The Queen’s Doctor
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 13: The Slippery Pulse
The baby prince turned one hundred days old on the first cold morning of autumn, and the whole palace celebrated.
In Namgok, a child’s hundredth day had meant a bowl of white rice cakes shared among the neighbors, if the family could afford the rice, and a quiet prayer of thanks that the baby had survived the dangerous first months when so many didn’t. In the palace, it meant a banquet. Tables were laid in the great hall of the Queen’s residence, crowded with towers of rice cakes in five colors, platters of fruit piled higher than a child’s head, bowls of red bean porridge to ward off evil spirits, and dishes So Hee couldn’t even name. Musicians played behind a painted screen. Ministers and their wives arrived in silk robes and knelt in long rows to offer their congratulations. And in the center of it all, on a cushion of yellow silk beside his mother, lay the tiny prince, fat and pink and utterly unimpressed, gnawing on his own fist.
So Hee watched from behind a latticed screen at the side of the hall, where the women of the Eastern Palace were permitted to sit apart from the ministers’ wives. It was her first appearance at a court occasion as a sohun, and Chae Won had spent the entire previous evening drilling her on where to kneel, how deeply to bow, and which dishes she was permitted to eat first.
“Don’t touch the rice cakes until Mother has touched hers,” the princess had instructed. “And don’t look at the ministers’ wives directly. They’ll take it as a challenge.”
“A challenge to what?”
“To whatever they’re already angry about. Which is you.” Chae Won had squeezed her hand. “Just smile and eat slowly and pretend they’re all charcoal burners’ wives. It helps.”
It didn’t help. So Hee could feel their eyes on her through the lattice from the moment she knelt: the ministers’ wives in their jewel-colored silks, their hair pinned with gold and jade, glancing toward the Eastern Palace screen and then away again, murmuring behind their sleeves. She caught fragments of it over the music. The southern girl. The medical woman. A slave, six months ago. They say she bewitched him with her needles.
She kept her face composed and her eyes lowered, the way Baek had taught her, and she didn’t let her fingers twist together in her lap.
Across the hall, in the front row of ministers’ families, sat a slender girl in a gown of pale gold, her small serene face bent modestly toward her hands. Shin Ha-yeon. Beside her sat a stern old man with a long white beard, who must have been her grandfather, the Minister of Rites. He did not look toward the Eastern Palace screen at all. He didn’t need to. His silence carried further than any whisper.
The King rose, and the music stopped.
“Today we give thanks,” he said, “for the life of my son, and the life of my Queen, both of which were very nearly lost to us one hundred days ago.” His gaze moved, briefly, toward the latticed screen where So Hee sat, and away again. “Heaven has been kind to this house. We will not forget it.” He paused. “The Ministry of Rites has asked me when the Crown Prince’s selection will be concluded. I will answer that question now, before you all, so that it need not be asked again. The final selection will take place in the spring, after the New Year rites are complete. Until then, the matter is closed.”
A murmur ran through the hall. Minister Shin’s face didn’t change, but his granddaughter’s small hands tightened in her lap.
Beside So Hee behind the lattice, Chae Won let out a long, quiet breath.
“Spring,” the princess whispered. “He’s bought you until spring.”
So Hee said nothing. She was looking at the platter of rice cakes on the low table in front of her, and at the dish of seasoned greens beside it, glistening with sesame oil. The rich, nutty smell of the oil rose up warm into her face.
Her stomach turned over.
She pressed her hand against her mouth, very lightly, and breathed through her nose until it passed.
Her new life had turned out to be both more and less than she had imagined.
She had a pavilion of her own, with a heated floor and flowers in every room and a stream that sang beneath her veranda at night. She had silk jackets, more than she could ever wear, and a stipend from the royal treasury that she had not yet dared to spend, and a young maid named Ok-bun who had been assigned to her by the Eastern Palace household office. Ok-bun was fifteen, round-faced and eager, with a habit of chattering about everything under the sun while she combed So Hee’s hair in the mornings. She seemed to find it thrilling beyond words to serve the famous southern sohun who had saved the Queen.
“The other maids are so jealous, Sohun mama,” she confided on the second day, working the comb through So Hee’s hair. “They all wanted to be sent to you. I only got picked because my aunt knows someone in the household office.”
So Hee smiled at her in the mirror and said nothing. It was strange to be served. She had spent her whole life serving others, and every morning when Ok-bun knelt to fold her quilts or carry away her washbasin, she had to stop herself from getting up and doing it herself.
She had kept her medicine, too. That had been her one request of the Queen, and the Queen had granted it at once: that she might continue to attend Her Majesty and the baby prince as their physician, sohun or not. So every morning, she walked to the Queen’s residence with her medicine box on her shoulder, the same battered box her mother had carried through the lanes of Namgok for thirty years, and knelt by the royal bedding to take the Queen’s pulse and examine the little prince. The court ladies bowed to her now, deeply and correctly, as her rank required. They also watched her, every moment, with eyes that missed nothing.
And every night, or nearly every night, the paper door of her pavilion slid open after the second watch, and Lee Jun stepped in from the dark garden, and for a few hours, none of the rest of it mattered.
They talked, still. They had always talked. He told her about the endless memorials piling up on his father’s desk, about the old men of the Board of Rites who sent him long, pained letters about the dignity of the royal house, about the lectures on the Book of Rites that still threatened daily to drive him into the lily pond. She told him about the Queen’s recovery and the baby’s first smile, and about the court ladies who bowed so correctly and watched so closely, and about Ok-bun, who had asked her that morning whether it was true that southern women could see in the dark.
“What did you tell her?”
“That of course we can. It’s how we find our way to the privy at night without a lamp.”
He laughed until he had to press his face into her shoulder to muffle it, and she held him and laughed too, and outside, the stream went on murmuring over its stones.
Later, lying in the dark with her head on his chest, she said quietly, “They hate me, you know. The ministers’ wives. They whisper about me at every gathering.”
His hand stilled in her hair. “I know.”
“They say I bewitched you.”
“You did.” He kissed the top of her head. “In a lane in Namgok, at dawn, with a dead child’s blood on your sleeves. I’ve never recovered.”
“Be serious.”
“I am serious.” His arm tightened around her. “Let them whisper, So Hee. Whispers can’t hurt you. Not while my father and mother stand behind you. Not while I’m here.”
She lay quietly against him, listening to his heart. She didn’t tell him what Baek had said at the gate of the throne hall. They’ll wait for your first mistake the way hawks wait over a field. She didn’t need to. She could see that he knew it too.
The sickness came back the morning after the banquet, and the morning after that, and the morning after that.
It came always at the same hour, just after dawn, when Ok-bun brought in the morning tray with its bowl of rice porridge and its little dishes of pickled vegetables. The smell of the food would reach her, and her stomach would heave, and she would have to put down her spoon and sit very still and breathe slowly until it passed. By the fourth morning, she couldn’t eat at all until midday. By the fifth, she was slipping out onto the veranda at first light, before Ok-bun came, and kneeling at the edge of the stream until the nausea eased.
She was tired, too. More tired than she had ever been, even during the worst of the measles in Namgok. She fell asleep in the afternoons over her herb books. Her breasts were tender and aching. And her monthly courses, which had always come to her as regularly as the new moon, were eleven days late.
She was a physician. She had known what it meant since the third morning. She simply hadn’t let herself believe it.
On the sixth morning, she knelt alone on the floor of her pavilion in the grey light before dawn, and laid the first two fingers of her right hand on the inside of her own left wrist, and closed her eyes.
Her mother had taught her to read the pulse before she had taught her anything else. There were twenty-eight kinds, Ja Young had said, and each one told a story: the floating pulse of a fever near the surface, the sinking pulse of a sickness deep inside, the rapid pulse of heat, the slow pulse of cold, the wiry pulse of pain, the hollow pulse of great blood loss. And one more, which her mother had placed So Hee’s fingers upon for the first time when she was ten years old, on the wrist of a young farmer’s wife in the lower village.
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