Chaebol Princess
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 1
Hanyang, 1747
The headdress weighed as much as her future and felt about as welcome.
Park Eun Bae stood in the outer courtyard of Changdeokgung and allowed the court ladies to make their final adjustments, their hands moving around her head with the practiced efficiency of women who understood that a Crown Princess was primarily a ceremonial object. The gache rose from her skull in tiers of lacquered black hairpieces threaded with jade pins and gold ornaments and two ruby-tipped hairpins that caught the afternoon light and threw it back at the assembled court in small bursts of red. She had practiced walking with it for six months. She had learned to hold her neck at the precise angle that distributed the weight without trembling. She had learned to keep her face arranged in the expression that communicated serene anticipation rather than the particular numbness that had settled into her chest three days ago and hadn’t moved since.
The courtyard was full. Ministers in their ranked robes. Court ladies in formation. The musicians positioned at the four compass points. Her mother somewhere behind her, not permitted to speak, permitted only to witness her daughter enter a life that had been negotiated before Eun Bae could form complete sentences.
She had never met the Crown Prince.
She had seen him once at a distance across a ceremonial pavilion, a young man in full royal regalia who stood with the bored correctness of someone also performing a function, and she had thought: we are alike in this at least. Neither of us chose it.
That thought had been the closest thing to comfort she’d found.
The chief court lady touched her sleeve. The signal.
Eun Bae drew one breath, set her neck at the correct angle, and began to walk.
The sky had been wrong all morning. She had noticed it the way she noticed most things — quietly, privately, without mentioning it to anyone because a Crown Princess in procession did not look at the sky. But the clouds had come in from the east with unusual speed, greenish at their undersides, and the air had developed the metallic quality that came before heavy rain. The musicians were playing. The assembled court was watching. She moved through the ceremonial gates with measured steps and the headdress caught the wind and she pressed her neck forward against the weight and kept walking.
The thunder arrived without adequate warning.
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