Where Sorrow Ends
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6
The woman’s name was Yeon.
Haewon found her the way she had found Bora — not looking, just present in a place at the wrong time, which in this court was also the right time. A storage corridor off the eastern residential wing, early morning, a basket of linens on the floor and Yeon sitting beside it with her knees drawn up and her face in her hands and the particular quality of stillness that was not rest but its opposite — a person who had run out of the energy required to keep moving and had simply stopped.
Haewon set down her delivery satchel and sat beside her on the cold floor without asking permission.
Yeon looked up. She was perhaps twenty, Goryeo-born, with the hollowed look of someone who had been managing something alone for too long. She registered Haewon’s face and something in her own face shifted — the specific relief of being found by the right person rather than the wrong one.
“I’m Haewon,” Haewon said. In Korean. Just that.
Yeon looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, very quietly, “He told me if I reported it I would be reassigned to the laundry depot.” A pause. “The women there don’t come back to court service.”
Haewon felt the heat move through her sternum the way it had in the corridor with Bora. She let it move. She didn’t try to cool it into something manageable because it wasn’t manageable and pretending it was would be a lie to both of them.
“Who,” she said.
Yeon told her.
Cui Jinglong.
The name landed in the cold corridor and sat there between them. Haewon kept her face steady and her breathing even and felt something harden underneath the heat — not anger exactly, something older and quieter and more dangerous than anger. The understanding that this was not one incident and not one woman and that the patience Jebe Temür had described operated in multiple directions simultaneously.
He had been patient with her. He had also been doing this, to women with no protection, for eleven years.
“Has he touched others,” Haewon said. “That you know of.”
Yeon’s jaw tightened. “There is a woman named Seol in the western residential wing. And one of the new girls from the autumn tribute party — I don’t know her name yet.”
Haewon absorbed this. She reached into her satchel and found the small cloth she carried and pressed it into Yeon’s hands because Yeon’s hands needed something to hold and it was the only concrete thing she had to offer right now.
“You are not going to the laundry depot,” she said. “I need you to trust me for a little while. Can you do that.”
Yeon looked at her with the specific expression she had seen on Bora’s face — the desperate wanting to believe something pressed up against the learned knowledge that wanting was dangerous. “Why would you help me.”
“Because it’s wrong,” Haewon said. Simply, without elaboration, because there was no elaboration. It was wrong and she was standing next to it and she was not the kind of person who walked past wrong things. She had never been that person. This court had not made her that person yet and she intended to die before it did.
Yeon looked at her for a long moment. Then she nodded. Small and careful, like a woman rationing her trust because she had very little left.
Haewon squeezed her hand once and stood and picked up her satchel and went to find Seol.
Seol was in the western residential wing where Yeon had said she would be, sorting correspondence with the focused blankness of a woman who had learned to put her mind somewhere else while her hands worked. She was perhaps twenty-three, the oldest Goryeo woman Haewon had encountered in court service, and when Haewon said Yeon’s name her hands went still on the correspondence and she looked up with eyes that had already done the calculation and arrived at the answer before the question was fully formed.
“You know,” Seol said.
“I’m beginning to,” Haewon said.
Seol looked at her for a long moment — assessing, not with hostility but with the careful precision of a woman who had survived this court for three years by being very accurate about who was safe and who wasn’t. Then she put down the correspondence and turned to face Haewon fully and began to talk.
She talked for a long time. Haewon listened without interrupting and without letting anything reach her face that would make Seol stop. Names. Dates. Specific incidents described in the flat careful language of a woman who had rehearsed the telling of them in her own mind many times without ever expecting to say them out loud to anyone.
By the time Seol finished the morning light had shifted in the window and Haewon’s delivery was late and she didn’t care.
“I need you to remember everything you just told me,” Haewon said. “Exactly as you told it. Can you do that.”
“I’ve been remembering it for three years,” Seol said.
She found Jebe Temür in the eastern courtyard at midday. She had not adjusted her route to find him and she had not needed to — she had simply gone where she needed to go and he was there, because the pattern between them had become something that operated below the level of planning now.
He saw her face before she spoke and whatever he read there made him say nothing and wait.
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