Fan Changyu felt something was off. She was about to keep walking when the neighbor woman's expression shifted into something careful and deliberate.
"The casino men went to your house again. Your husband..."
The words hadn't finished before Fan Changyu snatched a shoulder pole from the wall and ran.
"He wasn't hurt!" the woman shouted after her. "It was the casino boss who ended up lame!"
But Fan Changyu was already gone.
She spotted the crowd from halfway down the alley, a cluster of bodies pressed against the front of her house to watch whatever was happening. Her hand tightened on the pole. She didn't slow down.
"Move!"
They scattered.
The small boss of the casino, a man called Mr. Jin, was just limping out through her demolished front gate when she arrived, leaning on a long stick and wearing what was probably supposed to be a threatening expression. He didn't finish arranging it. Fan Changyu swung the shoulder pole sideways and put him on the ground before he could react.
She planted the pole and looked into her own courtyard.
The gambling den's thugs were looking back at her. Big men, the kind hired specifically to be large and frightening, and every single one of them was trying to shrink into the corner. Several were already dragging themselves toward the gate when they saw her, and they stopped that too.
Then she saw why.
In the Grand Tutor's chair below the eaves of the inner house sat Xie Zheng, back straight, face like a closed door, a cane across his knees. He looked like a man who had just finished something unpleasant and was now waiting for it to be over.
Fan Changyu stared at him.
He had beaten all of them? Him? The man who needed a cane to stand up, who bled through his bandages if he moved too fast, who had open wounds that hadn't finished closing?
A neighbor grabbed her elbow. "Changyu, don't you start too. Your husband already worked them over. Half of them can't walk right. Think about the doctor's fees before you start swinging!"
Doctor's fees. Right.
Fan Changyu grabbed Jin Ye by the collar and hauled him off the ground.
His face had gone the color of ash. Two thin streams of blood ran from his nose. He held both palms up in front of his face and started talking very fast. "Miss Fan, Miss Fan, please, I won't come back, I won't come back, you have my word, just let me go, just--"
"My doors," she said, gesturing with the pole at the broken gate. "Your men ripped down my doors. How are you going to pay for that?"
She did a quick sweep of the yard. No shattered jars. No overturned furniture. The inner house doors were intact. The thugs hadn't made it past the courtyard at all. There was nothing inside to claim damages for, not really.
Her eyes landed on the blood seeping through Xie Zheng's collar.
There was the wound.
"My husband is injured," she said, turning back to Jin Ye. "All of you, against one man in his condition. I'm not even going to ask about the surface wounds. Internal damage from a reopened injury, who knows how bad. That costs silver. A lot of it."
Jin Ye reached into his clothes with both hands and shoved everything he found directly at her. Broken silver, copper coins, miscellaneous small pieces, all of it pressed forward in a shaking pile. "Take it. Take it. Please, Miss Fan, just let me go."
Fan Changyu looked at the money in her hands.
She had only meant to scare him.
She loosened her grip on his collar. Jin Ye didn't wait. He got the coins on the ground, then he crawled, then he ran, and he didn't look back. The thugs in the yard watched him go for half a second, then individually produced copper pieces from their own clothes, set them on the ground in small stacks, and fled with whatever dignity their limping legs allowed.
The neighbors watched the entire exit in silence.
The gambling house collectors weren't known for leaving money behind. They were known for taking it, by force if necessary. The crowd dispersed slowly, in the confused way people move when something they've never seen before has just happened in front of them.
Fan Changyu crouched down and gathered up the coins and silver from the ground, trying to organize her expression. She walked to the eaves.
"The door," she said. "They were the ones who broke it?"
Xie Zheng nodded once.
She let out a breath. Good. That made the exchange fair.
"Your bandages are soaked through," she said, not quite meeting his eyes. "The wound opened again."
He said nothing.
"If something like this happens again," she said slowly, "try to wait. Hold on as long as you can and let me come home to deal with it. The wounds keep tearing open and you're the one who pays for it."
Still nothing.
"The trouble came from me," she said. "The gambling debt, all of it. You're the one suffering for what I built."
"They were too noisy," Xie Zheng said.
The sun had shifted. It caught the lower half of his face and left his eyes in shadow, and the pallor of his skin in that light gave him a sharpness like winter ice, clean and far away. It was a remarkable face. Irritable, but remarkable.
Fan Changyu had no answer for that.
He got up without another word and went inside.
A small sound came from the kitchen. Xiao Changning had pushed her head around the door frame just far enough to see. "Ajie."
Fan Changyu went over and pressed her palm to her sister's hair. "Were you frightened?"
Changning nodded, then shook her head, reconsidering. "Brother-in-law is so good at fighting."
Fan Changyu didn't react to the address. She guessed Aunt Zhao had been coaching her. "He fought off some bad people."
"They called him a little pale-face," Changning said, eyes wide and lit up. "They called him a cripple. And then he crippled all of them." She thought about this with visible satisfaction. "Ajie, what is a little pale-face? Is it because his face is very white?"
Fan Changyu's chest did something complicated. "That's an insult," she said. "You're not allowed to say it, Ning Niang. Understood?"
Changning nodded.
Fan Changyu pressed the bag of malt candy into her sister's hands, told her to stay in the yard, and went to find the wound medicine they kept in the back cabinet. She stood outside Xie Zheng's door for a moment before she raised her hand and knocked.
"What." His voice was flat and cool.
"I brought medicine."
Silence.
She said it before she could talk herself out of it. "I'm sorry. I should have thought about this before asking you to marry me. Once you were connected to me, of course they would say things like that to you. I didn't think about what that would mean for you."
The door opened.
He must have been in the middle of redressing the wound. The outer robe was draped loose over his shoulders, not tied. The inner garment was knotted at the bottom only, the upper half hanging open, and the gap showed the line of his collarbone and a piece of chest that was more solid than the rest of him suggested. His expression when he looked at her was not particularly warm.
"Discounting one of their legs wasn't enough for you?"
Fan Changyu shook her head quickly.
"I said they were too noisy." He turned and walked back inside.
She followed. "Do you need help?"
He turned his head and looked at her with an expression she couldn't quite classify, then reached down and tied the last loose knot of his inner garment. "It's been handled."
Fan Changyu looked away. She was still holding the new headband she'd bought at market, and now, standing in his room with her hands full of medicine and fabric, she felt the awkwardness of it sharply. When his eyes moved to her hands she kept her face still and tied the headband around her own ponytail. It was a dark blue that didn't suit most women. On her, somehow, it worked.
"I bought this for myself," she said, to no one in particular.
Xie Zheng's expression was difficult to read.
She set the medicine bottle on the table and returned to business. "Uncle Wang at the government office told me Fan Da sent a letter to the county. They won't transfer the property while the case is open. I think the casino showing up today was connected to that. Fan Da probably put them up to it, hoping you'd get scared and run. To people in their world you're a stranger here, you don't know anyone, and you're already injured. They expected you to leave."
Xie Zheng was quiet for a moment. "In the Great Yin Code, there should be a statute on female household registration for orphaned women."
Fan Changyu knew about widowed women forming independent households. An orphaned unmarried woman registering her own household was something else entirely.
"When a father dies and there are no male heirs, the relatives take the property," she said. "That's how it goes. Then the relatives raise the girls until they're old enough to marry off. How well they're raised depends entirely on whether those relatives have any conscience left. If they don't, the girl goes to a brothel. If they do, she's a servant who eventually gets sold into marriage. Whatever price someone will pay, that's what she's worth."
She paused. "Right after my father died, Fan Da and his wife came to the house. Said they'd take me and Changning in, raise us like their own daughters. I could see what kind of people they were. I refused. That's why he keeps coming back for the deed."
Xie Zheng said nothing. He had no frame of reference for this. Before his fall from court, the lives of orphaned girls among common people had never crossed his field of vision.
Fan Changyu pulled at the edge of her sleeve. "The law you're describing was written by officials in the capital. Officials who have three wives and half a dozen children and will never, in any version of their lives, run out of male heirs. They have no reason to think about what happens to a girl left alone. They don't know what that life looks like."
She caught herself. She was being too sharp. She reached for something softer.
"But if an official knew. If someone actually understood what orphaned women live through and was willing to write legislation for them, that would be a different thing. That would matter."
Xie Zheng turned it over. "A female household under the code receives reduced corvee obligations. If an orphaned girl could register her own household, she would qualify for the same exemptions. But if she later married, a man would enter the registration and the exemption would end. The paperwork involved in the transition would be substantial."
Fan Changyu stared at him. "How do you know the law that well?"
"I've traveled," he said, narrowing his eyes slightly. "You hear things."
She let it go and reached into her jacket to produce the household registration document. "Your paperwork came through. Keep it on you. The county has been arresting people without papers, beggars mostly, but also any outsider entering the city unregistered. Uncle Wang called in a favor to get this done. It wasn't easy."
Something shifted in Xie Zheng's expression. "Officials are arresting refugees?"
"I saw it on the way back," Fan Changyu said. "There's a new military governor in the Northwest. They're worried about bandits before the New Year, so the county issued the order."
She looked up at him. "I also heard the Marquis of Wu'an died at Chongzhou. You came from that direction. You were shaken up when I found you. Do you know if it's true?"
"Unknown," he said.
Fan Changyu let out a slow breath. "It would be a loss. If the Marquis really died, that would be a genuine loss."
Something crossed the pale face in front of her, not quite mockery, not quite anything else.
"What would be lost?"