fish ponds."

Miantang nodded, watching him with the expression of someone awaiting a verdict. "You guessed immediately. You're so clever."

After examining the land values in her drawings and working through the geography, she had ridden directly to the ridge and purchased the relevant ground at twice its market value. The seller, presented with an offer well above anything the land could reasonably produce for farming, had found a guarantor the same day and signed the deed without much deliberation.

Anyone who needed to transport clay from Gaoling by land now had exactly one path through the mountains. That path crossed Miantang's property. The men she had hired to stand at the boundary of her land were there to make that fact clear.

Cui Xingzhou looked at her for a long moment.

He had formed a fairly complete picture of the kinds of women who existed in his world. His mother and cousin Lan Shuilan — composed, accomplished in the accepted ways, their intelligence directed toward the careful maintenance of relationships and appearance. His father's favored concubines — their energy spent on competition, on securing attention, on managing each other. These were the varieties he knew.

Miantang did not resemble any of them. She was a beautiful woman with thorns, and beneath the beauty ran something more resilient than beauty — the tenacity of whatever grows through cracks in stone because stopping is simply not a behavior it has learned.

She also had a streak of mischief that was, by any proper standard, entirely unladylike.

He found, not for the first time, that he was looking at her in a way he hadn't quite planned to. Wondering what kind of man she would choose when her life resumed its real shape. Who, genuinely, would be equal to her.

He caught himself, and concluded with some firmness that her years among outlaws had almost certainly distorted her judgment about men. It would be worth locating her grandfather's family. Having relatives nearby — people who knew her and could watch over her interests — would reduce the risk of her being misled by someone whose intentions were less straightforward than they appeared.

He would have someone look for them in earnest.

Miantang, having confessed her expenditure and braced for displeasure, was watching him with some anxiety. His expression had not changed at all. He made a noncommittal sound and reached for his tea, turning something over in his thoughts at a remove from the present conversation.

She looked at him. The afternoon light was settling toward evening and it fell on him evenly — the clean line of his profile, the way he held himself even in repose, the stillness of his hands around the cup. He was thinking about something complex and whatever it was, his face as he thought carried a gravity that made her chest feel full in a way she couldn't quite name.

Their neighbors argued over small things constantly. She could hear it through the walls sometimes — raised voices over money, over meals, over nothing at all. Their household was nothing like that, and it was because of him. Because he was the kind of man who received alarming news without theater and thought his way through problems without asking her to absorb the weight of them.

She felt her admiration rise like a tide and nestled herself against his knee, looking up at him. "Don't worry. I'll earn it back double. The hole you dug won't stay empty for long."

Cui Xingzhou, adding to his private description of her — thorny flower, wild grass, and now apparently also a clingy cat with no warning — felt the warmth against his leg and the sweet peach scent reaching him again. His hand lifted, almost moving toward her hair.

He caught the motion and redirected it smoothly. "You haven't eaten yet. Come and have dinner."

---

As it happened, her offhand remark about the explosives had given him exactly the angle he needed for the canal audit.

Most Zhenzhou officials had no real knowledge of hydraulic engineering, and the old hands running the construction had been exploiting this without restraint — using deliberately inefficient methods to justify inflated costs, spreading the work out to maximize the duration during which money could be diverted. The casualties had been, in some respects, a consequence of corners cut to offset the money being taken elsewhere.

Cui Xingzhou had spent enough years managing men to know that perfect compliance was neither achievable nor desirable. Officials who could not benefit at all from their positions were officials who felt they had nothing to protect, and they became unpredictable in different and worse ways. He had always allowed minor infractions to pass without acknowledgment. The balance required it.

But this had gone past minor. Project delays with strategic implications, deaths that should not have happened, money disappearing in quantities too large to overlook — the balance had been broken, and it needed to be reset.

He arrived at North Street that evening with a clearer picture of what he intended to do and found he was, against all reasonable expectations, looking forward to dinner.

Mama Li, having calculated correctly that both of them had been in fields and carriages all day and were unlikely to have eaten much, had prepared accordingly.

A pork knuckle, de-boned and slow-cooked over a single log fire with fruit wine and spices until the skin was lacquered red-brown and the meat separated at a touch. Soft-boiled wild bird eggs tossed with sweet onions and foraged greens into a cold dish that was both delicate and bright. Sesame cakes fresh from the griddle, served with a sweet-spicy soup that opened the appetite before you were quite ready for it.

Miantang's headache had been retreating since she lay down, and her stomach made its opinion known well before she reached the table. She ate with the unguarded enjoyment of someone who has been genuinely hungry and found something genuinely good. The braised knuckle in particular produced an expression Mama Li watched with quiet satisfaction.

"I must have eaten all kinds of things before I lost my memory," Miantang said, between bites, "and now they're all gone. I can taste something wonderful for the first time when I've actually had it a hundred times before."

Cui Jiu said, without particular sentiment, "It doesn't matter. You can have them again. Ask Mama Li to make anything you like."

Miantang looked at him over the table and felt a sudden warmth rise in her. She picked up a piece of pork with the skin intact and held it toward his mouth.

Cui Xingzhou paused for half a breath. He felt the softness of the skin brush his lower lip. Then he opened his mouth and ate what she had offered him.

---

The gentlemen of the Lingquan Town Merchant Association had lost their appetites entirely.

The imperial porcelain commission carried a deadline, and the workshop masters had divided the quota and begun working around the clock with the confidence of men who had handled such orders before. It was only when the foremen came back with the same report from multiple directions — clay running short, suppliers unable to deliver on schedule — that the full shape of the problem became clear.

Er Ye He had initially been unconcerned. An imperial commission outranked canal construction in any reasonable ordering of priorities. He had his manager draft a formal petition to the Zhenzhou Water Authority requesting that some boats be released for clay transport. It was a straightforward request. He expected a straightforward response.

What he received instead was a message delivered by a yamen runner who had been briefed to be unhelpful.

Prince Huaiyang had spent the past three days conducting an audit of the Water Authority. The results had been significant — dozens of major cases uncovered, costs misappropriated at every level, and one long-standing subordinate of the old prince executed in the command tent according to military law with his property confiscated. Every official in the Water Authority had woken up that morning feeling that the ground beneath them had shifted and was still shifting.

When the He family's manager arrived to request boats on the strength of an imperial commission, the supervising official assessed his own situation and found that lending boats would delay the canal, which would bring the prince's attention onto him, whereas the He family's commercial problem had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

The runner delivered the response plainly: the Water Authority had taken on no palace commissions and earned nothing from them. If the He family's commission suffered from the He family's logistics problems, that was the He family's problem. The official's responsibility lay elsewhere.

The manager tried the angle of shared blame. The runner sneered. The manager returned to Er Ye He with nothing.

He Zhen suggested, after discussion with her father, that the barrier might be financial rather than principled. A substantial sum was prepared and sent to the official's home under cover of darkness.

It was returned the following morning.

The entire Water Authority was on notice. No one who had watched a colleague lose his position and his property in the same afternoon was going to accept a bribe from a porcelain merchant.

It was at this point that someone brought He Zhen information she found immediately interesting: the Jade Fired Porcelain Workshop had already transported a large quantity of clay and had it stored.

She sent people to trace the route. What they found was a flat path between the cliffs of Shuangling that led directly to a plot of newly purchased land. At the boundary of that land, several broad-shouldered men were stationed, hired specifically, by all accounts, by Madam Cui, to ensure that the road across her property was not used without her awareness.

Er Ye He slammed his hand on the table.

That woman had bought the only road through the mountains.