Where Sorrow Ends
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
Two weeks into her duties Haewon had learned three things about this court that no one had told her directly.
The first was that information moved faster than people. By the time you heard something it had already been everywhere it needed to be and several places it didn’t.
The second was that the most dangerous conversations happened in the most ordinary settings — over tea, in corridors, at the edges of ceremonial events where everyone was technically present and therefore no one was paying attention.
The third was that Sohwa knew everything.
Not almost everything. Everything. The full scope of this became clear on the morning of the fourteenth day when Sohwa sent for her before the first delivery of the day and received her not in the formal receiving room but in her private inner chamber — smaller, warmer, no attendants within earshot — which Haewon understood immediately as a deliberate choice.
Sohwa was already dressed, hair arranged, fully composed in the way she was always fully composed before the court’s day began. She poured the tea herself. She waited until Haewon had taken a sip and then she said, without preamble, “Tell me about Jebe Temür.”
Haewon kept her hands level around the cup. “He gave me directions to the inner court on my second day. We’ve spoken briefly in the outer complex since then.”
Sohwa looked at her with eyes that had spent four years reading this court’s faces. “Haewon.”
“Unni.”
“I am not asking because I disapprove.” Sohwa set down her cup and folded her hands in her lap with the particular stillness that meant she was being completely honest. “I am asking because I need to understand what is happening before other people understand it first.”
The room was quiet. Outside, the court was beginning its morning sounds — footsteps, the distant movement of the mechanism turning over. Haewon looked at her sister and made a decision.
“He is not like anyone else in this court,” she said.
“No,” Sohwa agreed. “He isn’t.”
“He sees things clearly. He doesn’t perform.” She paused. “He told me about Cui Jinglong on my second day. Without being asked.”
Something moved in Sohwa’s eyes — a rapid recalculation, there and gone. “He warned you about Cui Jinglong.”
“He gave me information. He let me draw my own conclusions.”
Sohwa was quiet for a moment. She picked up her cup and turned it in her hands, looking at it rather than at Haewon, which meant she was thinking rather than managing. “Jebe Temür is the most honest man in this court,” she said finally. “Which means he is also one of the most isolated. Honest men make enemies here the way fires make smoke — it’s simply what they do and they cannot stop doing it.” She looked up. “He has the emperor’s functional trust. He does not have the court’s goodwill. There is a difference.”
“I know there’s a difference.”
“His enemies are patient.” Sohwa said it the same way he had said it about Cui Jinglong, Haewon realized. Patient. The word this court used for dangerous. “And a Goryeo woman seen regularly in his company gives those enemies a tool they don’t currently have.”
Haewon heard all of it. She heard the love in it too — the genuine fear underneath the political calculation, her sister’s protection wearing the court’s clothing because that was the only clothing Sohwa owned anymore.
“Are you telling me to stay away from him,” she said.
Sohwa met her eyes. “I am telling you to be careful.” A pause. “There is a difference.”
She reached across and touched Haewon’s face the way she had when they were children — her thumb against her cheekbone, brief and complete, the gesture of someone confirming that a thing they loved was still there.
“I am always careful,” Haewon said.
Sohwa’s hand dropped. The court came back into her posture like water finding its level. “Cui Jinglong has requested a meeting with my office,” she said, her voice shifting registers so smoothly that the transition was almost invisible. Business now. The other thing filed away. “He will frame it as routine tributary administration. It is not routine.” She looked at Haewon steadily. “He has noticed you. I will manage him. But you should know.”
“What will you do.”
The slight smile that crossed Sohwa’s face then was not the asymmetrical real one. It was something else — smaller, sharper, the expression of a woman who had spent four years learning exactly how much force to apply to which points. “What I do best,” she said. “I will make him believe the idea he arrives with is not worth the cost of pursuing.”
She said it with the calm confidence of someone who had done this before and would do it again, and Haewon felt two things simultaneously — gratitude that this woman was on her side and a cold clear understanding of what it meant that this woman existed at all. Sohwa had not become powerful by accident. She had built it, piece by piece, in a court that had not wanted to give it to her, and the tools she had used were not all ones Haewon could afford to look at too closely.
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