The Queen’s Doctor
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 16: The Musk Pillow
Senior Uinyeo Baek Seon-hwa was summoned to the Queen’s inner chamber before dawn, alone, and was there for the better part of an hour. When she came to the pavilion afterward, just as the grey light was creeping over the maples, she didn’t knock, or wait to be announced. She slid the door open, stepped inside, slid it shut behind her, and stood looking down at So Hee in her bedding with an expression So Hee had never seen on her face before.
It took So Hee a moment to recognize it. It was fear.
“Her Majesty showed me the pin,” Baek said quietly. “And the spoon.”
“I’m sorry, Senior Uinyeo. She asked me not to tell you until—”
“I know what she asked.” Baek knelt beside the bedding and took So Hee’s wrist without asking leave, and for a long moment she said nothing at all, only felt the pulse beneath her fingers as though she needed to prove to herself that it was still there. When she spoke again, her voice was as cool and even as ever, but her hand was not quite steady. “Eight weeks. Eight weeks it sat on that shelf, and you never touched it.”
“You told me to trust no gift. Especially the kind ones.”
“I’ve told a great many women a great many things in twenty-six years.” Baek released her wrist. “Most of them didn’t listen.” She sat back on her heels and looked at So Hee steadily. “Her Majesty wants you ill. Convincingly ill, so that whoever sent that jar believes it’s working, and grows careless. She’s asked me to teach you how.”
“I’m a physician. I know what sickness looks like.”
“You know what it looks like from the outside, to a physician’s eye. That’s not the same as knowing how to wear it.” A faint, dry edge crept into Baek’s voice. “I was born a slave in a county office and I’ve climbed to where I am now, inside this palace, by learning exactly how things look to the people watching. Pay attention, Sohun mama. You’ll be performing for an audience that has already killed before, and knows what it’s looking for.”
She taught So Hee over the next two days, in the closed pavilion, with Ok-bun keeping watch on the veranda.
She taught her to eat in secret and fast in public: to have Ok-bun carry her full trays back to the kitchen barely touched, where the kitchen maids would see them and talk, while So Hee ate the rice balls and dried fish and pickled radish that Ok-bun smuggled in beneath her own jacket at night. She taught her to move slowly, one hand always pressed to the small of her back or the side of her belly, and to stop on the veranda steps as if to catch her breath. She showed her how the court ladies used powdered rice and a trace of white lead to lighten their faces, and then showed her how to use far less of it and more carefully, only enough to take the warmth from her cheeks and lips, and how a faint smudge of pine soot, blended with a fingertip, could shadow the hollows under her eyes so that she looked as if she hadn’t slept for a week.
“Not too much,” Baek said, studying her critically in the lamplight on the second evening. “Never too much. The eye expects the sickness to come slowly, the way the poison would bring it. A little paler each day. A little slower. If you look like death on the first morning, anyone with sense will wonder why.”
“And the pulse? If they send another physician to examine me?”
“They won’t examine you.” Baek’s voice hardened. “No one lays a hand on you but me. His Majesty has decreed it. And that, Sohun mama, is the part I’m most curious about. Because if someone wants that child gone badly enough to poison it, they’ll want very much to put their own physician at your bedside once they think you’re failing.” She paused. “Watch who asks.”
On the third morning, So Hee didn’t go to the Queen’s residence.
Ok-bun went instead, with a message: the sohun begged Her Majesty’s pardon, but she was unwell and couldn’t rise. By noon, it was being whispered in the kitchens. By evening, it had reached every corner of the inner palace.
It had also reached the Crown Prince, who had been told nothing.
He came to the pavilion just after the second watch, in a flurry of snow and cold air, having very plainly run the whole way from the Eastern Palace. He didn’t wait for Ok-bun to announce him. He came through the door with snow on his shoulders and his face white, and dropped to his knees beside the bedding, and took So Hee’s face between his hands.
“They’re saying you’re ill,” he said hoarsely. “They’re saying you haven’t eaten for three days. That you can’t rise. That the child—” He stopped, his breath coming hard. “Why didn’t you send for me? Why didn’t Baek send for me? Why did I have to hear it from a eunuch in the corridor?”
So Hee looked up at him in the lamplight, at the snow melting in his hair and the fear stark in his eyes, and felt her heart break a little.
“Lee Jun,” she said gently. “Look at me. Look closely.”
He looked. She watched his eyes move over her face, the pallor of her cheeks, the grey shadows beneath her eyes, and then down to her hands, which were warm and steady in his, and to the bowl of half-eaten rice on the tray beside her, which Ok-bun had not yet had time to hide.
Slowly, his expression changed.
“You’re not ill,” he said.
“No.”
“That’s rice powder.” He brushed his thumb over her cheekbone and stared at the faint white dust it left behind. “That’s rice powder and soot.”
“Baek’s recipe.” She took his hand and held it against her belly, where the child was stirring, lightly and restlessly, as it often did at night. “We’re both well. Both of us. I promise you.”
He let out a long, shuddering breath and bowed his head until his forehead rested against hers, and stayed there. When he finally lifted it, his face had changed again, and his voice was very quiet.
“Tell me.”
She told him. The jar, the card, the seal. The silver pin, blackening in the tonic. The Queen’s spoon. The two court ladies who had stayed in the room when Chae Won wept. The grey-green woman at the gate, whose eyes had taken So Hee’s pulse without touching her wrist. She told him all of it, plainly and in order, and watched his face grow stiller and colder with every word, until by the end it looked as though it had been carved out of the same pale stone as the palace steps.
When she had finished, he rose to his feet without a word and turned toward the door.
“Lee Jun.” She caught his sleeve. “Where are you going?”
“To my mother’s residence.” His voice was flat. “Every woman in it is going to be brought before the State Tribunal before dawn, and I’ll question each of them myself, and I’ll find out which one of them—”
“And the one who did it will be the calmest one in the room,” So Hee said. “And whoever paid her will hear about it by breakfast, and burn every letter, and bow to your father in council tomorrow morning and weep over the wickedness of servants. That’s what your mother said. Word for word.” She didn’t let go of his sleeve. “And she was right.”
He stood very still, his back to her.
“Please,” she said. “Sit down.”
For a long moment, she thought he wouldn’t. Then, slowly, he turned and knelt beside her again. His hands were shaking. She took them both in hers and held them until they stopped.
“You were a secret royal inspector once,” she said softly. “In Namgok. Do you remember? You didn’t storm the granary. You read the ledgers. You studied the cart ruts. You counted the sacks and watched the storekeeper’s larder and waited, and let the magistrate believe he was safe right up until the moment you stood on the riverbank and called out your office. That’s how you caught him.” She tightened her grip. “Be that man again, Lee Jun. Not the Crown Prince. The ragged stranger who dug a grave for the Choi baby and never once raised his voice.”
He looked at her for a long time. Then, very slowly, a little of the stone went out of his face.
“Gae Ttong,” he said.
“Gae Ttong,” she agreed, and smiled for the first time since he’d come through the door.
The gift arrived at the pavilion on the fifth day of So Hee’s illness, just after noon.
It was carried by a young maid So Hee had never seen before, who knelt at the gate and presented it to Ok-bun on a lacquered tray with many bows: a small, square pillow of heavy crimson silk, embroidered all over with peonies and butterflies in gold thread, with a folded card tucked beneath the tassel. The card was written in a strong, confident hand. The household of Minister Shin Geun-taek humbly sends this pillow to the Sohun of the Eastern Palace, with its sincere wishes for her swift recovery and the health of the royal child. It is stuffed with dried chrysanthemum and fragrant herbs, to bring restful sleep.
Ok-bun carried it inside and set it down beside the brazier, and backed away from it as though it were a coiled snake.
So Hee didn’t pick it up. She leaned over it, slowly, as she had leaned over the ginseng jar in the twelfth month, and breathed in.
Chrysanthemum, sweet and dusty and faintly bitter. Dried mugwort. A trace of lavender, and cassia bark, and something else beneath them all, very faint, rich and warm and animal, clinging to the back of her throat like smoke.
She sat back sharply.
“Ok-bun,” she said. “Open the shutters. All of them. Then take this outside, and set it on the far end of the veranda, in the cold. Don’t hold it close to your face. And wash your hands afterward, twice, in hot water.”
The girl stared at her. “What is it, Sohun mama?”
“Musk,” So Hee said. Her voice was very steady. “Deer musk. Only a little of it, hidden under the chrysanthemum and the cassia, so that you’d hardly notice. Physicians are taught never to give it to a woman with child, not even the smallest amount. It brings on the pains early. It opens the womb.” She pressed her hand to her belly and felt the child turn beneath it, restless, as if it too had caught the scent. “A woman who was already weak and sick, who slept every night with her face against that, breathing it in—”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.
By nightfall, the pillow sat on a cloth on the floor of the Queen’s inner chamber, between the Queen and her son, with Chae Won and Baek and So Hee kneeling in a half circle around it and the doors shut against the whole palace.
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