The Queen’s Doctor
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 5: The Sick House
Min made a remarkably convincing corpse.
He lay on his back on a straw mat inside the firebox, a threadbare quilt pulled up to his chin and his long limbs arranged in the loose, heavy sprawl of a man too far gone to care how he lay. So Hee knelt beside him with a small clay dish of paste and a thin brush made from a twist of rabbit fur, dabbing blotches of red across his forehead and cheeks and down the side of his neck.
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still, Agassi. I’ve never held stiller in my life.”
“You’re smiling. Dying men don’t smile.”
“Some of them must. The ones who die happy.” Min rolled his eyes toward the young man crouched at the kiln’s entrance. “What’s this made of, anyway? It smells like the inside of a dye shop.”
“Safflower and red clay, mixed with a little lamp oil to make it stick.” So Hee leaned back to study her work, then added two more blotches behind his ear. “Measles starts behind the ears and spreads across the face. Anyone who’s nursed a sick child knows that much. If they look closely, it has to be right.”
“And if they look very closely?”
“Then you’d better be coughing too hard for them to want to.” She set down the brush. “Let me hear it.”
Min drew a breath and let out a cough so wet and wretched that a swallow shot out of its nest in alarm and fled through the entrance past the young man’s head.
So Hee stared at him.
“That,” she said slowly, “was disgusting.”
“Thank you.”
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“I had a grandfather who coughed like that for twenty years. My brothers and I used to imitate him behind his back.” Min grinned beneath his rash. “He lived to be eighty-four.”
At the entrance, the young man laughed quietly. So Hee turned to glare at him and found him watching her with an expression that made her forget, for a moment, what she’d meant to say.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He looked away, out across the thistle field toward the village. “You’re good at this.”
“At painting spots on a fool?”
“At all of it.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing, and busied herself scraping the last of the paste back into its dish.
Bae had strung the rope across the kiln’s mouth at dawn, a thick twist of straw knotted at both ends and hung with a dangling strip of white cloth, exactly like the ones on the gates in the lower village. By midmorning, word had already begun to spread. So Hee heard it herself at the well, two women murmuring over their buckets about the old potter’s kiln, how the medical women had taken to using it as a place to lay the ones who were too far gone, so their families wouldn’t have to watch.
“The Choi baby’s cousin, I heard,” one said.
“No, a stranger. Some traveler who fell sick on the road.”
“Poor soul. To die out there, among the swallows.”
So Hee kept her eyes on her bucket and said nothing. By the time she walked back up the lane, the story had grown a second patient and a mysterious bloody cough, and she decided that Namgok’s gossips were a more effective weapon than anything Bae could have carried in his pack.
Her mother was waiting at the widow’s gate with the medicine box.
“You’re late,” Ja Young said.
“I was at the well. The whole village thinks the kiln is full of the dying.”
“Good.” Her mother turned toward the next house, then stopped as a cough caught her, deep and hacking, doubling her over so that she had to brace one hand on the gatepost until it passed. When she straightened, her eyes were streaming.
“Mother?”
“It’s nothing.”
“That’s the third time you’ve said that since yesterday.” So Hee set down the bucket and took her mother’s arm, turning her toward the light. Ja Young’s eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, the whites shot through with thin crimson threads, and they squinted painfully against the morning sun. “Your eyes—”
“I didn’t sleep. And the sun is bright.” Ja Young pulled her arm free, gently but firmly. “We have eleven houses today, So Hee. The Choi boy’s rash is turning, and the Yang boy still has that cough, and there are two new ropes at the far end of the village. Whatever you’re thinking, it can wait until tonight.”
“It can’t wait. If you’re sick—”
“If I’m sick, I’ll tell you.” Her mother met her eyes with a look So Hee had known since childhood, the one that ended arguments before they began. “Tonight. After Pyo’s men have come and gone. Your gentry son needs you today more than I do.”
“He’s not my gentry son.”
“No?” Ja Young’s mouth curved faintly, despite everything. “Then why do you keep blushing whenever someone mentions him?”
So Hee opened her mouth, found she had nothing to say, and shut it again. Her mother patted her cheek with warm fingers and walked on toward the next house, and after a moment, So Hee picked up the bucket and followed, and tried very hard not to notice how slowly Ja Young was walking.
Pyo’s men came at sunset, as promised.
There were eight of them, fanned out across the lower village in pairs, and they did their work with the thoroughness of men who had been told there would be consequences if they didn’t. So Hee watched them from the widow’s gate as they moved from house to house, kicking over woodpiles, poking their clubs into storage jars, dragging back the reed mats in empty sheds. They didn’t cross the sickness ropes. They shouted from the gates instead, demanding to know if a stranger had been seen, a ragged young man with bandaged hands, and the frightened families inside shouted back that they had seen no one.
Head Clerk Pyo walked behind them, his blue robe spotless and his hands folded behind his back, and his narrow eyes missed nothing.
When the search reached the edge of the village, So Hee slipped away through the back lanes and ran.
She came into the thistle field from the far side, breathless, her skirt hitched up and burrs clinging to its hem. Bae was already crouched in the long grass behind the kiln with his hatchet across his knees, and he lifted a hand in silent greeting as she passed. She ducked under the rope and through the entrance into the smoky gloom of the firebox.
“They’re coming.”
Min’s eyes flew open. The young man rose from where he’d been sitting beside him.
“How many?”
“Four. Pyo’s with them.” She was already moving, grabbing the basin of stale water from the corner and a stained cloth from the medicine box. “You have to go up. Now.”
The kiln climbed the slope behind the firebox in a series of low, connected chambers, each a little higher than the last, like the scales along a serpent’s spine. The upper chambers were dark and cramped and choked with broken pottery and old ash, and a man lying flat at the far end of the highest one would be invisible to anyone standing below.
“If they come inside—” he began.
“They won’t come inside.”
“If they do—”
“Then you’ll stay very quiet, and Bae will do whatever Bae does with that hatchet, and we’ll all hope it doesn’t come to that.” She pushed him toward the passage. “Go.”
He caught her wrist. For a moment he simply held it, his bandaged fingers warm against her skin, and looked at her in the dim light from the entrance.
“Be careful,” he said.
“I’m always careful.”
“You challenged the head clerk in the middle of the lane two days ago.”
“That was carefully done,” she retorted, and pulled her hand away. “Go.”
He went. She heard him scramble up through the low passage, heard the scrape of cloth on brick and the clink of shattered pots shifting, and then nothing.
So Hee knelt beside Min, dipped the cloth in the basin, and began, very gently, to bathe his painted face.
“Remember,” she whispered. “You’re dying.”
“Of what?”
“Measles that went into your lungs. You can barely breathe. You’ve been out of your head with fever since yesterday.”
“Should I babble?”
“Only if you can do it better than you cough.”
Min considered this, then let his eyes roll back until only a sliver of white showed beneath the lids, and began to breathe in short, rasping gasps that rattled wetly in his chest.
So Hee decided he could babble if he liked.
The voices reached the potter’s field a few minutes later.
“—the old kiln. The medical women have been using it.”
“For what?”
“The dying ones, they say. The ones too far gone for their families to watch.”
“Then there’s no point looking. Who’d hide in a place like that?”
“Someone who didn’t want to be found,” said a third voice, thin and cold and unmistakable. “Search it.”
Footsteps approached through the thistles and stopped at the entrance. So Hee didn’t look up. She went on bathing Min’s forehead, murmuring softly to him in the low, soothing tone she used for children in their last hours, and let the silence stretch.
“You,” Pyo said. “Uinyeo.”
She raised her head slowly, as though noticing him for the first time. He stood just outside the rope, flanked by two of his men, his face pinched with distaste.
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