Behind the Painted Curtain
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 9: The Boy
The labor began before dawn.
Nari felt it before Hyo Rin said anything — woke in the dark to the sound of Hyo Rin’s breathing changed, and was on her feet and across the room before Hyo Rin had finished deciding whether to wake her. She took one look at her face and went to the door and spoke quietly to the maid posted in the outer corridor, and within minutes the household was moving with the controlled urgency of people who had been preparing for this night for seven months.
Lady Soh appeared and took command of the outer rooms. The physician arrived with his assistant. The senior court midwife came with two others, women whose entire lives had been spent in rooms like this one, and they moved around Hyo Rin with the calm authority of people who had done this before and intended to do it correctly.
Nari stayed.
No one asked her to leave and she did not offer to go, and the midwives who might have raised an eyebrow at a lady-in-waiting remaining through a labor looked at her face once and decided against it. She positioned herself where Hyo Rin could see her and reach her and stayed there, and that was the end of the question.
The labor was long. That was the first thing — the hours of it, the way time moved differently inside that room than it did anywhere else in the palace, slow and then slower and then not moving at all. Hyo Rin was not a woman who made noise unnecessarily, and she did not make it now, but there were hours in the deep middle of the night when her hand found Nari’s and gripped it with a force that had nothing composed about it, and Nari held on and said nothing and did not look away.
Dawn came and the boy did not.
The physician’s face remained professionally neutral, which told Hyo Rin more than she wanted to know. She filed it and breathed and did what the midwives told her to do and did not think about anything beyond the next instruction, and Nari’s hand was there every time she reached for it.
By mid-morning the quality of the room had shifted, the midwives moving with more urgency than before, and Hyo Rin looked at the ceiling and thought with the clarity that comes from exhaustion past a certain point that she had arranged everything correctly and managed everything that could be managed and there was nothing left to manage now, only this, only her body doing what it was going to do regardless of what she thought about it.
Then the senior midwife said now and she bore down with everything she had left and the boy came into the world all at once, loud and furious and entirely himself, and the room erupted into the controlled chaos of people doing the things that needed doing, and Hyo Rin lay back against the mat and breathed.
The midwife brought him to her wrapped in silk, still protesting, his face red and creased and absolutely certain of his own displeasure, and Hyo Rin looked at him.
She had expected Yi Woon. She had been bracing for it — the moment of recognition, the face of the king looking back at her from inside a newborn’s fury. And it was there, the shape of it already present in the set of his jaw and the broad forehead and the particular darkness of his eyes when they opened briefly and found hers.
But there was something else too, something she had not expected. Something that was simply him — this boy, this new and complete person who had not existed this morning and existed now, entirely himself, entirely new, belonging to no one’s face and no one’s arrangement and no plan she had ever made.
She felt the full force of it hit her somewhere below her sternum and did not try to name it.
“Hello,” she said quietly, and he stopped protesting for a moment as though he recognized her voice, and she supposed he did.
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