The Oath of Eight Summers
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1: The Wildflower Field
The field belonged to no one.
That was the best thing about it. Inside the palace walls everything belonged to someone — every garden, every courtyard, every carefully raked path between the buildings had a name and a purpose and a protocol governing who could walk it and when. Outside the eastern gate, past the wall where the groundskeepers stopped caring, the field simply existed. Wild and unhurried and full of things that had decided to grow there without asking anyone’s permission.
It was Yi Joon who had found it first.
He was seven and already aware, in the way that second princes were made aware early, that most places were not entirely his. The throne room belonged to his father. The study hall belonged to his tutors. The formal gardens belonged to ceremony. But this field — this accidental field past the wall where the groundskeepers stopped — this he had decided was his without telling anyone, which was the only kind of ownership that actually felt like ownership.
He had brought So Yeon because she had followed him.
That was simply what she did. She was five and she had decided, with the complete conviction of someone who had not yet learned that decisions required justification, that where Yi Joon went, she would also go. He had tried explaining to her twice that he was a prince and she was a girl and there were protocols. She had looked at him with those enormous bright black eyes and continued following him.
He had stopped explaining.
They had been running for a long time.
The field was larger than it looked from the gate and they had gone deep into it, the palace walls invisible behind the grass and the wildflowers, the sounds of the court muffled and distant. The sky was very blue. The flowers were every color that spring could manage — white and yellow and pale purple and a red so deep it was almost not a color anymore.
So Yeon stopped first.
She dropped into the grass with the complete physical honesty of a child who had run as far as she could run and had no opinions about landing gracefully. Yi Joon stopped beside her, hands on his knees, breathing hard, trying to look like a prince who had chosen to stop rather than a boy who needed to.
She was already reaching for the flowers around her.
Her small hands moved through them with the focused pleasure of someone conducting important work. She held things up to the light. Discarded some. Kept others. Built a small pile of selected flowers beside her with the serious curation of a royal assessor examining tribute.
Yi Joon sat down beside her.
The grass was warm from the sun. The field smelled of things growing without being told to. Somewhere above them a bird was doing something loud and cheerful and completely unnecessary.
He watched her sort her flowers.
She had a smudge of dirt on her cheek from the running. Her braid had come mostly undone, the blue-black hair loose around her shoulders, a strand of it across her face that she kept blowing upward with her lower lip when it bothered her. Her court robes were going to require explanation when they returned.
She didn’t appear to be thinking about this.
He reached out and picked a flower. Yellow, small, the stem flexible and long. He leaned over and tucked it behind her ear.
She went still. Touched it with her fingertips. Looked at him with those eyes.
He picked up another. This one with a longer stem, more pliable. He worked it carefully — the stem around, once, twice, the ends tucked — and held out his hand.
A ring. Small and yellow and entirely temporary and somehow exactly right.
She looked at it.
He took her left hand — small as a bird, the fingers slightly dirty from the flower sorting — and slid the flower ring onto her finger.
She held her hand up and looked at it in the afternoon light. The yellow flower against her small brown hand. The petals already beginning to think about wilting but not there yet. Still perfect. Still entirely itself.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she looked at Yi Joon.
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