The Oath of Eight Summers
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 9: The Sound of Bells
He came at first light.
The Queen sent for him the way she sent for everything that mattered — through one trusted person, no written message, no court channel. Just a summons delivered quietly in the pre-dawn dark by a senior attendant who had been with her long enough to know which things left no paper trail.
He arrived alone.
So Yeon heard the doors and stood.
She had been sitting with the Queen in the lamplight for two hours by then, the two of them talking in the careful way of people rebuilding something that had been interrupted — not rushing it, not avoiding the weight of it, just laying one piece down and then the next. The Queen had asked about the farm. About Park Myung Hee. About the years.
So Yeon had answered plainly. The way she answered everything.
Now she stood and her hands were entirely steady and her face was composed and somewhere underneath the composure her heart was conducting itself with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting eight years for permission and had just received it.
The doors opened.
He stopped when he saw her.
She had known he would. She had rehearsed this moment ten thousand times across eight years — on the farm step in the dark, in the grain store, lying on her sleeping mat looking at the low ceiling with the dried flower against her chest. She had imagined every version of it.
None of them were this.
He was fifteen. She had counted the years. But counting and seeing were entirely different things. The boy from the wildflower field had become something she had no prior image for — taller, composed in the particular way of someone who had been carrying the weight of what he was going to inherit and had learned to carry it without letting it show. His eyes were the same. Still careful. Still patient. Still the eyes of someone who said what was true rather than what was comfortable.
He looked at her across the room.
She looked back.
Neither of them spoke.
The Queen stood to one side with the composure of a woman who had arranged this moment carefully and was going to let it find its own shape without her interference.
Jo Soo stood three steps behind So Yeon and watched everything and said nothing.
He crossed the room slowly.
Not hesitating. Just careful. The way you moved toward something you had been waiting a very long time for and did not want to get wrong.
He stopped in front of her.
She could see him taking inventory the way she was taking inventory — measuring the distance between what he remembered and what was standing in front of him, adjusting, recalibrating.
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