The next day a proclamation went up and set the whole city on its ear.

The government was selling coal at two coins a jin, a little over a pound, and anyone who could not pay could buy on credit.

The hemp cloth and raw cotton hauled back from Gaoan City, though, Ning Chen did not put up for sale.

Cotton was a luxury as far as ordinary people were concerned. It ran two or three hundred coins a jin, and a padded coat took two or three pounds of it at the very least.

That was fine. Ordinary people could not afford it, but somebody could... The high officials and notables in the city had money to burn.

So that day every high official and notable in the city, and every great house and gentry family with them, received an invitation.

That evening the Prince Who Holds the Realm would be hosting them at the Good Fortune Tower, the largest wine house in Qingzhou.

Ordinarily, an invitation to dine with the great and terrible Prince Who Holds the Realm was the kind of luck that sends smoke rising off your ancestral graves.

But the men who got one sat with their brows knotted. Not one of them could work up any pleasure in it.

The reason, of course, was the city's grain merchants.

Never seeing their stolen grain again was one thing. On top of it they had been squeezed for a large donation.

When the Prince Who Holds the Realm himself asks for donations, giving nothing, or giving too little, slaps him in the face and tells the world you think your life has gone on long enough.

So everyone understood what this was. No banquet like this one is ever a good banquet. (TL Note: 宴無好宴, "no banquet is a good banquet" — half of a fixed saying whose other half runs "no meeting is a good meeting." It means an invitation from a man with power over you is a summons dressed up as hospitality.)

Go, and the Prince Who Holds the Realm would certainly have…