Chapter 2: The Audience

Hyo Rin reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair back from Nari’s face, the gesture slow, deliberate, the kind of careful attention she gave to nothing else in this palace because nothing else in this palace had ever asked for it honestly.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Today is my birthday, Mistress.” A breath, almost a laugh, almost something else. “I just turned eighteen.”

Hyo Rin went still for a moment, taking that in. “So then. The Crown Princess of Joseon is your birthday present.”

“I hope so.” Nari’s voice had dropped to something barely above breath. “Mistress ... with all my heart.”

There was no more hesitation after that. Hyo Rin closed the small distance between them and kissed her, hesitant at first, as though Nari still expected to be stopped, and when she was not stopped the hesitation dissolved into something deeper, both of them learning the shape of it together. Hands found waists through robes, fingers curled against silk, neither of them undoing anything yet, both of them simply pressing closer.

They lay down together on the mat eventually, the kiss unbroken, and what had been careful and searching became something else entirely — slow at first, then not slow, silk pooling away from skin, the candles burning down to nothing while outside the palace kept its layered silence. Hyo Rin learned the shape of her that night with the same unhurried attention Nari had spent thirty evenings learning the shape of her feet, and when it was over they lay tangled together in the dark, neither of them speaking, because nothing yet needed saying that hadn’t already been said in the body instead of the mouth.

It did not occur to either of them until morning that they had marked the day differently than either had expected — one a confession finally spoken aloud after thirty evenings of silence, the other a birthday neither of them would ever be able to tell anyone the truth of.

~ ♡ ~

By the time the maids came to wake her, Hyo Rin had already decided what she would do next, and it had nothing to do with Nari at all, and everything to do with the memorandum she did not yet officially know existed, and the king who did.

She did not move quickly. A request from a new Crown Princess for a private audience with the king, made the morning after her birthday and confession with Nari, was the kind of thing that drew eyes if handled carelessly. She let three days pass, ordinary on their surface, while she settled the shape of what she meant to say.

On the third evening, she and Nari sat together long past the hour Lady Eum expected the lamps to be out, the two of them tangled in each other for the better part of an hour, mouths and hands moving over silk rather than under it. It needed to last. Lady Eum kept a clock in her own head for how long these evening sessions should reasonably take, and a hurried departure from Nari’s hands would draw exactly the kind of attention Hyo Rin could not afford tonight, of all nights.