Chapter 2

Sohwa’s rooms were not rooms. They were a statement.

Haewon understood this the moment she crossed the threshold — the layered silk hangings, the lacquerwork surfaces, the particular quality of the lamplight that was softer and more deliberate than anywhere else she had been in the last hour. Every object placed with the precision of someone who understood that in a court like this a room was not where you lived but what you communicated. Sohwa had learned that language fluently and was speaking it at full volume.

The sister who crossed the room to hold her was real. Haewon needed to be clear about that with herself — the arms around her were real, the smell of her underneath the court fragrance was real, the specific way Sohwa held on too long the way she always had since they were children was real. She felt all of it and let herself be held and did not think for that moment about the room or what it communicated.

Then Sohwa pulled back and held her at arm’s length and looked at her face with the focused attention of someone checking a thing they had been worried about across a very long distance for a very long time.

“You’re too thin,” Sohwa said.

“The road was long.”

“I’ll have food sent.” Her eyes moved over Haewon’s face, reading it. “Are you well. Truly.”

“I’m well. Truly.”

Sohwa’s real smile came then — slightly asymmetrical, the one no court training had touched — and Haewon felt something loosen in her chest that had been tight since the border.

“Come,” Sohwa said. “Sit. There is much to tell you.”

They sat across a low table and tea appeared without Sohwa visibly summoning it and two attendants settled at a discreet distance that was close enough to hear everything. Haewon noted both facts and filed them and accepted her cup.

Sohwa was nineteen years old. Haewon kept returning to this as her sister talked — nineteen, and she had been here since fifteen, and in four years she had become this. Not diminished. Not broken. Something else entirely. She spoke about the court’s structure with the fluency of someone who had not just learned a language but begun to think in it. The hierarchy of the inner court. The factions among the senior officials. The women to avoid, the women to cultivate. The emperor’s schedule, his preferences, the particular way his mood shifted in the afternoons. She described all of it with the calm authority of a woman who had assessed her terrain and mastered it and was now handing the map to someone she loved.