Chapter 2: The Letter That Never Arrived

Three days after Hwa-yeon went home, Eun-bin wrote her first real letter.

She had been composing it in her head since the morning after the visit, lying on her mat in the gray hour before the palace woke, arranging and rearranging what she wanted to say. Not the content — the content was easy, a tumbling abundance of small observations she had been saving without knowing she was saving them, the things that only made sense when told to Hwa-yeon. It was the alphabet that required care. Each word sounded out syllable by syllable, checked against the symbol chart she kept folded inside her poetry anthology where no one would think to look for it.

She wrote about the gardener’s assistant who had fallen asleep against the stone wall of the eastern courtyard and been discovered by the head eunuch, and the magnificent series of events that followed. She wrote about the persimmon tree outside her window that had dropped all its leaves in a single night as though it had made a decision. She wrote about missing Hwa-yeon in the way she always missed her after visits — not a sharp feeling but a blunt one, like a room where the furniture had been rearranged and she kept reaching for things that were no longer where she expected them.

She folded the letter three times, the way they had agreed. She gave it to her lady’s maid with the name of Hwa-yeon’s household and the instruction that it was a personal correspondence and should travel with the next messenger.

Then she waited.

A week passed. Then another. No reply came.

This was not unusual on its face — Hwa-yeon wrote the way she did everything, in great enthusiastic bursts followed by long silences, and the messenger schedule between the palace and the outer noble households was not reliable. Eun-bin told herself this. She believed it for approximately four days before she wrote a second letter.

The second letter was shorter. It said: Did the first letter arrive? Write back in our alphabet even if it is only one word so I know you received it. I will worry otherwise. You know I will worry.

She gave this one to a different lady’s maid with more careful instructions.

No reply came to that one either.

On the morning of the twenty-third day after Hwa-yeon’s visit, Eun-bin was summoned to her father’s study.

She had been inside the Royal Study many times. It was not an intimidating room to her the way it was to the officials who entered it with their careful postures and their eyes aimed at the floor — she had been brought here since childhood, sat on a cushion beside her father’s desk while he worked, occasionally handed a brush and told to copy something as a lesson in both calligraphy and patience. The room smelled of ink and old paper and the wood of the bookshelves, and she associated it with afternoons of comfortable quiet.