Chapter 1: The Palace and the Prince

The Joseon court had its own gravity.

Park Sena had heard this from her governess, who had heard it from her mother, who had spent thirty years in service to a minister’s household and understood such things. The royal court pulls everything toward it, she had said. Careers, fortunes, daughters. Everything eventually bends in its direction.

Sena was eight years old, and standing inside Gyeongbok Palace for the first time in her life, she understood what her governess meant. The great receiving hall stretched longer than anything she had seen — longer than the market road in their district, longer than the temple courtyard where she had once counted her steps out of boredom during a ceremony. Red-lacquered pillars rose at measured intervals toward a ceiling painted in the deep blues and greens of the royal court. Silk banners hung between them, the embroidered insignia of the Yi dynasty bright even in the diffused light filtering through the hall’s high paper screens.

Everything in the hall was positioned with intention. The officials and ministers stood in clusters that looked casual and were not — Sena had lived her whole life in her father’s house and understood, even at eight, that men who stood near each other had reasons for it. The cut and quality of each man’s robe announced his rank before he opened his mouth. The depth of each bow communicated relationships that had taken years to build. Even the placement of serving tables along the eastern wall meant something she didn’t have the knowledge to read yet.

Her father moved through all of it like water finding its level.

Minister Park Hyeon-su was a tall man with a composed face and the particular quality of stillness that powerful men cultivate — the appearance of ease that costs considerable effort to maintain. He held a mid-ranking position in the Ministry of Rites, which gave him legitimate business at court and access to men whose positions exceeded his own. He was, in the assessment of those who knew him, a patient man. He had not risen as far as his abilities perhaps warranted, and he was not finished rising.

Sena stood where he had positioned her — to his left, two steps behind, hands folded — and watched him work.

He was, she knew, here because of the Crown Prince.

Prince Yul, the eldest son of Emperor Seonjong, had recently reached an age at which the question of his marriage had begun to circulate through court society. He was fourteen — almost fifteen — and the emperor had not yet made any formal announcement, which meant the silence itself was a kind of invitation for ambitious men to position their daughters favorably. Minister Park had been maneuvering carefully for the better part of a year. He had secured this invitation to a minor reception, dressed Sena in her finest silk, and instructed her to stand correctly, speak only when addressed, and make an impression of quiet dignity should the Crown Prince’s eye happen to fall on her.

The Crown Prince was not here.

He had left the palace several weeks prior for a provincial inspection — or so the officials said, in the careful way court officials said things that meant something slightly different from what the words suggested. Whatever the true reason, the result was that Sena had dressed in silk and traveled three hours and was standing in the most significant room she had ever occupied with absolutely nothing to do.

She shifted her weight minutely to her left foot. Her right foot had begun to lose feeling.

No one was looking at her. She was a minister’s daughter at a minor reception, small and still and utterly without consequence to anyone present. Her father had moved into a conversation with two men whose robes were finer than his. She recognized the deferential angle of his shoulders — these were men he was cultivating, not friends.

She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the banners. She counted the pillars along the east wall — twelve — and had started on the west wall when a voice appeared at her elbow.

“What are you doing here? There aren’t any children around.”

She turned.

A boy stood beside her. He was taller than her by half a head, perhaps ten years old, with a clean honest face and the kind of dark eyes that seemed to be conducting a swift assessment of everything they rested on. His robes were finer than her father’s, she noticed immediately — finer than anyone’s she had seen this afternoon — but he wore them with the absolute indifference of someone who had never had to think about what he was wearing.