The Queen’s Doctor
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6: The Ford
By morning, the rash had spread across Ja Young’s face.
It had crept down from behind her ears in the night, across her forehead and her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, and now it ran in dark, merging blotches down the length of her throat and disappeared beneath the collar of her jacket. Her eyes were swollen almost shut. Her breath came short and hot, and every few minutes a cough tore through her that left her gasping against the pillow So Hee had folded beneath her head.
So Hee had not slept. She had spent the night kneeling beside the quilt with a basin of cool water, bathing her mother’s burning skin, spooning decoction between her cracked lips, counting her breaths the way she had counted Bok Sun’s and the Choi baby’s and a hundred others. Twenty-eight in the span of a hundred heartbeats. Then thirty. Then, toward dawn, back down to twenty-six, and she had let herself breathe a little easier.
Now the paper window glowed pale gold, and outside in the courtyard the kitchen women were calling to each other as they drew water for the county office’s morning rice, and Ja Young opened her eyes as far as they would go and looked at her daughter.
“It’s the twelfth,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“You should go.”
“No.”
“So Hee—”
“No.” So Hee wrung out the cloth and laid it across her mother’s forehead. “The headman is going with them. And Bae, and Min. They don’t need me at the ford. You need me here.”
“I’ve nursed myself through worse than this.”
“You’ve never had measles in your life. You told me so yourself.” So Hee’s voice cracked, and she steadied it with an effort. “Your rash is out fully. Your lungs are still clear, I’ve listened. If the fever breaks in the next day or two, you’ll be all right. But if it goes into your chest while I’m lying in the reeds at the ford watching rice carts—” She stopped. “I’m staying.”
Ja Young looked at her for a long moment. Then her hand moved on the quilt, slowly, and found So Hee’s.
“You’ll go tell him, at least,” she said. “He’ll be waiting.”
“He can wait.”
“He’s been waiting for you all week, daughter. Anyone with eyes can see it.” Her mother’s cracked lips curved faintly. “Go. Tell him yourself, so he doesn’t come looking for you and get himself caught. I’ll still be here when you get back.”
“You promise?”
“I promise to be exactly as sick as I am now.” Ja Young closed her eyes. “Go.”
He was sitting in the entrance of the kiln with his back against the brick, polishing a small object in his lap with a scrap of cloth, and when he saw her coming across the thistle field, he tucked it quickly inside his jacket and rose to his feet.
She saw his face change as she came closer. She didn’t know what her own face must look like, after the night she’d had, but whatever he saw there made him step forward, ducking under the sickness rope, and meet her halfway across the field.
“Your mother,” he said.
“The rash came out overnight. All over her face and down her chest.” So Hee stopped in front of him. She had meant to say it calmly, the way she’d have told any family, but her voice would not hold steady. “Her fever’s very high. Her lungs are clear for now, but at her age, never having had it as a child—” She pressed her lips together. “I can’t come tonight.”
“Of course you can’t.”
“I’m sorry. I know I said I would. I know the headman trusts me, and I was going to—”
“So Hee.” He took her hands. His own were still bandaged, the cloth grimy now from the kiln, and he held hers carefully, as though they were the fragile ones. “Stop. You don’t owe me an apology. You don’t owe me anything at all. You’ve already given more than I had any right to ask.” His grip tightened. “Stay with her. That’s where you belong tonight.”
She looked down at their joined hands, and her vision blurred.
“She’s the only family I have,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“If she dies—”
“Then you’ll have done everything anyone could have done. Everything.” He bent his head to look into her face. “But she won’t. She’s the most stubborn woman in Namgok, apart from her daughter. She’ll outlast us all.”
So Hee laughed, a small wet sound, and pulled one hand free to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. “You don’t know her.”
“I know she gave half her supper to a stranger in a kiln. And I know she taught you.” He paused. “That tells me most of what I need to know.”
They stood in the thistles in the morning sun, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Somewhere behind the kiln, Bae was muttering to Min about rope, and a swallow swooped low over the field and away toward the pines.
“Catch them,” So Hee said finally. “Tonight. Catch every one of them.”
“I will.”
“And come back and tell me.”
Something passed across his face then, a shadow she didn’t understand, and he looked away toward the valley road for a long moment before he looked back at her.
“When it’s over,” he said, “I’ll come to you. As soon as I can.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.” He lifted her hand, the one he still held, and pressed it briefly against his chest, just over his heart, where something small and hard lay hidden beneath the ragged cloth of his jacket. “Go back to your mother, Agassi. She needs you more than I do tonight.”
So Hee went. When she glanced back from the edge of the field, he was still standing in the thistles, watching her go, and he didn’t move until she had disappeared among the houses of the lower village.
Magistrate Gu Il-seok did not attend the loading of the carts himself. He never attended anything unpleasant. He sat instead in his study with a jar of warmed wine and a plate of dried persimmons, reading poetry by lamplight, while down the hill in the granary compound, Head Clerk Pyo supervised the evening’s work.
Four carts had come up the back road just after dark, drawn by oxen with rags tied around their hooves to muffle their steps. The merchant from Naju had sent a man to oversee the sale, a sleek, sharp-eyed fellow in a quilted silk jacket who stood beside Pyo with his hands tucked into his sleeves and counted every sack as it came out through the doors of the second storehouse.
“Fifty-seven,” he said. “Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine.”
“Sixty,” Pyo finished, as the last sack thudded into the bed of the fourth cart. “As agreed.”
“And the barley?”
“Next month. When the magistrate is satisfied with the price.”
The merchant’s man smiled thinly. “My master is always satisfied with a fair price, Head Clerk. The question is whether your master is.”
“My master,” Pyo replied, “is satisfied with a great many things. Pay the rest when the sacks are in the warehouse, and we’ll all be satisfied.” He turned to the guards clustered by the gate, eight of them, the ones he trusted most, their clubs in their belts and their faces greedy with the promise of double pay. “Put out the torches. We go by moonlight.”
At the far corner of the compound, in the dark doorway of the storekeeper’s house, Storekeeper Ma stood watching with his arms wrapped tightly around himself, and behind him, in the warm room where the lamp still burned, his daughter slept peacefully beneath a heavy quilt, her fever broken that afternoon.
He watched the carts roll out through the gate and turn south onto the valley road. Then he went inside, knelt beside his sleeping child, and did not get up again for a very long time.
The ford lay an hour south of Namgok, where the valley widened and the river spread itself thin and shallow across a bed of pale stones. On the near bank, the road dropped down between two low hills thick with willows and reeds before running out into the water, and on the far side, it climbed a gravel bank and disappeared into the darkness toward Naju.
Carts had to slow there. They had no choice. The stones were slick and the current, though shallow, was strong enough to catch an ox off balance, and every carter in the province knew to walk his beasts across one careful step at a time.
The young man lay on his belly in the reeds at the top of the western hill, with Bae on one side of him and old Noh Seung-gu on the other.
The headman was shaking. He had been shaking since they left the village, a fine, constant tremor that ran through his whole thin body like the quiver of a plucked string. But he had not once asked to turn back, and when the young man had offered him a last chance to go home, he had shaken his grey head fiercely and whispered that he’d been a coward once already this spring and didn’t intend to be one again.
“They’re late,” Bae murmured.
“They’ll come.”
“And if they’ve gone by another road?”
“There is no other road to Naju. Not for loaded carts.” The young man kept his eyes on the dark ribbon of road where it wound back toward Namgok. “Is Min in place?”
“Across the river. On the far bank, with the others.” Bae shifted uncomfortably in the damp reeds. “Twenty men from the Obong post station, all armed. The station master nearly fainted when you showed him what you carry. I don’t think he’s ever seen one before.”
“Most people haven’t.”
“Most people,” Bae said pointedly, “are sensible enough not to go wandering the provinces with one tucked inside their jacket like a lucky charm.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.