Fated to Love: a Joseon Love Story
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2: The Betrothal
Spring came early to the capital that year.
The plum blossoms were already past their peak by the time Minister Park Hyeon-su’s household made the journey from their district residence to Hanyang, the petals browning at their edges, the trees already thickening toward full leaf. Sena watched the city grow around their palanquin as they entered the capital — the tile rooftops stacking against each other up the hillsides, the market roads crowded with merchants and their carts, the smell of the Han River carried on a warm southerly wind. She was eight years and ten months old, close enough to nine that she had begun saying almost nine when anyone asked, which felt more accurate to the person she was becoming.
She knew why they were here.
Her governess had told her, carefully and with the particular gentleness adults used when delivering information they expected to be received with mixed feelings. The betrothal had been arranged. Minister Park had secured what he had spent two years positioning for. His daughter was to be formally presented to Crown Prince Yul, the eldest son of Emperor Seonjong, as his intended bride.
Sena had listened. She had thanked her governess. She had gone to her room and sat with the information for a long time, turning it over the way she might turn over a stone found in the garden, examining it from every angle.
She thought about what Seon had told her, in the alcove behind the screen of painted cranes, when she was eight and he was ten and neither of them had any weight in the world. If your father wants to betroth you to Prince Yul, you’re going to have a very miserable life.
She thought about that for a long time.
Gyeongbok Palace wore ceremony the way it wore everything — as though it had been built specifically for this purpose and no other. The reception hall had been arranged for the betrothal presentation with meticulous attention to hierarchy and symbolism. Red and gold silk panels hung between the lacquered pillars. The ceremonial table at the hall’s center bore gifts from her father’s household — bolts of fine silk, lacquerware, a pair of bronze cranes — arranged according to protocols her father had spent weeks ensuring were correctly observed.
The officials and their wives filled the hall in their proper ranks. Her father moved through them radiating the careful pleasure of a man who had achieved something significant and was required to appear modest about it.
Sena stood in her best silk — deep blue with silver embroidery at the cuffs and collar, her hair dressed by her governess that morning with unusual care — and watched the room with the stillness she had practiced since she was small enough to fit in her father’s arms. She was, she understood, the object of considerable attention today, and the correct response to being an object of attention was stillness and composure.
She was almost nine. She did as she was told.
Crown Prince Yul arrived twenty minutes after the appointed hour.
He was thirteen, recently turned, and he walked into the hall with the particular quality of someone who had never in his life been required to hurry. He was tall for his age — taller than Seon, she noticed immediately — with a face that would have been handsome if it hadn’t arranged itself into an expression of permanent mild impatience. His ceremonial robes were magnificent. He wore them the way he wore his tardiness — as his simple due.
The hall bowed. He acknowledged this with a slight incline of his head and moved toward the ceremonial table with the unhurried pace of someone completing an obligation.
His gaze swept across Sena with the efficiency of a man checking a ledger entry.
She was almost nine years old — slight, unformed, the angles of childhood still outrunning any suggestion of what she would become. She stood correctly, eyes appropriately lowered, hands folded. She was pretty in the way that well-bred children were often pretty, which was to say she showed the promise of something without yet delivering it.
Crown Prince Yul looked at her for perhaps four seconds.
Then he turned to the official standing at his right and said, in a voice pitched low but not low enough, “She’s just a child. There’s nothing here yet.”
The official’s face arranged itself into a diplomatic blankness. Minister Park, two steps away, heard every word and did not move a muscle.
The ceremony proceeded. The appropriate words were spoken by the appropriate people. Her father presented the betrothal gifts. The court recorder noted the formal acceptance. The thing was done — Park Sena, daughter of Minister Park Hyeon-su, was officially the Crown Prince’s intended.
Through all of it, Yul stood with the patience of someone waiting for rain to stop.
When the formal portion concluded and the reception began — servants moving through the hall with food and wine, the assembled officials clustering into conversation — the Crown Prince remained for precisely the time required by decorum. He ate nothing. He spoke to no one except when addressed. His eyes moved around the room with a restless quality that had nothing to do with anyone present.
Then he leaned toward his attending official and murmured something.
The official bowed and addressed the room with practiced smoothness. “His Highness the Crown Prince conveys his regrets. He is not feeling entirely well and requires rest.”
The room bowed. The Crown Prince walked out.
He did not look at Sena again.
The reception continued as if nothing had occurred, because in the official version of events, nothing had. The Crown Prince had felt unwell. These things happened. The betrothal was formally recorded and entirely valid regardless of his presence at the subsequent festivities, and Minister Park received the congratulations of his colleagues with an expression of composed satisfaction that had cost him considerable effort to construct.
Sena stood at the edge of the room and understood with the clarity that children sometimes achieve before adults think to obscure things from them, that she had just been weighed and set aside. Not rejected — the betrothal stood. Simply assessed as not worth the trouble of remaining.
She kept her face still and her hands folded and her chin at the correct angle. She was almost nine. She had been trained for composure.
A hand closed around her wrist from below.
She looked down.
Between the draped edge of the banquet table and the floor, a gap of perhaps two hand-widths revealed a familiar face looking up at her with dark eyes carrying equal measures of apology and mischief.
Seon.
He was almost twelve now — she could see it in his face, the slight sharpening of his features since the alcove and the cranes. He jerked his head toward the space beneath the table with an expression that said, very clearly: get down here.
Sena glanced at her father. He was deep in conversation, angled away from her, both hands engaged in the emphatic gestures he used when making a point he considered important.
She tucked her silk skirts carefully and lowered herself to the floor.
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