Behind the Painted Curtain
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 1
The betrothal had been settled for nearly a year before mumps entered the calculation at all.
Yi San had been a healthy young man by every account that reached the Queen Dowager’s ear—diligent in his studies, correct in his bearing, possessed of the kind of unremarkable good health that made him, among other things, an acceptable match. The physicians who examined him before the formal betrothal noted nothing beyond the ordinary. The astrologers found the dates auspicious. Lady Eum, dispatched to oversee the bride’s preparation, reported back that the Crown Princess-elect was being instructed correctly in all matters and would require no special handling.
Then, three months before the wedding, Yi San fell ill.
It began as fever and swelling at the jaw, dismissed at first as nothing more than a head cold aggravated by autumn air. By the second day the swelling had spread, tender and unmistakable, and the court physician who examined him went pale in a way that careful men did not allow themselves to do in front of a future king.
Mumps was not, in itself, considered dangerous to a young man’s life. The physicians said so plainly, and the swelling did recede within the fortnight, and Yi San returned to his duties looking gaunt but otherwise himself. What the physicians said less plainly—what was recorded only in a private memorandum carried directly to King Yi Woon and read once before being burned—was that the illness had settled, briefly but unmistakably, somewhere it should not have. That such a thing, in a grown man, sometimes left no mark at all. And that sometimes it left a man unable to father children, or unable to perform the act that might lead to them, and there was no examination known to medicine that could say with certainty which outcome had occurred until time itself answered the question.
King Yi Woon read the memorandum twice. He asked no one’s counsel on it, not even the Queen’s. He filed it away in the part of his mind where he kept the problems a king could not yet act on, and he let the wedding proceed, because there was no reasonable cause to halt it, and because three months was not enough time to find a new bride for a Crown Prince without inviting a scandal far worse than the private uncertainty he was choosing to live with.
Yi San himself learned the fuller truth of his condition in the days that followed his recovery, alone with his own body in a way no physician’s report could soften. The fever had broken. The swelling had gone. And what should have followed—what every instinct of a young man approaching his own wedding night expected to follow—did not. He told no one. He was eighteen, and proud in the particular silent way of boys raised to be kings, and he spent the three months before his wedding hoping, with the kind of desperate private hope that does not survive contact with reality, that whatever had been taken from him would return before anyone needed to know it was gone.
It did not return.
The wedding proceeded with all the ceremony the kingdom could provide. Yi San performed every gesture correctly, accepted every blessing with the appropriate stillness, and looked, to anyone observing him across the long ceremonial day, like a young man entering his marriage with composure. Only Hyo Rin, seated beside him through hours of ritual she barely had the strength to absorb, noticed that his composure had a brittleness to it, a quality of a man holding very still so that nothing inside him would crack.
That night, when the attendants had finally withdrawn and the doors were closed and the two of them were alone for the first time in their lives, he did not come to her.
He sat instead at the far side of the room, on the low chest where his ceremonial robes had been folded, and he looked at his hands for a long time before he looked at her.
“There is something you should know,” he said, “before anything else happens between us tonight. Or before nothing happens, which is more likely the truth of it.”
She had said nothing. She had simply waited, the way she had been taught to wait for things that mattered.
He told her, then, plainly and without the dressing of euphemism a lesser man might have reached for—the fever, the swelling, the physician’s private memorandum he had not been meant to know existed but had, through a careless servant, come to know anyway. He told her he did not know if the condition was permanent. He told her he did not know, with any certainty, whether he would ever be able to give her a child. He told her this on their wedding night, in a voice that did not break but came very close to it, because he had decided—in the three months of silent hoping that had brought him nowhere—that he would not build a marriage on a lie he would eventually be unable to sustain.
“I am telling you this,” he said, “because you deserve to know what you have actually married. Not what the kingdom believes it has given you.”
Hyo Rin had sat very still, absorbing this the way she absorbed everything that mattered—without visible reaction, filing it carefully into the part of her mind that would need it later. She did not weep. She did not rage. She understood, with a clarity that surprised even her, that what he had just done—telling her the truth when every incentive in his life pointed toward silence—was its own kind of gift, and perhaps the only one he had to give her.
“Thank you for telling me,” she said finally. “I would rather know.”
They did not touch that night, nor for many nights after. He kept to his side of the room until it grew late enough that leaving would have drawn more notice than staying, and then he slept on the far edge of the mat, careful even in sleep to leave the distance between them undisturbed. In the morning he was courteous to her, as he would remain courteous in the weeks that followed—visiting twice in the first month, each time with the same careful, sealed-off attention, each time departing before the candles burned low, leaving her to a marriage that looked, from the outside, exactly as a young royal marriage should, and was, on the inside, something neither of them yet had a name for.
The palace had a sound at night that Hyo Rin was still learning. The outer courtyards went quiet first, then the corridors, then the antechambers, each layer of noise peeling away until only the inner rooms remained, and in the inner rooms the small sounds of women preparing a princess for sleep.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.