Chapter 11: The Queen’s Doctor

The Queen’s residence blazed with light.

Every lantern in the building had been lit, every brazier filled, and from the far end of the great courtyard it glowed against the dark summer sky like a paper lantern the size of a palace. Court ladies ran along its galleries in clusters, their skirts gathered in their fists, carrying basins and folded linens and steaming jars. Eunuchs stood at every door. And from somewhere deep inside came a sound that So Hee had heard a hundred times in a hundred mud-walled huts in Jeolla, and never once grown used to: a woman’s long, low, exhausted cry of pain, rising and breaking and falling away again into silence.

Chae Won ran ahead of her across the courtyard, barefoot on the warm stones, dragging her by the wrist.

“This way. The side gallery. They won’t be watching it.”

They were watching it. A pair of eunuchs stood at the foot of the side steps, and a senior court lady in green silk stood at the top, and all three of them turned as the princess came hurtling out of the dark with a medical woman in a patched cotton jacket stumbling behind her.

“Your Highness!” The court lady’s face went white with horror. “Your Highness, you can’t be seen like this, in your sleeping robe—”

“Out of my way.”

“Your Highness, the birthing chamber is closed to everyone but the senior medical women, by Senior Uinyeo Baek’s order—”

“I said out of my way!” Chae Won’s voice cracked across the gallery like a whip. So Hee had never heard her sound like that before, and neither, by the look of them, had the eunuchs. “My mother is dying in there, and this is my physician, and if you don’t move aside this instant, I’ll have you sent to scrub the kitchen floors until you’re older than Grand Queen Dowager Sim!”

The court lady moved aside.

They went through the gallery and down a long corridor that smelled of blood and smoke and scorched mugwort, past knots of weeping maids and a row of shuttered doors, until they came to a large inner room divided in two by a tall folding screen of painted silk. On the near side of the screen, three elderly men in the dark robes of royal physicians knelt in a tense, murmuring huddle, one of them holding a long red silk thread that disappeared beneath the edge of the screen. On the far side, lit by a dozen lamps, lay the birthing chamber.

So Hee took one look at the red thread and felt something cold and furious rise in her chest.

She had heard the old stories about the royal physicians who read a Queen’s pulse through a silk thread tied around her wrist, so that no man’s hand would ever touch a royal lady’s skin. She had always thought they were legends. Apparently not.

“Uinyeo!” One of the old physicians looked up, saw her, and half rose in outrage. “Who is this? Who let this person in?”

“She’s mine,” Chae Won snapped, and pulled So Hee straight past him and around the edge of the screen.

The Queen of Joseon lay on a thick pallet of silk quilts in the center of the room, propped against a mound of cushions, her face the color of old candle wax and slick with sweat. Her hair had come loose from its pins and lay in dark, damp coils across the pillows. Her eyes were closed. Her belly rose huge beneath the loose white birthing robe, and around her hips the quilts were soaked through with blood, dark and spreading.

Four medical women knelt around the pallet. Senior Uinyeo Baek knelt at the Queen’s head with her hands pressed to Her Majesty’s temples, and when she looked up and saw So Hee standing in the lamplight, her smooth, composed face did something So Hee had never seen it do before. It cracked.

For just an instant, beneath the mask, So Hee saw raw, naked fear.

Then the mask came back.

“Get out,” Baek said, very quietly.

“Mother.” Chae Won dropped to her knees beside the pallet and seized the Queen’s limp hand. “Mother, I brought her. I brought the one I told you about. The one from the south.”

The Queen’s eyelids fluttered. She did not open them.

“Your Highness,” Baek said, without looking away from So Hee, “you should not be here. And neither should she. Uinyeo So Hee, I told you what would happen if you set foot in this residence.”

“You did, Senior Uinyeo.”

“Then go. Now. And I may yet forget that you came.”

So Hee didn’t move. She was looking past Baek, past the princess, at the great swollen curve of the Queen’s belly beneath the soaked white robe. She looked at the shape of it, the way it rose too wide and too flat across the front instead of peaking in a high, rounded dome. She looked at the blood, and the Queen’s gray face, and the way her whole body clenched and shuddered as another pain seized her, and at how the belly heaved sideways beneath the robe instead of down.

“How long has she been in labor?” So Hee asked.

“That is not your concern—”

“How long?”

A younger medical woman kneeling at the Queen’s feet looked up, her eyes red with exhaustion. “Since sunset,” she whispered. “Six hours. The waters broke at the first watch. But the baby hasn’t come down. It won’t come down. We’ve tried everything—”

“Uinyeo Ji,” Baek said sharply.

“And the bleeding?”

“Since the second watch,” the younger woman whispered. “It’s getting worse.”

So Hee closed her eyes for one heartbeat.

She saw a mud-walled hut in Namgok, and a lamp burning low, and a charcoal burner’s wife writhing on a straw mat with her belly heaving sideways just like this one. She saw her own hands, fourteen years old and shaking so hard she could barely hold them still, and her mother’s voice in her ear, calm and steady as bedrock.