Fake Daughter Is the Real Legend novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Scale
Ruyun proves before two hundred men that the quartermaster's weights are filed down, and the commander has her lashed ten times for speaking in the ration line. That night his orderly says the commander served her grandmother.
The commander's tent smelled of horse blanket and cold tea.
Shen Zhuo sat behind a plain table with the bronze tally in front of him and did not stand when she came in.
He was young for a commander, perhaps thirty, lean, with a scar through his left eyebrow.
He looked at her swollen hand before he looked at her face.
"Qiao Ruyun."
"Yes, Commander."
"The quartermaster says you carried this into my camp. Contraband."
"It was given to me."
"By whom?"
"By someone who is not in this camp."
He turned the tally with one finger.
His face did not change at all.
"I will tell you my rule once," he said. "In Ironwall no one is owed anything. Not a name, not a favor, not an extra ladle. You work or you eat the cold."
"I understand."
"Do you?"
"I take a fair wage and nothing else," Ruyun said. "I would like to be paid for the work. That is all."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth.
It was gone before she could name it.
"Contraband goes to the commander," he said, and slid the tally into his sleeve. "Go back to the washhouse."
"Commander. May I say one more thing?"
"You may say it."
"Your quartermaster is cheating your rice."
The tent went very quiet.
"The sack for the washhouse is marked forty jin," she said. "The women have been telling me for an hour how thin their bowls are. I lifted the sack this morning. It was not forty."
"A convict's guess."
"Then let me prove it at the ration line. Tomorrow, with your own steelyard."
He studied her for the length of a slow breath.
"Dawn," he said. "If you are wrong, you will be sorry."
At dawn the whole camp stood in the trampled yard.
Two hundred men and the forty women of the washhouse waited in their lines, steaming in the cold.
The quartermaster stood on the steps with his scoop.
Shen Zhuo stood at the back with his arms folded and said nothing.
A soldier set the washhouse sack on the quartermaster's scale, and the needle settled on forty.
"There," the quartermaster said. "Honest weight."
"With respect," Ruyun said. "May we try the Commander's steelyard?"
The quartermaster turned the color of tallow.
"A convict does not speak in the ration line."
"Bring it," Shen Zhuo said.
An orderly ran to the tent and came back with a bronze steelyard on a chain.
He hooked the sack to it and lifted.
The long arm swung and stopped.
"Thirty-four," the orderly said.
A murmur ran down the lines.
"The scale was knocked loose," the quartermaster said. "The cold. The metal."
"Your weights," Ruyun said. "Put your one-jin weight on the Commander's scale."
The orderly took the iron weight from the quartermaster's table and hung it.
It read eight-tenths of a jin.
Someone in the line laughed, short and ugly, and a hundred men heard it.
The quartermaster's mouth opened and shut.
"Shaved with a file," Ruyun said. "You can see the bright edge. The ones in the Commander's tent are dull."
Every eye went to Shen Zhuo.
He walked forward through the snow.
He stopped beside her, took the weight, turned it, and handed it back to the orderly without a word.
"The quartermaster will make up six jin to the washhouse by sundown," he said. "And the weights will be replaced."
The women made a low sound.
Ruyun felt the first thing she had felt in thirteen days that was not cold.
"And you," Shen Zhuo said.
She turned.
His face was the same flat gray as the sky.
"A convict who interrupts the ration line before two hundred men gets ten lashes. It is camp law. The quartermaster may carry out the punishment, since he was the party spoken against."
"Commander," she said.
"Ten."
Her ears rang.
He had stood there and let her prove it, and now he would watch.
They tied her wrists to the post.
The quartermaster took the rod himself, grinning, and counted aloud.
On the fourth stroke she stopped hearing the count.
On the seventh she bit through her lip.
She did not scream.
Shen Zhuo stood at the back and watched every blow with his arms folded and did not move.
When it was over the soldiers cut her down, and she walked to the washhouse on her own feet.
The old woman from the washhouse, whom the others called Auntie, laid her face down on a pile of warm linen and said nothing.
Near midnight the door opened.
The young orderly stood there with a jar and a clean strip of cloth.
"The salve is from the Commander's own box," he said, very low. "He said I was not to say so."
Ruyun did not take it.
"Tell him I do not want his charity."
"He said you would say that." The orderly hesitated. "He also said to tell you something. He served your grandmother in her household when he was a boy. She wrote to him about you six months ago, before the trial."
Ruyun lay very still.
"Six months ago," she said.
The Grand Princess had known the sentence before the Marquis ever wrote it.
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