Behind the Painted Curtain
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 11: What Remains
The mourning period required forty-nine days.
Hyo Rin observed every one of them correctly — the white robes, the simplified meals, the suspension of music and formal entertainments, the daily ceremonies at the ancestral shrine that marked the passage of a Crown Prince from the living world into the remembered one. She performed all of it with the composure the court expected and received the condolences of officials and court ladies and provincial representatives with the quiet dignity of a young widow who was bearing her loss correctly.
She was bearing it. That much was true.
What the court could not see was what happened in the inner rooms at night, when the performance was over and the doors were closed and Nari was there. She did not weep dramatically. She was not built for dramatic weeping and Yi San would have found it unseemly on her behalf. But there were nights in those forty-nine days when she lay in the dark and felt the full weight of what had been lost — not the marriage, not the arrangement, but him, the man who had told her the truth on their wedding night when every incentive pointed toward silence, who had covered her hand with his and said I can do that, who had looked at a son he did not father and loved him without reservation or condition.
She had not expected to grieve him. She grieved him.
Nari held her through those nights without speaking, which was exactly right, and in the mornings Hyo Rin rose and put her composure back on and went out to be what the palace required her to be.
The question of the regency surfaced before the mourning period had ended.
Yi Hyun was eight months old. He was the Crown Prince now, heir to a throne he could not sit for years, and the machinery of succession that Hyo Rin had set in motion eighteen months ago on the morning she sent word to Yi Woon was now arriving at its next requirement. A regent would be needed. The boy’s mother was the obvious candidate, but obvious candidates in Joseon court politics were never simply confirmed — they were negotiated, contested, weighed against competing interests and alternative arrangements.
Hyo Rin had been watching this coming for months. She had prepared for it the way she prepared for everything — quietly, thoroughly, and well in advance of anyone expecting her to.
She requested an audience with Yi Woon.
The king’s private receiving room looked exactly as it had on the morning she had walked into it as a new Crown Princess with a proposal that could have ended with her death. The books, the low writing table, the window facing the inner garden now bare of everything the winter had taken. She had been a different person then, or the same person with less behind her. She was not entirely certain which.
Yi Woon was standing at the window when she entered, the way he always stood at the window, and he turned and looked at her with the expression she had come to know over eighteen months of formal occasions and careful glances across ceremonial rooms — the full attention of a man who had never once underestimated her and did not intend to start now.
She performed the correct obeisance and he gestured her up and they sat across the low table from each other and a court attendant brought tea and withdrew and the room settled into its quiet.
“You are here about the regency.”
“Yes.”
“I expected you sooner.”
“The mourning period was not the right time,” she said. “This is.”
He looked at her steadily. “There will be opposition. You are young. You are a woman. There are men on the council who will argue for a male regent — an uncle, a senior official, someone whose authority they find less—” he chose the word carefully— “unfamiliar.”
“I know. I have been listening to them arrange their arguments for two months. They are not as subtle as they believe.”
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