Chapter 10: The Archer’s Thumb

Princess Chae Won’s wrist healed in eight days.

It then developed, in rapid succession, a mysterious stiffness in the mornings, a troubling ache whenever it rained, a peculiar clicking sound when she rotated it that nobody else could hear, and finally, in the second week of summer, a sympathetic weakness in the other wrist as well, which the princess insisted was the result of favoring the first one and required daily examination by the southern medical woman, and no one else.

“You can’t keep doing this,” So Hee told her, kneeling in the peony pavilion with the princess’s perfectly healthy wrist in her hands. “Senior Uinyeo Baek has started keeping a record of my visits. She wrote down forty-one yesterday.”

“Forty-one is nothing. Grand Queen Dowager Sim had a medical woman attend her feet every day for eleven years.” Chae Won stretched out on her cushion like a contented cat. “Besides, I’m learning so much. Tell me again what you use for a child’s cough.”

“Balloon flower root and licorice, boiled together.”

“And for a burn?”

“Egg white, if it’s fresh. Honey, if it isn’t. Never butter, whatever the old women say.”

“And for a broken heart?”

So Hee looked up sharply. The princess was watching her with bright, innocent eyes.

“There isn’t a medicine for that, Your Highness.”

“Chae Won,” the princess corrected. “When we’re alone, you call me Chae Won. I’ve told you a hundred times.” She sat up and leaned forward, her voice dropping. “And there is a medicine for a broken heart, So Hee. It’s called my brother, and he’s coming to the archery ground tonight after the second watch, and he’s asked me to ask you to come too.”

So Hee set down the princess’s wrist very carefully.

“I can’t.”

“You can. I’ll be there. It’s perfectly proper.”

“Nothing about it is proper.”

“It’s proper enough for the Eastern Palace.” Chae Won grinned. “He wants to teach you to shoot.”

The weeks had fallen into a pattern since the day in the peony pavilion, and So Hee lived inside it the way she had once lived inside the rhythm of the seasons in Namgok, carefully and watchfully, never quite trusting it to hold.

In the mornings, she ground herbs in the medical office under Senior Uinyeo Baek’s cool, unblinking gaze. In the afternoons, she was summoned to the princess’s pavilion, where she sat with Chae Won among the peonies and taught her the names of medicinal plants, and Chae Won taught her in return the endless, intricate rules of the palace: which gate a medical woman could pass through and which she couldn’t, how deeply to bow to a concubine as opposed to a court lady, what it meant when the Queen’s ladies wore green ribbons instead of blue, and who in the whole vast household could be trusted, which was almost nobody.

And sometimes, not every day, never on a day anyone could have predicted, Lee Jun would come walking through the pines behind the pavilion in his plain grey silk, and Chae Won would suddenly discover a pressing need to feed the carp.

They talked. That was all they did, at first. They sat on the stone platform with a respectable distance between them and talked, about Namgok and the headman’s grandson’s letters, about the scholars who lectured Lee Jun every morning on the Book of Rites until he wanted to throw himself into the lily pond, about So Hee’s mother and the stories she used to tell. He told her about the long years of mourning he had spent as a boy, first for his grandfather and then for his grandmother, shut away in the white-draped halls of the palace while the world went on outside. She told him about the first baby she had ever delivered, when she was fourteen and her mother had been called away to a fever on the other side of the valley, and she had done it alone, by lamplight, with her hands shaking so badly she could barely tie the cord.

“Did it live?” he asked.

“She’s six now. She herds geese.” So Hee smiled faintly. “Her mother named her after me.”

“Another So Hee.”

“Another bright hope. Namgok has a few of them now.”

He was quiet for a moment, looking at her. Then he said, softly, “I’m not surprised.”

The news about the Queen came in the third week of summer, carried through the palace on a rising tide of whispers that So Hee heard first in the herb stores and then everywhere else.

“With child,” the junior medical women murmured to each other over the grinding stones. “Five months already, and she’s only just announced it.”

“At her age!”

“Forty, isn’t she? Forty-one?”