The Oath of Eight Summers
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2: The Farm at Dawn
They let her sleep.
Nobody knocked. Nobody came to dress her or prepare her for morning court obligations or tell her what the day required. The house simply woke up around her the way houses did — gradually, with the particular sounds of people who had things to do and were doing them.
So Yeon opened her eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling.
She lay still for a moment. The way you lay still when you woke somewhere wrong and needed a second to understand where wrong was. The ceiling was low and plain, dark wood beams, nothing like the painted pavilion ceiling of her palace rooms. The sleeping mat beneath her was thicker and rougher than what she knew. The smell was different — wood smoke and grain and something animal from somewhere outside.
Then she remembered.
She lay still for another moment with the remembering sitting on her chest.
Then she heard it — a rhythmic sound, steady and unhurried, coming from the next room. She sat up. Pushed her hair back. Stood on legs that were still tired from the night before and followed the sound to the doorway.
A girl was grinding barley.
She was perhaps eight or nine, solidly built, with the focused competence of someone doing a familiar task without needing to think about it. The grinding stone moved in steady circles. The barley disappeared and came out the other side as something finer and more useful.
The girl looked up.
She looked at So Yeon with the direct uncomplicated assessment of someone who had not been taught to be careful about looking at people.
Then she turned her head and called for her mother.
The mother was a broad warm woman named Park Myung Hee who fed So Yeon before she asked her anything, which So Yeon would remember for the rest of her life as the correct order of priorities. A bowl of barley porridge with a small dish of kimchi and a cup of barley tea, set in front of her without ceremony, with the simple expectation that she would eat it.
She ate it. All of it. She had not realized until the first spoonful how hungry she was.
Park Myung Hee watched her eat with the expression of a woman taking inventory — not unkindly, just practically. Looking at what had arrived in her house in the night and determining what it needed.
It needed food first. That had been established.
What it needed next was clothes.
The women came together the way women in that household came together for anything that required more than one pair of hands — without being asked, without ceremony, with the focused efficiency of people who understood that things needing doing were best done quickly and well.
Three women. Cotton cloth. Scissors and needles and the particular shorthand of people who had been sewing together long enough that half the work happened in glances.
So Yeon sat on a low stool and watched them work around her. Measuring with practiced hands. Cutting with confidence. The cloth taking shape in their hands the way things took shape when people knew exactly what they were doing.
Two sets. A short jeogori jacket over loose baji pants, the practical clothing of a girl with things to do and no time to manage anything more complicated.
Plain cotton. Nothing embroidered. Nothing that required careful handling or special treatment.
Nothing that said princess.
While the women sewed, Park Myung Hee took the royal nightgown — the silk sleeping robe So Yeon had been wearing when Park Dohun came through her window, the one with the small embroidered cranes at the collar — and fed it to the kitchen fire without particular ceremony.
So Yeon watched it burn.
She didn’t say anything. She was five and she understood, in the wordless way that children understood things that adults hadn’t explained, that the burning was necessary. That the girl who wore that nightgown needed to be somewhere else for a while.
She watched until the silk was gone.
Then she looked at her hands. Still the flower ring finger on her left hand, still the slight ghost of where the stem had wrapped — but the ring itself gone, fallen apart somewhere on the road before morning.
Park Myung Hee set a pair of shoes beside her feet.
So Yeon looked at them. Plain leather, worn but clean, the right size.
Someone had thought about her feet.
She put them on.
The girl’s name was Jo Soo.
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