Chapter 9: The Archer’s Thumb

Princess Chae Won’s wrist healed in eight days.

It then developed, in rapid succession, a stiffness in the mornings, an ache whenever it rained, a clicking sound when she rotated it that nobody else could hear, and finally, in the second week of summer, a sympathetic weakness in the other wrist as well, which the princess insisted was the result of favoring the first one and required daily examination by the southern medical woman, and no one else.

“You can’t keep doing this,” So Hee told her, kneeling in the princess’s reading room with Chae Won’s perfectly healthy wrist in her hands. “Your ladies aren’t fools. Sooner or later, one of them will wonder why a sprain needs a physician for five weeks.)”

Then I’ll stop pretending.” Chae Won stretched out on her cushion like a contented cat. “I asked Father at breakfast this morning whether I might have a medical woman of my own, attached to my household, the way Mother has hers. I told him I was tired of Baek sending me whichever junior girl she could spare, and that I wanted the southern one, because she’s the only one who doesn’t treat me like a porcelain doll.” She smiled. “He said yes before he’d finished his rice. Fathers always do, when their daughters are sixteen and ask for something that costs nothing.”

So Hee stared at her. “Chae Won.”

“You’re mine now, officially. Every afternoon, for as long as I like. Baek can’t say a word about it.” The princess’s eyes sparkled. “So. Tell me again what you use for a child’s cough.”

“My ladies think I’m spoiled and demanding. They’ve thought so since I was four.” Chae Won stretched out on her cushion like a contented cat. “A spoiled, demanding princess who refuses every medical woman but one is the least surprising thing in this entire palace. Besides, I’m learning so much. Tell me again what you use for a child’s cough.”

“Balloon flower root and licorice, boiled together.”

“And for a burn?”

“Egg white, if it’s fresh. Honey, if it isn’t. Never butter, whatever the old women say.”

“And for a broken heart?”

So Hee looked up. The princess was watching her with bright, innocent eyes.

“There isn’t a medicine for that, Your Highness.”

“Chae Won,” the princess corrected. “When we’re alone, you call me Chae Won. I’ve told you a hundred times.” She sat up and leaned forward, her voice dropping low. “And there is a medicine for a broken heart, So Hee. It’s called my brother, and he’s asked me to ask you whether you’d come to the Eastern Palace archery ground tonight, after the second watch.”

So Hee set down the princess’s wrist very carefully.

“I can’t.”

“You can. I’ll be there the whole time.”

“And how would a medical woman explain being found on the Crown Prince’s archery ground in the middle of the night?”

“She wouldn’t be found. That’s the point.” Chae Won’s grin faded into something more serious. “He’s thought about it, So Hee. He’s thought about nothing else for days. The ground belongs to the Eastern Palace alone, and it’s barred at night, and Bae and Min will be standing at the gates. You’ll come to my quarters as usual, and when my ladies have gone to bed. I’ll take you through the back garden. No one will see you on the way there, and no one will see you on the way back.” She paused. “He wants to teach you to shoot.”

The weeks had settled into a pattern since the day in the peony garden, and So Hee lived inside it the way she had once lived inside the seasons in Namgok, carefully and watchfully, never quite trusting it to hold.

In the mornings, she ground herbs in the medical office under Senior Uinyeo Baek’s cool, unblinking gaze. In the afternoons, she was summoned to the princess’s quarters, where she sat with Chae Won in the shuttered reading room and taught her the names of medicinal plants. Chae Won taught her in return the endless, intricate rules of the palace: which gate a medical woman could pass through and which she couldn’t, how deeply to bow to a royal concubine as opposed to a senior court lady, what it meant when the Queen’s attendants wore green ribbons instead of blue, and who in the whole vast household could be trusted, which was almost nobody.

And sometimes, never more than once or twice in a week and never on a day anyone could have predicted, the princess would send her ladies off to the far corners of the palace on errands that would keep them busy until evening, and a little while later the paper door at the back of the reading room would slide open, and Lee Jun would step through from the private passage that connected his sister’s quarters to the Eastern Palace.

He was careful, far more careful than he had ever been in Namgok. He came without attendants, in plain grey silk, and he never stayed longer than an hour, and when he left, he left by the same hidden passage he had come. So Hee understood without being told that every one of those visits had been planned as carefully as the ambush at the ford.

They talked. That was all they did, at first.