Chapter 9: The Archer’s Thumb

For a long moment, no one in the sunlit room moved.

The court lady in rose silk remained pressed to the floor by the door. The bird went on singing in the peony garden. Princess Chae Won sat frozen on her cushion with her half-bandaged wrist in her lap, her bright eyes darting from her brother’s face to the medical woman kneeling at her feet and back again, and So Hee knelt with her face lifted and her hands gone cold and still around the roll of cotton, staring up at a man in dragon robes who had once dug a child’s grave badly on a hillside in Jeolla.

It was the Crown Prince who moved first.

“Court Lady Yun,” he said, without looking away from So Hee. His voice was perfectly pleasant and perfectly calm. “Would you go to the kitchens and ask them to send up some chilled plum tea? My sister will want something cool while her wrist is bound. And some of the honey cakes from this morning, if there are any left.”

The court lady raised her head from the floor. Her eyes flicked once toward So Hee, curious and quick, and then away again.

“At once, Jeoha,” she murmured, and rose, and backed out through the door with her head bowed, and slid it shut behind her.

Her footsteps faded down the corridor.

So Hee lowered her eyes to the floor, and discovered that her hands were shaking so badly she could not hold the cotton. She set it down carefully on the silk cushion beside the princess’s knee, and pressed her palms flat against her thighs, and made herself breathe.

“Finish binding my sister’s wrist, uinyeo,” the Crown Prince said quietly. “Please.”

It was the first thing he had ever asked of her in a voice that sounded like an order, and it steadied her the way nothing else could have. An order, she knew how to follow. She picked up the cotton again, took the princess’s slender wrist in her fingers, and began to wind, turn over turn, loosely, the way she had promised, while her heart slammed against her ribs and the dark blue hem of his robe stood motionless at the edge of her vision.

Nobody spoke. The princess, who had not been silent for this long in living memory, sat perfectly still and watched them both with enormous eyes.

So Hee tied off the bandage and sat back on her heels.

“Ten days, Your Highness,” she said to the floor. “Loosely bound. No archery. If the swelling worsens, send for the medical office.”

“I’ll send for you,” the princess said.

“Your Highness is very kind.”

“Uinyeo.” It was the Crown Prince again. So Hee did not look up. “Thank you for attending my sister. You may go.”

She bowed until her forehead touched the polished wood. Then she gathered up her medicine box, and rose, and walked backward to the door with her head lowered, the way court ladies did, the way she had seen them do all week, and slid it open and stepped through and closed it behind her.

The corridor stretched away before her, long and dim and empty, smelling of beeswax and cedar.

She walked perhaps twenty paces before her knees gave out, and she had to put out a hand against the wall, and stand there with her eyes shut and her forehead pressed to the cool painted wood, while her whole body shook.

Behind the closed door, Princess Chae Won drew a long, slow breath, and let it out again.

“Orabeoni,” she said.

“Not now, Chae Won.”

“Orabeoni. Who was that?”

The Crown Prince did not answer. He had crossed to the open doors on the garden side of the room and stood with his back to her, looking out at the peonies, his hands clasped behind him. The sunlight fell across the golden dragons on his shoulders and made them glitter.

“Because,” Chae Won went on, in a tone of dawning wonder, “I’ve known you my entire life, and I’ve never once seen you look at anybody like that. Not the scholars, not the ministers, not Father. Not even that horrible grey stallion you love more than your own family.” She leaned forward on her cushion, forgetting her wrist entirely. “You looked at her like she’d hung the moon.”

“Chae Won.”

“And she looked at you like you’d risen out of your own grave.” The princess’s eyes narrowed. “She knew you. She’d seen you before. She said ‘you’ as though she knew exactly who you were, except she didn’t, not really. She didn’t know you were you.”

Her brother sighed, very deeply, and turned around.

“If I tell you,” he said, “you can never repeat a single word of it. Not to your ladies, not to Mother, not to anyone in this palace, as long as you live.”

“I swear it.”

“I mean it, Chae Won. This isn’t gossip about which minister’s son fell off his horse. If a word of this gets out, it won’t be me who suffers for it.” He held her gaze. “It’ll be her.”

Something in his voice made the princess sit back slowly. The teasing drained out of her face, and she looked at him properly, the way she rarely bothered to look at anyone, and whatever she saw there made her nod once, gravely.

“I swear it,” she said again, and this time it was not a sixteen-year-old’s promise.

He came and knelt across from her on the floor, the heavy blue silk pooling around him, and told her.

He told her about the month he had disappeared, and what their father had sent him to do. He told her about a rice town called Namgok at the bottom of Jeolla, where children were eating tree bark beneath a granary full of stolen grain. He told her about a medical woman and her daughter who went into every house in the lower village, sickness rope or not, and about the morning he had sat against a wall across the lane from the charcoal burner’s widow’s gate and watched the daughter come out into the grey dawn, exhausted and furious and beautiful, and felt the ground shift beneath him in a way it had never shifted before. He told her about the blisters, and the kiln, and the swallows, and the sick house with Min painted like a dying man. He told her about the ford.

And then he told her about the mother, and the rattling breath, and the promise he had made on their father’s life.

When he finished, the princess sat very still for a long time, looking down at her neatly bandaged wrist.

“She buried her mother,” Chae Won said at last. “Six weeks ago. And then she came here.”