Fated to Love: a Joseon Love Story
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6: Princess of Joseon
The wedding was held on the fourteenth day of the second month, when Sena was ten years and three months old and the plum blossoms were just beginning along the palace’s southern wall.
It was a smaller ceremony than the Crown Prince’s marriage, which had been conducted with the full apparatus of royal spectacle two months prior — three days of celebration, the court assembled in its entirety, the capital’s citizens lining the processional roads. The Second Prince’s wedding was a single day’s affair, properly conducted and correctly observed in every particular, but scaled to the occasion rather than designed to overwhelm it. The Emperor had arranged things with his characteristic precision. Enough ceremony to establish the marriage’s legitimacy and dignity. Not so much that it invited comparison with what had come before.
Sena wore white and gold. Her governess had spent the better part of a week on her hair.
She stood through the ceremony with the composure she had been practicing her entire life and tried not to think about how strange it was to be ten years old and standing in a wedding hall. She focused instead on Seon, who was directly across from her in his ceremonial robes looking exactly like what he was — a twelve-year-old boy who had gotten what he wanted and was experiencing the particular combination of satisfaction and sudden awareness that the thing you wanted is now actually happening.
Their eyes met during the ritual exchange of bows.
His expression said, very clearly: well.
Hers said, just as clearly: yes, well.
They completed the ceremony without incident.
Her quarters were in the eastern residential wing, three connected rooms that the palace household staff had furnished with the careful attention appropriate to a prince’s wife. The main room held a writing table, low shelving for books, a sitting area arranged around a brazier that kept the winter chill manageable. The sleeping room beyond it had a proper bed platform and screens painted with the pale blue herons that someone on the household staff had apparently decided suited her — correctly, as it happened. The small anteroom at the entrance was her governess’s domain, which meant Sena’s governess had made the transition from the Park family household to the palace and was managing her new environment with the adaptable efficiency she applied to everything.
Sena spent her first evening in her new quarters sitting at the writing table looking at the heron screens and conducting a quiet inventory of her situation.
She was ten years old. She was a princess of Joseon, which was still a phrase that sat oddly in her mind regardless of how many times she turned it over. She had her own rooms in Gyeongbok Palace, her own staff of two junior attendants in addition to her governess, and a husband who was twelve and lived in the western residential wing on the other side of the inner garden.
She was also, for the first time in her life, not going home.
This last fact arrived with more weight than she had anticipated. Not grief exactly — she had known this was coming, had been prepared for it, had understood since she was eight years old standing in a palace reception that her father’s plans pointed eventually in this direction. But knowing and arriving were different things, and the particular smell of her family’s courtyard in the morning, the sound of the persimmon tree in the wind, the specific quality of light through her bedroom window at home — these surfaced in the quiet of her new rooms with an insistence she hadn’t budgeted for.
She sat with it until her governess brought evening tea and the practical concerns of settling in displaced the less practical ones.
She was a princess of Joseon.
She would manage.
Seon appeared at her quarters the following morning before her first lesson.
Not at the door — at the garden gate that connected the eastern and western residential wings, which technically required a senior attendant’s notification on both sides before a visit could be conducted properly. He was standing at the gate when Sena’s junior attendant opened it for the morning airing of the garden, wearing his everyday robes and the expression of someone who had been standing there for a few minutes and was entirely unbothered by the protocol implications.
“Good morning,” he said.
The junior attendant looked at the Second Prince standing at the gate in the early morning and looked at Sena and made the rapid calculation of someone new to palace service trying to determine the correct response to a situation her training had not specifically covered.
“Your Highness,” Sena said, from the garden path where she had been walking in the thin winter sunlight. “You are aware that visits require notification through the appropriate channels.”
“I notified my senior attendant,” Seon said. “He’s still asleep.”
“That is not how notification works.”
“It might be.” He pushed the gate open — it was unlocked, which he had apparently already established — and came into her garden with the unhurried ease he brought everywhere. “How did you sleep?”
Sena looked at him. She thought about her governess’s view on this, which would be comprehensive and firmly expressed. She thought about the junior attendant watching them both with the frozen attention of someone awaiting instruction.
“Well enough,” she said. “The rooms are comfortable.”
“Good.” He fell into step beside her on the garden path as though this were an established routine rather than the second day of their marriage. “Your lesson schedule starts after the morning meal?”
“Classical literature and calligraphy in the morning. Music in the afternoon.”
“Mine starts at sunrise.” He said this with the resignation of long acquaintance. “Master Jeong believes the mind is sharpest at dawn.”
“Is it?”
“Master Jeong’s mind may be. Mine objects strenuously.” He glanced at her. “Do you like it here?”
The question was the same directness she had always gotten from him. Not are you comfortable or is everything satisfactory — the question an official might ask. Just: do you like it.
Sena considered it honestly. “I miss home,” she said. “I didn’t expect to miss it as much as I do.”
He nodded. No dismissal of this, no reassurance that she would get used to it. Just the acknowledgment of someone who takes what you say seriously.
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