A Nation Speaks
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 12: October
The promulgation date was set for the ninth day of the tenth month.
Eun-bin learned this from her father in the eighth month, sitting across from him in the Royal Study in the early evening with the lamps already lit and the smell of ink and old paper around them the way it had always been, since she was small enough to sit on a cushion beside his desk and be handed a brush as a lesson in patience.
He told her the date and she counted forward — thirty-one days. She would still be fifteen. Her birthday fell twelve days after, in the deep middle of October, when the cold had arrived and the city settled into the quiet of a season turning.
Thirty-one days.
“Will there be a ceremony?” Her voice came out steady.
“A formal proclamation. The document will be read at court. Copies will go out to the provinces.” He looked at her across the desk. “It will be called Hunminjeongeum. The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People.”
She turned the name over. Hunminjeongeum. Formal, dignified, the kind of name that belonged to something that intended to last. She had built it in secret with a stolen ink cake and a cousin who had too many feelings, and it was going to be called The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People and read aloud at the court of King Sejong the Great.
“That is a good name,” she said.
“Scholar Jeong drafted it.”
“It is still a good name.”
Her father almost smiled. “Yes. It is.”
She spent the ninth day of the tenth month in her chamber.
No one had told her she couldn’t go elsewhere. She simply found, when she woke that morning, that she did not want to be anywhere that required her to perform composure. She wanted to be in her own room with her own things around her, and so she stayed.
Her lady’s maid brought breakfast and did not ask questions, which was one of the things Eun-bin valued most about her. Court Lady Ahn moved through the outer room with her customary quiet. The morning passed.
Hwa-yeon had sent a letter that arrived the previous day, timed with the accuracy of someone who understood exactly what the ninth would mean.
I will be thinking about you all day, it said, in the alphabet, in the hand that no longer leaned quite as far left as it once had, straightening imperceptibly over three years of use. Not because you need me to. Because I want to. Because we were there first and I want someone to be thinking about that while the proclamation goes out, and I am the only person who can.
She was reading it again when she heard it.
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