A Nation Speaks
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4: The Girl Who Started It
Hwa-yeon arrived in the way she always arrived — slightly ahead of her escort, her robe not quite settled from the journey, talking before she was fully through the door.
“I never received your letters.”
Eun-bin, who had been waiting with considerably more composure than she felt, rose from her cushion. “I know.”
“Both of them? Neither one arrived?”
“Neither one.”
Hwa-yeon stopped in the middle of the room and looked at her with the expression she wore when the world had failed to meet reasonable expectations. She was taller than she’d been three months ago — eleven going on twelve, all angles and energy, her hair escaping its court pins in two places already. “That is completely unacceptable. I waited and waited and I thought you’d forgotten me or were ill or—” she stopped. Something in Eun-bin’s face had told her something. “What happened to them?”
“Come sit down.”
“Eun-ah. What happened to the letters.”
Eun-bin sat. After a moment Hwa-yeon sat across from her, close, the way she always sat — near enough that their knees almost touched, near enough that nothing could be hidden in her face.
So Eun-bin told her.
She told her about the interception, the summons, her father standing at the window with the folded paper in his hand. She told her about the hours of teaching in the Royal Study, the lamps coming on without either of them noticing, her father writing the sky is clear today in her alphabet and looking at it for a long time. She told her about the Hall of Worthies and the six scholars and the three weeks of silence before she spoke about the doubling mark, and Scholar Jeong’s face when the logic unfolded under his brush.
She told her everything except the part her father had said at the end, standing in the garden by the persimmon tree. That part she kept, not because it was secret but because it was hers, a small coal she was still keeping warm.
Hwa-yeon listened the way she listened to things that mattered — completely still, which was the only time she was ever completely still, her eyes on Eun-bin’s face, not blinking very much.
When Eun-bin finished, the room was quiet.
“Our letters,” Hwa-yeon said. “Our alphabet. He’s going to make it the alphabet. For everyone.”
“For all of Korea. Yes.”
Hwa-yeon looked down at her hands in her lap. They were ink-stained, Eun-bin noticed — Hwa-yeon’s hands were almost always ink-stained, which Lady Seo found mortifying and which Eun-bin had always found secretly reassuring, evidence that her cousin existed in the world between visits.
“Will anyone know?” Hwa-yeon’s voice was careful in a way it rarely was. “That we — that you—”
“No.”
A long pause.
“That doesn’t seem right.”
“No,” Eun-bin agreed. “It doesn’t.”
Hwa-yeon looked up. There was something working in her face, something moving through the usual brightness toward a place underneath it that Eun-bin recognized as the place where Hwa-yeon kept the things she actually thought, as opposed to the things she said. At eleven she had already learned that distinction, which was either wisdom or sadness or both.
“But you’re still doing it. You’re still going to the Hall of Worthies and helping them.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Eun-bin considered the question seriously, the way it deserved. Outside the window the persimmon tree stood in its new leaves, improbable and green.
“Because it needs to be right,” she said finally. “Because if it isn’t right — if it’s too hard to learn or the sounds don’t map cleanly or a farmer in Jeolla province writes a word and a farmer in Pyongan province can’t read it — then what is it for? It’s just a clever thing we made. A pretty system.” She paused. “It needs to actually work. For the people who need it.”
Hwa-yeon was quiet for a moment. “The people who can’t read now.”
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