The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis-Chapter 328: Girls With Pretty Wrists

I’d expected Zhao Hengyuan to burst in again with accusation dressed as grief. He didn’t. Meiling didn’t try to be the storm, either. The two of them had gone still; sometimes that meant a bigger wave later. Sometimes it meant they were smarter than they looked. We would learn which.

When Ren rose under guard, the cart still open and the coin still bright, I took one of the silver bars from its nest. It was heavy enough to crack a skull. Or a habit.

I set it on the desk beside our cold bowls. "We’ll melt this one for hooks," I said. "Rugs don’t trip boys if you force them to hold where you put them."

Mingyu had his fingers on the rim of his bowl again, that small half-smile in his eyes that meant the board inside his head had already changed. "Hooks," he repeated, pleased. "Hooks it is."

As Ren passed, he made the mistake of glancing at the phoenix engraved into the arm of my chair. Not greed—envy. As if he believed the difference between us was furniture.

"You miscounted," I told him.

"How," he asked, careful now.

"You thought numbers only add," I said. "You forgot they also subtract."

He looked away. That was his best answer of the morning.

Longzi waited until the last boot heel had faded. "If Zhao Hengyuan is quiet," he guessed, "it’s because he’s choosing which bridge to burn behind him."

"He’ll be watched on all of them," I returned. "If he’s wise, he’ll bring me water before his house starts to smoke."

Deming reappeared at the threshold, efficient as winter. "The men from the South gate are already in a cell. Bell hut rope is being cut under Aunt Ping’s eyes; she’s correcting men who tie knots like poets."

Yizhen’s mouth tilted. "That’s almost a compliment."

A runner slid on the stone and caught himself with palms he’d curse later. "From the weaving hall," he panted. "Aunt Ping says—her words, not mine—’tell the Empress her new apprentice knows how to count, but she keeps trying to count herself first.’"

Meiling. Of course she’d found a way to turn a shuttle into a mirror.

"Tell Aunt Ping to let the girl finish one bolt clean," I said. "If she does, she can eat in the kitchen. If she doesn’t, she can eat in the hall with the draft."

The runner bobbed, grateful to be useful, and fled.

Mingyu tipped his head toward me, private again, the way we were when courtyards emptied. "You’re not making a spectacle out of Ren."

"I’m making a precedent," I said. "Noise teaches slower than work."

He accepted that like he accepted winter—without argument, anticipating the next frost.

We ate the porridge anyway, cold and sweet, because Aunt Ping would clout me for wasting food, Empress or not.

When the bowls were empty, the room had changed temperature. Evidence sat stacked like neat bricks. Coin glared where it had once smirked.

And the space that Zhao Hengyuan liked to breathe in had gotten smaller.

"Next," I told the air, because days like this didn’t ask for permission.

The air answered with a knock.

Not the knock of a minister who thinks he owns half the palace. A measured knock. Three beats. Yaozu’s rhythm when he plays messenger instead of knife.

He slid in sideways, eyes bright with the satisfaction of a man who’d found a thread and tugged.

"Visitors," he reported. "From Minister Zhao’s outer office. A junior scribe and a porter. One brought a confession. The other brought a bruised conscience."

"Which is which," I asked.

"The scribe thinks he confesses," Yaozu said. "The porter knows he does."

"Bring both," I decided. "And fetch me a fresh brush."

If Zhao Hengyuan wanted to drown us in numbers, I would give him a sea that finally remembered its tide.

I set my hand on the silver bar again and pictured it poured into a hundred small hooks. Small, plain, unavoidable. The kind of thing that held where it was told.

"Let’s hang a man on his own arithmetic," I murmured.

And then the scribe stumbled in with ink already on his wrists, and the porter with a hand swollen from a door that had refused to stay shut, and the next line of the day wrote itself without asking me if I had finished the last one.

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Aunt Ping didn’t bow when I entered the weaving hall. She never did.

That was one of the many reasons why I liked her so much.

She had a broom in one hand and a spindle in the other, and if you could tell which one she preferred, you hadn’t been paying attention.

"You sent me a girl with pretty wrists," she announced before I’d reached the center aisle. "Pretty wrists make crooked numbers if you don’t set them straight."

"I sent you a mirror," I said. "You decide whether she finds a window."

Meiling stood at a frame three looms down, blue silk exchanged for un-dyed linen, hair pinned with a single bone stick Aunt Ping had probably taken from a stew and washed because it offended her to look at the girl’s jewels.

Her posture was perfect. Her sheet was not. The warp had learned her vanity; the weft resented it.

She heard me anyway, the way a woman hears any change in weather.

"Empress," she offered, voice pitched lower than her usual music. "I am told I may eat with the kitchen if I finish a bolt."

"You may," I said. "And if you cheat you may eat with the mice."

Her mouth twitched. "Aunt Ping would sooner throw me to the cats."

Aunt Ping snorted. "Don’t tempt me."

I walked the line of frames like I walked walls—hand on wood, eye for what splinters when you lean.

Numbers lived here in threads—counts that either married or tripped each other, rows that learned discipline the hard way.

"Why are you here, Meiling," I asked without turning.

"Because the Empress told me to be where numbers answer faster than mouths," she replied, quick. "Because if I bring you clean sums you will consider me less of a problem."

"Not less," I corrected. "Different."

She swallowed that, eyes dropping to the shuttle. "Father says he will be vindicated."

"Father says whatever makes his reflection tidy," I returned.