A Nation Speaks
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 16: The Letter from Nowhere
The baby came in the ninth month of the following year, a girl, born in the early morning while the city was still dark and quiet outside the window.
Kim Jae-won sat with her through the long night before, which was not customary and which neither of them discussed because it did not require discussion — it was simply what he did, present the way he was always present, and she was grateful in a way that went too deep for words.
When it was over and the court ladies had done what court ladies did and the room had settled into the exhausted peace that followed enormous effort, he sat beside her and looked at their daughter with the expression she had come to know as his most honest one — open, without performance, the whole of his attention given freely.
“Soon-hee,” she said.
He looked at her.
“If you are willing.” She held his eyes. “Soon-hee.”
He looked back at the baby for a long moment. Then he reached out and touched his daughter’s hand, the tiny closed fist, with one finger.
“Soon-hee,” he said. As though confirming something that had always been true.
The child changed the household the way children changed households — completely, immediately, reorganizing everything around her small and absolute requirements. Eun-bin moved through the early months in the way new mothers moved, in the broken rhythms of feeding and sleeping and the particular alertness of someone whose rest was always provisional.
Hwa-yeon came when Soon-hee was three weeks old and held her with the competence of someone who had younger siblings and did not find infants alarming, and talked to her in a steady stream of commentary about the household and the weather and the political situation at court, which Soon-hee received with the unfocused gravity of the very newly arrived.
“She has your eyes,” Hwa-yeon said.
“Everyone says that.”
“Everyone is right.” She looked up. “She has your father’s forehead. She is going to be someone who thinks before she speaks and it is going to drive people who don’t do that absolutely mad.”
Eun-bin looked at her daughter in Hwa-yeon’s arms. “Good.”
The letter arrived in the third month after Soon-hee’s birth, on an unremarkable morning when the household was going about its ordinary business and Eun-bin was in the inner room feeding the baby and half-reading a text Scholar Jeong had sent the previous week.
Her lady’s maid brought it with the day’s correspondence and set it on the table, and something about its appearance made Eun-bin look at it twice before she picked it up — the paper was not court paper, not the paper of educated correspondence, but the rougher stock that came from provincial markets, the kind of paper that cost less and showed it.
The address on the outside was written in the alphabet.
Not Hanja. Not the classical script of official correspondence. The alphabet, in an unschooled hand, the blocks slightly uneven, the strokes of someone who had learned recently and was still finding confidence — but readable. Entirely, unmistakably readable.
It was addressed to the royal household, to no one in particular, which meant it had made its way through several hands before landing here, passed along by people who were not certain where it belonged but sensed it belonged somewhere.
She set Soon-hee against her shoulder and opened it.
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