Where Sorrow Ends
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8
She did not seek him out the next day.
Not because she didn’t want to. Because she wanted to too much and wanting too much in this court was a liability she could not afford to ignore two days running. She had sat on the sleeping platform the previous night with her fingers against her jaw and let herself have the feeling and now the feeling needed to be carried carefully rather than chased, the way you carried something that mattered — with both hands, watching where you walked.
She did her routes. She delivered her communications. She checked on Hyun, who was managing, and Yeon, who was less frightened than she had been and more angry, which Haewon considered progress. She found the sixth woman — a quiet girl named Suki in the northern residential corridor who had been about to tell nobody because nobody had ever asked — and sat with her and listened and added her account to the five already living in her memory.
Six women. One man. Eleven years.
She carried that too.
Sohwa sent for her on the third morning.
Not the private inner chamber this time — the formal receiving room, attendants present, tea appearing without being summoned. Haewon read the register shift immediately and adjusted accordingly, arriving with her court face on, the one she had been building since the gate with its ironic name.
Sohwa was standing when she entered. Not seated, not arranged behind the low table in the position of a woman receiving. Standing in the center of the room with her hands folded and her face doing something complicated that the court surface was only partially covering.
“Close the door,” Sohwa said.
Haewon closed it. The attendants were still present — Sohwa had not dismissed them, which was its own message.
“You were seen,” Sohwa said. Quietly. Without accusation, which was almost worse than accusation. “In the administrative corridor. Late. Coming from the direction of Jebe Temür’s office.”
Haewon held her face where it needed to be. “I had information to share with him. Regarding a matter of court welfare.”
“At that hour.”
“The information couldn’t wait.”
Sohwa looked at her with the eyes that had spent four years reading this court’s faces and were now reading her sister’s and finding things they recognized. “Haewon.”
“Unni.”
The word didn’t do what it usually did — didn’t soften the room or shift Sohwa back toward the private register. She stayed where she was, standing, hands folded, something working behind her eyes that was both love and calculation and Haewon could not separate them.
“He is not a safe attachment,” Sohwa said.
“I know that.”
“His enemies—”
“Are patient. Yes. He told me himself.”
Something flickered in Sohwa’s face. “He told you about his enemies.”
“He tells me true things,” Haewon said. “That is the nature of our — “ She stopped. Found the word carefully. “Association.”
The word was too small for what it was and they both knew it and neither of them said so.
Sohwa was quiet for a moment. She turned slightly away — not dismissively, the turn of a woman thinking rather than managing — and when she turned back something in her posture had shifted. Lower. More real.
“I cannot protect you from what people will say,” she said. “I can manage Cui Jinglong. I can manage factions and alliances and the politics of your position here. I cannot manage what people say about my sister and the military commissioner if it becomes a story this court decides to tell.”
“I understand.”
“Do you.” Not sharp. Genuinely asking. “Because understanding it and feeling it are different things and right now you are feeling something very strongly and I need to know that you understand it.”
Haewon looked at her sister — at the nineteen year old girl who had been here since fifteen and had built something real and powerful and complicated out of materials this court had given her, who loved her completely and was also afraid of what that love was going to cost her — and felt the truth of both things simultaneously without letting either cancel the other.
“I understand it,” she said. “I am being careful.”
Sohwa held her gaze for a long moment. Then she crossed the room and took Haewon’s face in both hands the way their mother used to and looked at her from very close.
“Be more careful,” she said. Quietly. The court entirely gone from her voice.
Then she released her and stepped back and the court came back into her posture and she said something to one of the attendants about the afternoon’s schedule and the audience was over.
Haewon walked back through the corridors and felt Sohwa’s hands on her face and thought about being more careful and understood that more careful and stop were the same instruction wearing different clothing.
She was not going to stop.
She found him that evening.
Not late this time — early evening, the court’s first quiet hour, when the day’s business was done and the night’s hadn’t begun. The eastern courtyard in the last of the winter light, which was thin and pale and made everything look slightly more itself than it did in the fuller illumination of midday.
He was there. She was beginning to understand that he was often there because she was often there and neither of them was pretending otherwise anymore.
He looked at her when she entered and she looked at him and the previous night was in the air between them, present and real, and she didn’t perform not noticing it and neither did he.
“Sohwa knows,” she said.
“I assumed she would.” He said it without anxiety. “What did she say.”
“Be more careful.” She paused. “Which means stop.”
“And.”
“And I’m here.”
Something moved in his face — that unguarded thing she had seen the previous night, the one that lived underneath the careful containment. He didn’t try to cover it. They were past that.
“The sixth woman,” she said. “Her name is Suki. Her account is consistent with the others.” She held his gaze. “I think there may be one or two more. I’ll know within the week.”
“When you have them all,” he said, “we will need to discuss what comes next. How the information moves. Who it moves to.”
“Sohwa,” Haewon said.
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