Dawn rinsed the frost from the ditch grass and left it shining. The mill slept behind her; the square hadn't warmed its voice yet. Geese muttered in their dreams. Xueyin walked the field edge with the instrument under oil cloth and the day new in her lungs.
Something in the ditch breathed wrong.
Not trouble like men made; not the hush that follows a lie. A small, ragged sound—wet, stubborn, certain it would be ignored.
She stepped off the cart path. The ditch was a tangle of reed and winter mud. A loop of wire glinted where it shouldn't, and inside it a fox cub had one foreleg caught high and tight. It wasn't old enough to be smart; it was old enough to be proud. The tiny body trembled; the eyes tried not to beg.
"Easy," Xueyin said. "I hear you."
The wire tightened when the fox pulled. She knelt on the bank and studied the angles. If she tried to free it by hand, it would bite and make the loop worse. If she cut the wire wrong, it would whip and cut again. She set the instrument across her knees and breathed until the world narrowed to a safe thread.
She counted quietly to nine.
On the last beat she set a lane—not toward the animal at all, but toward a peg on the farther bank where the snare tied off—no more than one pace wide. Heel, toe; on the second beat she slid left so the thread would travel through empty morning and end in wood.
A glass-clean note left the bridge. Reed tips shivered; frost pearls jumped on a blade of grass. The line kissed the peg and parted the old cord that held it. The snare slackened at once, as if a mean idea had suddenly lost its memory. The loop fell wide. The fox's leg came free in an awkward lurch, and it tumbled into the reeds, panting at the insult.
"Stay still," she said, not to command it, but so she would hear her own kindness and remember to keep her hands slow.
The wire had left a line on the fur—thin, angry, not bleeding. The cub's foot touched ground and lifted, unsure. It showed small teeth to prove it was not soft; then it tried to put weight on the leg and hissed at the news. Pride lost a vote to pain.
She eased a strip of oil cloth off the instrument and wrapped it loose around the leg with silk thread, not to bind hard—only to tell the skin to rest. The cub trembled and let her. When she lifted her hands away, it slid one step, then another, and crouched, choosing between staying and bolting.
"Road's that way," Xueyin murmured. "Forest the other. Decide with your nose."
The cub sniffed the wind like a scholar reading an opinion he intended to disagree with. It took three tiny, important steps toward the reeds and vanished like a thought that belonged to itself.
She sat back on her heels. The wire snare lay in the mud like a dropped question. Traps so close to town would make the runner's jaw hard.
"Early work," a voice said behind her.
She didn't start—she had heard the footfall on the path when the geese muttered. The yamen runner had a wool cap pulled low and the brush tucked at his belt as if he'd slept with it.
"Early snare," she said. She nudged it with a reed. "Too near the ditch."
"Too near the kids who don't watch their feet," he said. He looked at the wire and kept his mouth from cursing by will alone. "I'll write a line."
He crouched to see the knot, then looked at the cut cord on the far peg. His eyebrows asked how.
"Angle," she said. "And mercy."
He snorted once, which was his way of saying both thank you and don't get smug.
They followed the ditch a little way and found two more loops, both slack, one rusted enough to argue with the idea of work. He coiled them into a hateful ring and slid it into his pouch.
"You kept your lane off the animal," he said at last.
"Toward wood."
"Toward wood," he echoed, approving as if the ditch were a market street and the reeds had paid taxes. He straightened and winced. "My back says I'm not young."
"My ear says the same," she said. The whisper in her right ear had learned to be a companion. It stayed small in the cold.
They were turning back to the path when a man in a rag coat stepped from behind the reeds with the wrong kind of patience on his face. He had the stoop of someone used to looking down at ground for loops and prints and coin. The cuffs of his coat had cut marks where he wiped a knife clean more than once.
"That my wire?" he asked.
"Your wire in my ditch," the runner said, voice level.
"I set it." The man didn't look angry yet. He looked like a person who believed the world could be played with rules no one else had agreed to. "There's meat on that trail and winter in my house."
"Then set it beyond the road marker," the runner said. "You know the line."
"Beyond the marker," the man repeated as if that sounded like a far country. He shifted his weight. "And who will see it there, if the fox stays clever and the dogs stay home? The ditch pays out; the forest hides."
"Ditch belongs to the village," the runner said. "Forest belongs to itself. The space between is where a man earns a fine."
The man's eyes slid to the instrument on Xueyin's knees and lingered like hunger. "You cut it," he said, deciding. "You cut my morning."
"I uncut a leg," she said.
"Same thing," he said, and his mouth made the shape of a truth that wasn't. He wasn't a brave man. Brave men were rarer than poets thought. He was a stubborn man. Stubborn men took longer to arrive at sense.
The runner showed him the coiled loops. "These don't go back into the ditch. If I find them again, you go on the board."
The man's patience turned brittle. "You post me and I'll set twice as many where you don't walk."
"You'll set none near children," the runner said. "And none in sight of a road. That's the law we can keep with the coin we have."
Xueyin stayed quiet. Ditch law wasn't her poem to recite. She watched the man's shoulders, not his eyes. Shoulders told you when a decision had finished cooking.
"Tax," he said suddenly, desperate for a lever. "For performing on the ditch without a ring."
"Not a ring," Xueyin said mildly. "A cut."
"A cut is a song with short words," he said. He took a step that wasn't wise.
"Names," the runner said, brush-hand at his belt. He didn't shout. Shouting would have given the man a crowd to pretend to.
"Wren," the man said, which was either a lie or a joke, and neither helped.
"Walk with me," the runner said. "We'll write it on calm boards."
"Walk alone," Wren said, and his shoulders decided badly. His hand moved toward the pocket where a wire-twist might wait.
Xueyin set the board to her hip and chose the ground instead of the air. Tap—tap—Bridge Strike rode the frost-stiff reeds and kicked under Wren's boots. He stumbled that thumb's width men hate to show. The runner took that moment and the snare coil and the law, and the three of them arrived at a truth together: that no one bled today and the ditch would feed children before it fed pride.
Wren glared at the water as if it had betrayed him. "You town people think the road grows bread."
"We think bread grows when no one breaks ankles," the runner said. "If you must set, do it beyond the marker. Bring me the first catch and we'll argue a permit like adults."
"Permit," Wren said, making the word sound like a disease. But he wasn't brave, and he wasn't ready to be arrested over a rusty loop. He hunched his shoulders and walked the wrong way, which here was away from town.
The runner didn't watch him go. He wrote a line with his mouth instead of his brush. "No snares within sight of water," he said softly, already composing the board in his head. "No wire where shoes might be."
He looked at Xueyin. "You kept it small."
"The ditch asked for small," she said.
He nodded, pulling his cap down. "Play near the well tonight. Everyone sleeps better when paper breathes."
"Near the well," she agreed.
They followed the path back. The square had woken properly; the porridge boiled like a gentle argument. Ash sprinted at them and only remembered to stop when he saw the runner.
"You left without me," he accused Xueyin, scandalized.
"I went to look at water," she said. "It looked back."
He peered at the ditch and then at her hands. "Did it cost?"
"Only a little," she said.
They reached the square. A woman with a baby on her hip waved shyly. The baker's wife lifted a tray to show the dough had risen instead of sulking. The board had room for fresh chalk.
The runner posted his new lines: No snares within sight of water. No wire within sight of the road. Fines double for second marks. He didn't look at Wren's direction as he wrote. He didn't need to.
Xueyin set the instrument near the well. She played small, the way a place deserves when it has tried all morning to be kind to itself. She kept the lanes aimed at wood. The lantern paper breathed with her.
By midday she had earned a bowl, a sprig of bitter greens, and the promise of a shoe patch if she ever wore through the heel. The fox did not return; the ditch didn't call her name. She took that as the best kind of thanks.
When the sun leaned down, wind made its usual mischief among the reed mats, but not enough to matter. She walked the square's edge and listened. Only geese complained. Only the paper breathed.
She wrapped the instrument and lay with its familiar weight against her ribs under the mill eaves, sleep finding her with her right ear whispering, the thread nipping the split nail, and her wrists aching mild.