Chapter 8: Dragon Robes

The summons came on the thirty-first day after Ja Young’s death, in the hands of a dusty runner from the provincial seat who had clearly never been asked to deliver anything to a medical woman before and did not know quite how to hold himself about it.

He found So Hee at the widow’s house, kneeling on the porch with Bok Sun in her lap, checking the little girl’s eyes. The measles had left the child’s sight weak, as it sometimes did, and So Hee had been coming every few days to bathe them with a wash of chrysanthemum and to watch for any sign that the weakness might become blindness. So far, it hadn’t.

“Uinyeo So Hee?” the runner asked, peering over the gate. “Of Namgok County?”

“Yes.”

“I have a letter for you. By royal command.” He said the last two words carefully, as though they were made of glass, and held out a folded document sealed with red wax.

The widow, who had been hanging washing in the yard, dropped a wet jacket in the dirt.

So Hee set Bok Sun down gently beside her and took the letter. Her hands were steady. She had spent a month learning to keep them steady, through the long nights alone in the narrow room behind the storehouse wall, through the mornings when she woke and reached for her mother before she remembered. She broke the seal and unfolded the heavy paper and read it through twice.

“What does it say?” the widow breathed. “Uinyeo, what does it say?”

So Hee looked up. The runner was watching her curiously. Bok Sun was tugging at her sleeve.

“It says,” she answered slowly, “that I’m to report to the Palace Medical Office in Hanyang, to serve in the royal household. By order of the Board of Rites.” She looked down at the letter again, at the dense official characters marching down the page. “I’m to leave within ten days.”

The widow sat down abruptly on the edge of the porch, as though her legs had given way.

“The palace,” she said. “The royal palace.”

“Yes.”

“You.” The widow stared at her. “Our uinyeo. In the palace.”

“It seems so.”

“But how? Why?”

So Hee thought of a small folded slip of paper, written in a fine, strong hand, that she had kept every night since the burial beneath her pillow. The capital will know your mother’s name, and yours. I made sure of it.

“I think,” she said, “someone put in a good word.”

The news was all over the lower village by nightfall, and by the following morning, it had reached the far end of the valley and doubled in size. So Hee was going to the palace to be the King’s own physician. So Hee was going to cure the Queen of a secret illness that had baffled every doctor in the capital. So Hee had been summoned because the secret inspector had fallen in love with her and meant to make her his wife, never mind that she was a government slave and he was, by now, according to at least one version, the King’s own nephew.

So Hee heard every version and denied all of them, and nobody believed her.

Headman Noh came to see her on the third day, climbing the back path to the county office with his grandson at his elbow and a bundle wrapped in blue cloth under his arm. He found her kneeling in the narrow room, folding her few belongings into a traveling pack, and he stood in the doorway for a long moment watching her before he spoke.

“Your mother would be proud.”

So Hee’s hands stilled on the folded jacket.

“I don’t know that she would,” she answered quietly. “She spent six years in Hanyang when she was a girl. She used to tell me stories about it. The medical office, the palace, the court ladies in their silk. She said it was the loneliest place in the world.”

“Then you’ll write to us.” The old man lowered himself to sit on the edge of the doorway with a grunt of effort. “My grandson can read now. You’ll write, and he’ll read your letters out to the whole village, and you won’t be lonely.”

“The whole village will want to know what the Queen eats for breakfast.”

“The whole village will want to know that you’re well.” He set the blue bundle down on the floor between them and pushed it toward her. “From all of us. Open it.”

She untied the cloth. Inside lay a new jacket of good white hemp, carefully sewn, and a skirt to match, and a long white ribbon for her hair, the proper mourning dress for a daughter who had lost her mother. Beneath them was a pair of new straw sandals, tightly woven, and a small cloth bag that clinked when she lifted it.

“The women sewed the clothes,” the headman said. “The widow made the sandals. The coins are from everyone, a few from every house. It isn’t much. But you can’t walk into the royal palace in the rags you’ve been wearing all spring.”

So Hee sat looking at the white jacket in her lap. For a long moment, she couldn’t trust herself to speak.

“I can’t take the money,” she said finally.

“You can, and you will, or I’ll keep coming back with more until you do.” The old man’s eyes crinkled. “I seem to recall telling you that once before, about a sack of rice.”

“You’re a stubborn old man, Noh-ssi.”

“So your mother used to say.” He rose, slowly, and rested his gnarled hand on her head for a moment, the way he might have done with one of his own granddaughters. “Go well, child. Serve the palace as your mother served us. And don’t let them forget where you came from.”

She went up to the burial ground on her last evening, as she had gone every evening since the funeral, and knelt beside her mother’s grave in the long gold light.

The mound had begun to settle. Thin green shoots of grass were pushing up through the soil, and someone, probably Bok Sun’s mother, had planted a small clump of wild violets at its head. Below, in the valley, the barley was turning gold at last, the fields rippling like water in the evening wind. The barley hill was over. There would be bread in Namgok this summer, and the children who had survived the spring would grow fat on it.