Chapter 3: The Hall of Worthies

The scholars came to her.

This was not how it was announced. What was announced, through the careful language of court protocol, was that Princess Jeong Eun-bin would attend certain sessions of the Jiphyeonjeon as an observer, a distinction conferred occasionally on royal children of demonstrated academic achievement. It was an honor. Several court ladies told her it was an honor. Her tutor told her it was an honor with an expression that suggested he was still working out how he felt about it.

Eun-bin understood what it actually was. Her father had found a way to put her in the room.

The Hall of Worthies occupied a long low building northeast of the main palace complex, its interior divided between a library that smelled of aged paper and cedar and a working chamber where the scholars spread their materials across three large tables pushed together into an irregular shape that had clearly evolved over years of accumulated habit. Books were stacked against the walls in towers of varying stability. Ink-stained cloth covered the tables where the wood had suffered too many spills to recover. The whole room had the feeling of a place where thinking happened at the expense of everything else.

There were six scholars assigned to the project. Eun-bin learned their names and their habits in the first two sessions without appearing to pay attention to either.

Scholar Jeong Inji was the eldest, silver-haired and deliberate, who read everything twice before speaking and whose silences carried more weight than most men’s sentences. Scholar Choe Hang moved constantly, pacing behind the others while they worked, occasionally stopping to write something on whatever surface was nearest. Scholar Park Paengnyeon was young for the Hall, perhaps thirty, and had the distracted brightness of someone whose mind ran slightly ahead of his words. The other three — Scholars Sin, Yi, and Gang — formed a unit that debated among themselves in a shorthand of references and counter-references that Eun-bin spent two weeks learning to follow.

She sat on a cushion near the window and said nothing.

This was the arrangement her father had described without describing it. She was there to observe. Observation did not require speech. What it required was stillness and patience and the ability to watch six brilliant men work with a flawed version of something she had already solved, without correcting them.