Chapter 13: The Wedding Month

Her birthday arrived quietly, the way she had always preferred.

Hwa-yeon came the day before and stayed through it, which required negotiation with both their mothers and was worth every bit of it. They sat up late the night before talking about nothing consequential — Hwa-yeon’s poetry-and-agriculture boy, whose name was Lee Sung-ho and who had apparently sent her a letter so formal it read like a land survey, which Hwa-yeon found both hilarious and oddly touching. They talked until the lamp burned low and sleep came without either of them deciding to stop.

In the morning Eun-bin was sixteen.

It did not feel different from fifteen, which she had been told it wouldn’t and hadn’t believed until now. What felt different was everything around it — the way the court ladies moved through her chambers with a new attentiveness, the way her mother looked at her across the breakfast table with something in her eyes that had not been there before. The world had decided she was something new. She was still deciding.

Her father’s gift was a set of brushes, seven of them graded from the finest point to the broadest sweep, wrapped in cloth and accompanied by a note in his small careful hand. The note said only: For everything you will write from here.

She held the brushes for a long time before she put them away.

The wedding preparations began the following week and consumed the palace the way water consumed low ground — gradually and then completely, filling every available space with fabric samples and negotiation and the opinions of people whose opinions she had not requested.

Eun-bin moved through it with the composure she had been practicing in the Hall of Worthies for two years, the ability to be present without being swept. She had views about the wedding robes and expressed them once, clearly, and they were incorporated, which was one of the advantages of being a princess that she had learned to use without apology. She had no views about the catering arrangements and said so, which freed several court ladies to argue about them without her.

Hwa-yeon visited twice during the preparation weeks and was useless at embroidery and invaluable at everything else, moving through the logistical chaos with the instinct of someone who had grown up watching her mother manage a noble household and had absorbed more than she let on. She reorganized the robe fittings schedule on her second visit without being asked, which saved three days of confusion, and then sat down and wrote Lee Sung-ho a letter that was notably less formal than his and didn’t tell anyone she’d done it.