The trading company was called Liang Meridian.
This was not accidental. The name carried the previous princess's surname — her mother's surname, the one the emperor had allowed and then quietly used against her — repurposed into something that moved through the world on its own terms. A small private acknowledgment that she filed under the thing that now had a label and did not need to be examined further.
Liang Meridian had offices in four cities, a fleet of seven river barges, contracts with eleven merchant guilds across the eastern and northern provinces, and a staff of forty-three people who knew, to varying degrees of specificity, what the company actually was underneath the trading concern.
