The Witch in the Woods: The Transmigration of Hazel-Anne Davis-Chapter 329: She Came

Her hands stilled. She didn’t look at me. "If he falls, I fall with him."

"That’s a choice," I said. "Not a law."

"For a daughter," she murmured, "it feels like both."

Aunt Ping rapped her knuckles lightly with the handle of the broom. "Stop talking where the cloth should be listening."

Meiling flinched, then bit back whatever insult her tongue had grown fat on and returned to the row.

I let the hall breathe around us: threads humming, women counting in low voices that made the air feel honest. It calmed me the way a clean ledger calmed me. You can’t lie when a warp tangles; everyone sees the knot.

"Two men came to me this morning," I told Meiling as if discussing dye. "A scribe who thought he knew what a confession looked like. A porter who actually did."

Her shoulders rose a fraction. "Porters carry other people’s mistakes."

"They also carry truth in hands that know how to lift weight," I said. "The scribe told me where your father’s cousin hides the temple seal stamps when he’s drunk. The porter told me where your father hides the key to the chest under the floor. Which man would you trust."

She swallowed. "The porter."

"So would I," I said, and Aunt Ping’s broom made a pleased little circle in the air.

I stopped at Meiling’s loom and laid two fingers on the edge, the way I touch a table before I cut into it. "I gave you a window yesterday," I reminded her. "Would you like to keep it."

She looked up then. Ambition and fear make the same shine if you’re standing close enough.

"What price," she asked.

"Your father’s handwriting," I answered. "Bring me his personal annotations by noon. The ones he writes with the quill he pretends is unlucky. Bring me his schedule of private audiences. Bring me the list of pages he trusts to carry letters to shrines."

Her chin tilted. "You assume I can fetch them."

"You were raised to be Empress," I said. "If you can’t fetch papers from your own father’s desk, then all the lessons were wasted."

She laughed then, a short, sharp sound that didn’t suit her. "He doesn’t let me near the desk when he’s writing."

"Then watch when he leaves it," I said. "I don’t require drama. I require paper."

She set her jaw, spun a clean pass of weft through warp, laid it down neat. "And if I bring nothing."

"You eat near the draft," Aunt Ping supplied.

"And," I added, "you stand beside your father when judgment arrives."

Meiling’s hands kept moving. That was new. In a different life she would have stamped her foot. Today she chose to weave.

"May I send my maid with a note to my mother," she tried, head bent, eyes on the line she was teaching her hands to make. "She will worry if I don’t appear in the west court by dusk."

"No," I said. "Your mother will worry anyway. She can practice patience."

Aunt Ping handed her a new shuttle without looking. "Count," she instructed. "Out loud."

Meiling obeyed. Her voice was steady on numbers in a way it had never been steady on humility.

"Four," she finished under her breath, and then, in a voice even lower, "If I bring you the papers, will you spare him?"

"I will weigh him," I said. "And I will not let you stand between him and the scale." 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

She nodded once like a woman who had finally been offered something real: not mercy, but clarity.

I left the loom room to the sound of threads trying to learn honesty. Outside, Yizhen fell into step without announcing himself because he liked the game and because he knew I let him win it.

"She’ll steal it," he predicted. "Not because she cares about justice. Because she wants to prove she can steal."

"I don’t care why," I answered. "Reason is for poets. Results are for me."

"Deming is moving the south gate men to the inner yard," he reported. "Longzi posted two watchers on Ren’s dye stall. The oldest son tried to vanish out the back; he didn’t make it to the alley."

"Bring him to the counting house," I said. "Let him hear his father recite the routes. If he learns to hate numbers, I’ll consider it a form of education."

We turned the corner into the narrower walk that skims the kitchens. Steam breathed out of the door and wrapped my ankles. Women’s voices turned orders into comfort the way only cooks can.

A boy with a basket nearly ran into me and froze like prey. He clutched the cloth tighter. Aunt Ping would have called it a posture for beating. I called it a day in Daiyu.

"What’s in the basket," I asked him.

"Rejected cakes," he blurted. "From the west gate—left by the Dowager Huai—Guard said send them to the barracks but cook said soldiers fight better on dumplings so she said bring them here and—"

"Stop," I told him. "Breathe. Take half to the barracks. Give the rest to the laundries. Tell them the Empress prefers women who can lift wet blankets to men who complain about rope."

His eyes sparked with the kind of pride a boy keeps in his pockets and forgets to hide. He ran. He didn’t spill. I made a note to feed him first for another week.

"Window closing," Yizhen murmured.

"Not yet," I said. "Windows close when a hand chooses to pull."

We were half a corridor from the counting house when Yaozu appeared as if the stone had curled back to let him through. He didn’t look pleased; he looked hungry.

"She came," he reported.

"Who."

"Meiling," he said. "With a maid who didn’t manage to walk like a maid. The papers are under her sash."

"Good," I said.

"And she brought a second thing," he added, lazy on purpose.

"What is it."

"An excuse," he said. "She’ll try to use it when she’s caught. I thought you’d enjoy watching it fail in person."