Chapter 10

Haewon told Sohwa on a Wednesday.

Not planned — she had been carrying the full weight of the case for three days, seven women’s accounts organized in her memory with the precision of someone who understood that what she was holding was not just testimony but lives, and on Wednesday morning she looked at her sister across the morning tea and understood she could not carry it one more day without placing it in the hands that could do something with it.

She told her everything. From Bora in the corridor on her fifth week to Chaewon in the laundry depot to the specific language Cui Jinglong used, the threats, the dates, the locations. She told it the way she told everything that mattered — flat and precise, no editorializing, the full shape of it laid out between them like a document.

Sohwa listened without moving. Without changing her expression. Without making a sound.

When Haewon finished the room was completely silent.

Sohwa set down her cup. She stood. She crossed to the window and stood with her back to Haewon for perhaps thirty seconds — not processing, Haewon understood, she had processed it while listening. She was doing something else. Deciding something. The specific stillness of a woman who had made a decision and was letting it fully settle before she acted on it.

Then she turned.

“How many are willing to speak,” she said.

“All seven. Chaewon from the laundry depot especially — she has been waiting three months for someone to ask.”

Sohwa nodded once. “I need their names. Now.”

Haewon gave them. All seven. Sohwa’s attendant appeared — summoned by some signal Haewon hadn’t seen — and Sohwa spoke to her in a low rapid voice that had none of the court’s careful pacing. Instructions delivered with the efficiency of a woman who had made her decision and was already three steps into executing it.

The attendant went.

Sohwa turned back to Haewon. The court surface was still intact but underneath it something was running at a different temperature than usual — hotter, more direct, the specific heat of a woman whose love and whose power had finally found the same target.

“Go to Jebe Temür,” she said. “Now. Tell him I need him in the emperor’s presence within the hour. Tell him to bring whatever he knows about Cui Jinglong’s conduct in this court. Everything.”

“He’ll come,” Haewon said.

“I know he’ll come.” Sohwa looked at her — the real look, the one underneath everything. “You built this.”

“I talked to women who needed someone to talk to.”

“Haewon.” Her name, just her name, with the same weight Jebe Temür gave it. “You built this. Say it.”

She held her sister’s gaze. “I built this.”

Sohwa crossed the room and held her face in both hands and looked at her from very close. “Good,” she said quietly. “Now go.”

Jebe Temür was in the eastern courtyard.

She told him in forty words. He listened without interrupting and by the time she finished he was already moving — not running, not performing urgency, just walking with the specific directness of a man who had somewhere to be and nothing that was going to prevent him from getting there.