Chapter 15

Sohwa came to the house.

Not a summons — an arrival. Unannounced, attended by only Yuna, on a morning three days after Haewon’s letter. She appeared at the plain wooden door in the low stone wall without ceremony and without the imperial regalia and without any of the court’s careful language of rank and positioning.

Just her sister. Coming to see where she lived now.

Haewon opened the door and they looked at each other for a moment in the thin winter light — the empress and the woman who had chosen not to be — and then Sohwa stepped inside and looked around the small courtyard with the dormant garden and the plain house beyond it with the expression of a woman absorbing something she had not quite allowed herself to picture until now.

“It’s small,” Sohwa said.

“It’s mine,” Haewon said.

Sohwa looked at her. The asymmetrical smile came — brief, real, entirely hers. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

Jebe Temür made tea and brought it to the main room and excused himself with the economy of a man who understood when a space needed to belong to two people and not three. Haewon watched him go and felt the specific gratitude of being known well enough that the knowing expressed itself in small practical gestures rather than words.

Sohwa watched him go too. Then she looked at Haewon with eyes that were reading something and finding it satisfactory.

“He made you tea,” she said.

“He makes tea every morning,” Haewon said.

“Mm.” Sohwa accepted her cup and looked around the main room — the low table, the south-facing window, the document Jebe Temür had left folded at the room’s edge, the small accumulated evidence of two people living in a space together without performing the living. She took it all in with the attention she gave everything and said nothing for a moment.