A Nation Speaks
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1: The Secret Language of Cousins
The ink was the problem.
Eun-bin had stolen — borrowed, she corrected herself, borrowed — a small cake of her tutor’s finest ink, the kind ground so fine it left no texture on the paper, only a clean dark line. She had not anticipated that Hwa-yeon would be so enthusiastic about using it, or that enthusiasm would mean ink on the sleeping mat, ink on the silk cushion, ink on the left sleeve of Hwa-yeon’s court robe in a shape that looked somewhat like a frog.
“Don’t look at it,” Hwa-yeon said.
“I’m not looking at it.”
“You’re looking at it.”
“It looks like a frog.”
Hwa-yeon examined her sleeve with the solemn expression of someone assessing damage after a battle. “It looks nothing like a frog. It looks like — a cloud. A ceremonial cloud.”
“Lady Seo will say you did it on purpose to embarrass the family.”
“Lady Seo says I do everything on purpose to embarrass the family.” Hwa-yeon set her brush down with great dignity and picked up the paper she’d been working on. “She also says I eat too fast and laugh too loud and walk like I’m late to a fire. Last week she told my mother I breathe incorrectly.”
“You do breathe quite loudly.”
“Eun-ah.”
Princess Jeong Eun-bin pressed her lips together very firmly and looked at the wall. The wall was plain white plaster, entirely neutral, offering nothing. It was not her fault that it was also slightly funny.
They were tucked into the far corner of Eun-bin’s sleeping chamber, behind the lacquered screen that divided the room — not hidden exactly, since hiding in one’s own quarters was not a concept that made sense, but arranged so that the gap under the door showed only the edge of the mat and not the two girls sitting cross-legged on it with ink and stolen paper between them. Court Lady Ahn was somewhere on the other side of the outer room. They could hear her occasionally, the soft rhythm of her moving through the space, checking, adjusting, performing the endless quiet maintenance that court ladies performed.
This was normal. Court Lady Ahn was always somewhere nearby, the way weather was always somewhere nearby — present, watchful, and largely ignorable when conditions were favorable.
Conditions were currently favorable.
“Show me again,” Hwa-yeon said, leaning over the paper.
Eun-bin pointed to the marks she’d made at the top of the sheet. Eighteen symbols, arranged in three rows. “Each one is a sound. Not a meaning — a sound. So this one,” she touched the first mark, a simple vertical line with a small curve, “is the sound your mouth makes at the very beginning of annyeong. The ah-sound. See how it’s open? Round at the bottom because your throat is open when you make it.”
Hwa-yeon made the sound several times, her fingers pressed to her own throat the way Eun-bin had shown her. “And this one?”
“That’s the ng-sound. The one at the end. Feel how your throat closes?” She watched Hwa-yeon’s face as the eleven-year-old worked through it, the small focused frown, the finger pressed below her jaw. Hwa-yeon learned differently than Eun-bin did — not through systems but through sensation, through her body understanding before her mind did. Once her body knew a thing she never forgot it.
“So I put them together—”
“Stack them. The beginning sound, then the middle, then the end, all together in one block. Like building a house. Foundation, walls, roof.”
Hwa-yeon’s brush moved slowly, constructing the syllable. It was clumsy — she held a brush the way she did most things, with more confidence than precision — but the shapes were recognizable. She held it up.
“Annyeong,” Eun-bin confirmed. “You wrote annyeong.”
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