Page 8 of The Scarlet Alchemist

“He’ll say we have too much to eat,” Wenshu said, trying to scrub Yufei’s face with his sleeve, but she ducked under his arm and stepped back, nearly toppling the person behind us in line.

“All he can see is what Ididn’teat.”

“Just eat it now and be done with it!” Wenshu said, trying to grab Yufei again. She pulled his straw hat over his face and shoved him backward into me. I caught him under the arms, grunting as he dug his heels into the dirt to right himself. He managed to yank my sleeve so hard that the seam tore, sending him to the ground with the fabric in one hand.

The doors to the commandant’s office slid open. “Next!” a man called, glaring down at the three of us.

I dumped out the entire bag of gold onto the market commandant’s tray. This was meant to be our entire week’s worth of earnings for them to count and remove taxes from, but no one was foolish enough to be honest.

We knelt on the floor while the commandant sat on a raised cushion before us, draped in enough blue silk that he looked like a bald head emerging from the sea. I wondered how old he really was—you could never tell with gold eaters. But I knew from the color of his robes that he was low-ranking, so he couldn’t be gorging himself on too much gold—the price of it went up the farther south it had to be imported, as only the royal alchemists in Chang’an knew how to make it.

“Fan Wenshu,” my cousin said, handing over our ledger while the assistant began counting our coins.

“What do you sell again?” the commandant said, barely looking up from his notes. The man spoke the dialect of the capital, like all government officials, even though few merchants in Guangzhou could. When I was young, Uncle Fan had pantomimed his way through these meetings, always getting shortchanged or berated.

“Míngqì, sir,” Wenshu said.

The man nodded. “The new adjusted rate for míngqì next week is twenty-five gold.”

Wenshu nodded but said nothing. Gold was getting devalued every day, so the increase wasn’t surprising. The market commandant was responsible for regulating prices.

“And the new tax rate is twenty percent.”

I looked up. “You’re increasing our prices by five coins and our taxes by ten percent?”

“Orders from the Empress,” the assistant said. “There’s a shortage of ceramic.”

“There isn’t,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “We make our own. We would know.”

“Zilan,” Wenshu said, elbowing me. We both knew it was just for show. It would reflect poorly on Wenshu if he let his sisters speak freely to a high-ranking officer. But it would look even worse if we said nothing at all—this was supposed to be our entire week’s earnings, and quiet complacence while half of it was stolen would make them suspicious.

“It is not my job to question the will of the Empress,” the commandant said, “and certainly notyours.”

He said the last word like even mentioning us put a sour taste in his mouth. Was it our low rank, or the fact that I was ahùnxie, or the food still on Yufei’s face?

Our coins clattered into a porcelain bowl as the assistant swept a quarter of them off the tray.

“You can’t charge us next week’s tax rate on last week’s profit,” I said.

“I counted correctly,” the assistant said without sparing us a glance.

“Count again,” Yufei said, crossing her arms.

Wenshu sighed and pinched Yufei’s ear in one hand and mine in the other, yanking us down into a bow. We were allowed to be defiant because the commandant would trust that Wenshu would punish us at home. Defiance from Wenshu himself wouldn’t have been so easily tolerated.

“I apologize for my sisters,” he said. “Please, would you humor them? I’ll never hear the end of it otherwise.”

The assistant huffed and stiffly removed the coins, recounting as the three of us watched his every move. The amount he placed in the bowl was smaller this time.

“Inspections are next week,” the commandant said. That meant they would come to our shop, break a few míngqì in their attempts to “inspect the quality,” and turn over every drawer looking for the money they knew we hadn’t given them. But I had sealed our savings into the walls, and they had yet to find it.

It wasn’t even as if the taxes we paid were of any use to us. Most of the money went to Chang’an to repave the roads in gold. No one cared about the dirty south.

The commandant dismissed us with a wave of his hand, and it took everything in me not to hurl my bag of gemstones at his face. I had the power to raise the dead and fix any broken thing or creature, but alchemy wouldn’t stop the commandant from taking our money. No matter how much I hated him, I couldn’t just bring the roof down and crush him under straw and wood beams—another man would take his place the next day. There was nothing to be done but save what we could and, one day, if we were lucky, become one of the rich that we hated so deeply.

Wenshu and Yufei stood up, but when I moved to follow them, my legs prickled with numbness and I sank back to the floor.

“Zilan?” Wenshu said, gaze darting back to the commandant, who no doubt wanted us gone. I opened my mouth to explain, but the words lodged in my throat, breath choked away, a strange and wordless sound falling from my lips like dead bark off a rotting tree. Yufei said something, but her voice blurred before it could reach my ears, and I couldn’t tear my gaze from the long swathes of blue silk of the commandant’s robes, rippling and stretching to the edges of the room like a nauseous sea pooling hot under my feet. The room grew dim around us, paneled walls falling away and a night sky unfolding overhead, and when I turned my head up to find the stars, I toppled forward, my forehead smacking against something hard.

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