Chapter 5

She started with the seasonal reception.

Not the next one — that was three weeks away — but the one that had already happened, the one she had attended as a serving woman pressed against the wall watching Jebe Temür across the hall and Cui Jinglong by the pillar. She went back through it in her mind and looked at it differently. Not as a woman being careful. As a woman taking inventory of terrain she intended to move through.

She had spent two weeks being nobody. A delivery route. A Goryeo girl attached to the first consort’s name. She had watched and filed and stayed at the edges and called it intelligence when some of it was simply fear wearing intelligence’s clothing.

Jebe Temür had seen that. Of course he had.

She spent three days observing which women in the inner court held actual influence versus displayed influence — who other women moved toward when they needed something real versus who they moved toward when they needed to be seen moving toward someone. She identified four. She introduced herself to two of them through the natural channels of shared morning duties, not performing warmth, just being present and useful and genuinely interested in what they knew. By the end of the third day one of them — a Korean woman named Mira, five years in the court, quiet and precise — had started walking the same morning corridor at the same hour without it being arranged.

Small. But it was ground that belonged to her now and not to Cui Jinglong’s framing.

She also learned, through Mira, that Sohwa’s meeting with Cui Jinglong had happened two days prior. Mira delivered the information without affect — court news, nothing more — but Haewon heard what was underneath it. The meeting had been brief. Cui Jinglong had left without having said directly anything that could be used against him. Sohwa had given him nothing. The encounter had ended in a kind of polite stalemate that both parties understood was not a resolution.

Patient, Jebe Temür had said. He will wait for the moment your sister’s protection costs her more than it benefits her.

The stalemate simply meant the waiting had resumed.

She was crossing the outer garden on the fifth morning when she saw Sohwa with the emperor.

She had not been looking for them. The south garden was not on her route and she was not adjusting her route today — she was moving with purpose now, direct lines, Jebe Temür’s advice applied to her feet as well as her strategy. But the covered walkway along the garden’s northern edge was the fastest connection between the eastern offices and the inner residential wing and she had a delivery that needed to arrive before the morning’s second bell.