Chapter 8: The Flowering

The announcement moved through the palace the way water moves through dry ground — fast and total, finding every crack and channel available to it. By the afternoon of the physician’s visit the senior court ladies knew. By evening the officials knew. By the following morning the kingdom knew, or would know as soon as the formal proclamation reached the provinces, which Yi Woon ordered drafted before the day was out.

The congratulations came in waves. Officials who had never addressed her directly appeared at her outer gate with gifts and formal expressions of joy that she received standing, composed, her hands folded correctly in front of her growing midsection. The senior court ladies arrived in a delegation so carefully assembled in its happiness that Hyo Rin read the relief underneath it clearly — not joy for her sake but the exhale of a court that had been quietly frightened about something and was now quietly not frightened anymore. She said the right things and accepted the right gifts and performed the right gratitude, and when the last of them had withdrawn she sat alone in the receiving room for exactly as long as it took to draw three slow breaths, and then she rose and went back to work.

The gifts kept coming for a week. Silk, jade, lacquerware, medicinal preparations the court physicians recommended for women in her condition, foods considered auspicious for the production of sons. She catalogued them all and wrote the appropriate acknowledgments and filed everything away and did not allow herself to feel anything about any of it until she was alone with Nari at night, and then she allowed herself exactly as much as the night would hold before morning came and required her composure back.

Yi Woon she saw at the formal occasions that continued regardless of her condition — the seasonal ceremonies, the court assemblies where she stood at the correct distance behind Yi San and performed the correct deference. Their eyes met across those rooms the way they always met, briefly and without expression, carrying between them in that single glance everything that could never be said in any room with other people in it. He looked at her midsection once, in the second month, with an expression so quickly controlled that no one else in the room would have caught it. She caught it. She filed it with everything else she kept about him — the warmth of his hands on that night, the forehead kiss, the bolt of green silk — and said nothing, and looked away, and continued performing the correct deference to her husband.