The Queen’s Doctor
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 17: The Kindest Man at Court
The council hall of the main palace was cold on winter mornings, however many braziers the eunuchs lit along its walls, and the ministers of the State Council had long since learned to wear their heaviest robes beneath their official ones. They filed in that morning as they filed in every morning, in their ranks and in their order, their breath smoking faintly in the grey light that came through the high latticed windows, and took their places on the stone floor before the throne.
Kang Myeong-su, Minister of Personnel, came in near the end of the line, as his rank required, and took his place on the eastern side of the hall. He was a slight, stooped man of perhaps fifty, with a thin grey beard and a gentle, lined face, and he moved with the unhurried courtesy of a man who had never in his life needed to raise his voice to be obeyed. He nodded pleasantly to the minister on his right and murmured something about the bitterness of the frost, and folded his hands inside his sleeves, and waited.
He didn’t notice that the guards at the doors had been changed in the night, or that there were twice as many of them as usual. If he noticed that the Crown Prince, seated at the King’s right hand, looked as though he hadn’t slept, he gave no sign of it.
The King let the ordinary business of the morning run its course. A report from the Ministry of Taxation on the grain stores in Gyeongsang. A petition from the magistrates of the northern provinces concerning bandits in the mountain passes. A dispute between two clans over a burial site, which he referred to the Ministry of Rites. He listened to each one with his usual patient attention, asked his usual careful questions, and gave his usual measured answers.
Then he set down the memorial in his hands and looked out over the hall.
“Minister Kang.”
Kang stepped forward from his place and bowed. “Jeonha.”
“Your ministry has written twice this week to the Palace Medical Office concerning the health of the Sohun of the Eastern Palace. Urging that the Chief Royal Physician attend her in place of the Senior Uinyeo.”
“Yes, Jeonha.” Kang’s soft voice was full of grave concern. “Forgive my presumption. But the reports from the inner palace have been so grievous. They say the sohun can’t keep down even a spoonful of rice gruel, that she can’t rise from her bedding. I couldn’t in good conscience keep silent, with the royal child at stake.” He bowed again. “I’ve prayed at my family shrine every morning since the child was announced. I’d hoped to hear better news by now.”
“Your devotion does you credit, Minister.” The King’s face was entirely unreadable. “You’ll be glad to hear, then, that the Senior Uinyeo reported to me this morning that the sohun has made a full recovery.”
A murmur ran along the ranks. Kang’s face lit with warm relief.
“Heaven be thanked, Jeonha. That’s the best news I could have hoped for.”
“Indeed. And the recovery was a swift one,” the King went on, in the same even voice, “because the sohun was never ill at all.”
The murmur died.
In the sudden stillness, the King turned his head a fraction toward the western side of the hall, where the most senior ministers stood.
“Minister Shin.”
Shin Geun-taek, Second State Councillor, stepped forward and bowed. He was a tall, heavy man of sixty with a broad, handsome, fleshy face and small, shrewd eyes, and he carried himself with the ease of someone who had dominated the State Council for twenty years.
“Jeonha.”
“Nine days ago, a pillow was delivered to the pavilion of the sohun. Crimson silk, embroidered with peonies. It came with a card bearing the name of your household, wishing her a swift recovery.” The King paused. “It was stuffed with chrysanthemum and cassia and mugwort. And beneath them, with a quantity of deer musk.”
Shin’s broad face went grey.
He didn’t stagger. He had survived two kings and four purges, and he didn’t stagger. But he dropped to his knees on the cold stone floor with a speed that belied his size, and pressed his forehead to the ground, and when he spoke his voice was hoarse.
“Jeonha, I swear on the graves of my ancestors, I sent no pillow. My household sent no pillow. I’ve never in my life—”
“I know you didn’t,” the King said.
Shin went still, his forehead still pressed to the stone.
“Rise, Minister Shin.” The King’s gaze moved away from him, back across the hall, to the eastern side, where Kang Myeong-su stood alone in the space before his place, his gentle face frozen in an expression of polite bewilderment. “Bring them in.”
The doors at the rear of the hall opened, and men of the King’s own guard brought in three prisoners, their wrists bound before them with red cord, and made them kneel in a row on the stone floor before the throne.
The first was a young court lady in the pale green of an ordinary nain, her face white and blotched with weeping, her hair coming loose from its braid. The second was a thin young man in the grey coat of a junior government clerk, who kept his eyes fixed on the floor and was shaking so hard that the guard behind him had to hold him upright. The third was a tall, lean man of middle years in the plain dark coat of a household steward, with a hard, closed face, and a large brown mole beside his nose.
Kang Myeong-su looked at the steward, and for an instant, only an instant, something moved behind his gentle eyes.
Then it was gone. He turned to the throne with his hands still folded in his sleeves and his face full of grieved confusion.
“Jeonha,” he said. “I don’t understand. These people—”
“Then allow me to help you understand, Minister.” The King lifted his hand. “Crown Prince.”
Lee Jun rose from his seat at his father’s right hand and came down the steps of the dais, and in his hand he carried a thin, dog-eared, grubby little book bound with cheap string. He walked the length of the hall, past the kneeling prisoners, and stopped before Kang Myeong-su, and held the book up so the old man could see it.
“The ledger of an herbalist in the lane behind the Jongno bell pavilion,” he said. His voice was quiet and perfectly steady. “Two measures of white arsenic, sold in the tenth month. One measure of deer musk, sold eleven days ago. Both paid in silver. Both recorded against the steward of the household of Shin.” He turned a page. “The herbalist describes that steward as tall and thin, with a mole beside his nose and a Chungcheong drawl. The steward of Minister Shin’s household is short, and fat, and from Andong. I’ve seen him.” He closed the book. “But your steward, Minister Kang, is tall and thin, with a mole beside his nose. And your family’s estates are in Chungcheong.”
Kang said nothing.
“That young woman,” Lee Jun went on, “is Nain Kwak, who has served my mother’s tea for four years, on the recommendation of your ministry. That young man is her brother, a junior clerk in your ministry. Last night, he met her at the western gate of this palace. Then he went to the herb shop behind the Jongno bell pavilion, and bought a packet of musk. And then he went to the back gate of your house in Bukchon, where your steward let him in.” He paused. “The men who followed him are waiting outside, if you’d like to hear it from them. So is the herbalist. We found the packet of musk in your steward’s quarters an hour before dawn, and the remainder of the white arsenic hidden with it, beneath a floorboard.”
The hall was utterly silent. The braziers crackled along the walls. Somewhere at the back, one of the junior ministers coughed and then froze, appalled at himself.
Kang Myeong-su stood very still. His gentle face didn’t change. He looked at the ledger in the Crown Prince’s hand, and then at the three prisoners kneeling on the stone, and last of all, for a long moment, at Nain Kwak.
The young court lady lifted her tear-stained face and met his eyes, and began to weep afresh.
“I’m sorry, my lord,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry. They knew. They knew everything already. I couldn’t—”
“Be quiet, girl,” Kang said, very softly, without any anger at all, and she fell silent at once, as though he had struck her.
It came out afterward, in pieces, before the State Tribunal, and later in the tribunal’s sealed record, which So Hee never read but which Lee Jun told her about, a little at a time, over the weeks that followed.
Nain Kwak was the daughter of a tenant family on the Kang estates in Chungcheong. Four years earlier, the minister had arranged her place in the Queen’s household through the Ministry of Personnel, and her brother’s clerkship with it, and had asked nothing of her in return but that she keep her eyes open and send him word, from time to time, of what she heard in the Queen’s inner chamber. For four years, she had done so, and had been paid for it, and had told herself it was harmless.
On the day the princess wept in her mother’s chamber, Nain Kwak had sent word, as always.
Ten days later, a sealed packet had come to her from her brother, with instructions. In the rush of the New Year gifts, with dozens of jars being filled and sealed in the Queen’s storerooms at once, and a dozen hands passing them from shelf to tray, it had taken her no more time than it took to pour a cup of tea to empty the packet into one small jar of ginseng tonic, press the plum-blossom seal into the warm wax, and set it on the tray bound for the Eastern Palace.
She had not known, she wept, what the packet held. She had guessed. She had known her mother and her brothers lived on the minister’s land, at the minister’s pleasure. She had not dared to refuse.
Kang Myeong-su never wept, and he never begged. He answered the tribunal’s questions calmly and courteously, as he had answered every question put to him in thirty years of service, and at the end of it, when the chief magistrate asked him why, he was silent so long that the magistrate thought he wouldn’t answer at all.
Then he said, quite gently, “Because the royal line of Joseon is not a thing to be handed to the son of a county slave. Somebody had to see to it. And I have a daughter who would have made a fine Crown Princess.”
The King’s sentence was pronounced in the throne hall eleven days later.
Kang Myeong-su was stripped of his office, his rank, and his family’s name on the register of officials. He was sent home under guard to his house in Bukchon, where, three days afterward, an officer of the State Tribunal arrived with the royal edict and a bowl of sayak, the poison the King bestowed upon high officials condemned to death, so that they might die by their own hand within their own walls. His steward was executed. His family was sent into exile on the southern coast, his estates confiscated to the crown. His daughter’s name, which had stood modestly among the remaining candidates for Crown Princess, was struck from the list and burned.
When Lee Jun told So Hee about the poison, she sat very still for a long time.
“Arsenic,” she said at last. “In the sayak. It’s mostly arsenic, isn’t it?”
“Mostly,” he said.
She didn’t say anything else. She thought of the dark tonic in the little squat jar, and the silver pin turning grey in the lamplight, and the child fluttering beneath her palm in the dark. She didn’t feel glad, exactly. She found that she didn’t feel much of anything, except very tired, and very cold, and very grateful for the warmth of his arm around her.
She asked for only one thing, afterward.
She went to the Queen’s residence on the first morning that she could walk there openly again, with the rice powder washed from her face and the color back in her cheeks, and when she had taken Her Majesty’s pulse and examined the baby prince, who laughed at her nose as though she’d never been away, she knelt back on her heels and folded her hands in her lap.
“Jungjeon mama,” she said. “I’d like to ask a favor. For Nain Kwak.”