Behind the Painted Curtain
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 10: The Cough
The cough did not go.
Through the winter it persisted, quiet and unremarkable on its surface, the kind of thing a young man might dismiss as the cold air or the damp of the season. Yi San dismissed it exactly that way, with the same composed certainty he brought to everything he did not want to examine too closely, and the court took its cue from him and said nothing, because a Crown Prince who was not concerned about his own health gave no one else permission to be concerned either.
Hyo Rin was concerned.
She said nothing outward. She watched him at his monthly visits with the same careful attention she brought to everything that mattered, cataloguing the changes the way she catalogued everything — the weight still dropping from him, slowly but consistently, the color in his face not quite right in certain lights, the careful way he positioned himself in a room now, always near something he could rest against if he needed to. The cough itself was still intermittent, still suppressible, still something he could wave away with a hand and a reassuring look when her eyes stayed on him too long.
But it was not going.
By spring it had changed in quality, something deeper in it now, something that came from further down than a winter cold had any business reaching, and the physician who had been visiting Yi San with increasing frequency emerged from his chambers one afternoon with a face so carefully arranged that Hyo Rin, passing in the corridor, stopped and looked at him and said quietly, “Walk with me.”
He walked with her through the inner garden where no one was within earshot, and she listened to what he said without interrupting. The physician was a careful man and he chose his words carefully, but careful words arranged in a certain order said the same thing as plain ones.
When he finished she looked at the plum blossoms for a moment and then said, “Is it consumption?”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“How long.”
He did not answer immediately, which was its own answer. “The progression varies,” he said. “In a young man of his constitution — “ He stopped. “Months, Your Highness. Not years.”
She thanked him and sent him on his way and stood alone among the early spring plum blossoms for a long time.
Consumption. The word sat in her mind with the flat weight of something irrevocable. Not a question anymore, not a problem being watched — a fact, moving at its own pace toward its own conclusion, entirely indifferent to anything she might arrange or manage or file away for later.
She had managed everything. She had managed the marriage and the arrangement with the king and Lady Eum’s removal and Lady Soh’s warning and the overnight cover and the pregnancy and the birth and the court’s scrutiny and fourteen months of secrets that would have destroyed her if they had surfaced. She had managed all of it with a thoroughness that had left no room for failure.
She could not manage this.
She went back inside and asked for tea and sat with it until her hands were steady, and then she sent for Yi San.
He arrived knowing something was coming. She could see it in the way he came through the door — the braced quality of a man who has been half expecting a conversation and is not entirely sorry it has arrived.
She did not make him wait for it.
“I spoke with the physician,” she said.
He sat down across from her and was quiet for a moment. “I know what he told you.”
“Then you know it is not the winter air.”
“No,” he said. “It is not the winter air.” He looked at his hands, the gesture she had come to know as his, the thing he did when he was working out how to say something he had already decided to say. “I have known for a while. Longer than I told you.”
She did not show him what that cost her to hear. “How long.”
“Since the autumn. Before Hyun was born.” He looked up. “I did not want to — I needed him to arrive first. I needed there to be a son before I said it out loud, because saying it out loud makes it a different kind of thing.”
She understood that. She understood it completely, and she did not tell him he should have told her sooner, because the truth was she might have done the same.
“How bad,” she said.
He held her gaze. “Bad enough that the physician uses the word months rather than years when he thinks I am not listening.”
The room was very quiet.
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.