In the sixth year of the Shaoding era of the Southern Song, the most expensive official document in Lin'an is used to wrap a dead fish.
Wenren Zhaoye, a clerk at the prefectural office, recognizes an extraordinary lawsuit on the paper. A widow who was buried thirteen years ago has apparently appeared in person at Lin'an Prefecture and won a case the previous day over sandy farmland worth ten thousand strings of cash. Stranger still, the judgment is scrupulously fair, citing old precedents that protect the vulnerable and curb the powerful. Someone has not forged an unjust law, but is using the name of justice to seize property.
A sheet of paper wrapped around a fish leads to 372 households whose names have been erased, and to Lin'an’s layers of household registers, land deeds, grain stores, and personal connections. Following the paper fibers, the ink, and traces of revisions in the judgment records, Zhaoye and the decorative painter Miao Tingyun hope to restore the names of those forced out of the ledgers. But they soon discover that what is truly difficult to distinguish is not just truth from falsehood. It is also who a benevolent policy saves once it reaches the people, and who it sacrifices.
The tide is coming. Can a single judgment hold back the lights of ten thousand homes?
