Chapter 15: Hwa-yeon’s Wedding

The wedding was in the second month of the following year, when the plum trees were just beginning and the cold had not yet decided to leave.

Eun-bin arrived with her household the day before, which required coordination between three families and produced the kind of organized chaos that Hwa-yeon would have found both mortifying and funny. Kim Jae-won handled the logistics of their travel with his customary steadiness and asked nothing of her except that she tell him what she needed, which she was still getting used to — the simple fact of being asked.

She found Hwa-yeon in her chamber that evening, sitting on her sleeping mat surrounded by the components of tomorrow’s robes, her hair already half-pinned by a court lady who had stepped away, her hands in her lap with nowhere particular to go.

She looked up when Eun-bin came in and the court ladies withdrew without being asked.

They looked at each other across the room.

“You’re not frightened,” Eun-bin said.

“No.” Hwa-yeon looked at her hands. “I thought I would be. I’ve been waiting to be frightened for weeks.” She looked up. “I think I am ready. Is that strange?”

“I told you the same thing on my wedding morning and you told me nothing I think is strange.”

Hwa-yeon smiled — not the bright public smile but the quieter one underneath it, the one that belonged to rooms without an audience. “I did say that.”

Eun-bin crossed the room and sat beside her on the mat, close the way they had always sat, and for a moment neither of them spoke and the room held them the way it had always held them — without ceremony, without the weight of what they were to each other in the world outside it, just two people who had been telling each other the truth since one of them was eight years old.

“Lee Sung-ho,” Eun-bin said. “Tell me what you know about him now.”

Hwa-yeon was quiet for a moment, the way she was quiet when she was finding the true shape of something rather than the easy shape. “He listens when I talk. Not performing it — actually listening, following the thread of what I mean rather than waiting for me to finish. I didn’t know how rare that was until I noticed it.” She paused. “He told me his mother taught herself to read from merchant signs and temple notices over twenty years, one word at a time, and never told anyone because she was ashamed it had taken so long.”