ataraxia @crowapplesandwich - Tumblr Blog

Sep 30, 2025

Beneath the Palace Moon

Pairing: Prince! Kim Mingyu x Concubine! F. Reader

Wordcount: 27.4K

Smut Warnings: Explicit sexual acts - Oral (F. Receiving) - Praising - Use of petnames - PIV - Unprotected intercourse - Mentions of virginity - Slight cumplay - Slight breeding kink - Semi public

This story is intended for an adult audience only. Minors do not interact.

The palace gates are not built for mortals. They tower above you like mountains clothed in vermilion and jade, swallowing the sky with tiled wings that gleam black-blue in the sun. Their shadow falls over you as if to remind you of scale: you are small, you are nothing, you are already consumed.

The men in uniform do not slow. Their steps drum against the stone as though this march were inevitable from the day you were born. You stumble after them, your thin shoes slipping against flagstones polished smooth.

A eunuch in blue silk glides forward, his voice cold. “This way.” You follow because there is nowhere else to go.

The women’s quarters are a braided hush tangled with whispers. A matron waits beneath the eaves, hair built high as a crown of lacquer, mouth pinched. Her name is not offered; her authority is enough.

“Strip her,” she says.

It is not a request, and so your rough cotton is peeled from your limbs; the sting of air on your bare arms a cold slap. You want to fold yourself small, hide the plain stubborn bones of your body, but the room gives you no shelter. Hands, practised and impersonal, lift your arms and measure your waist. A basin appears, steam trembling the surface. Another woman scrubs your skin with scented cloths until you are raw and new, and no longer yourself.

The robe they pour you in is heavier than it looks, a pale blossom patterned with moons; the underskirt murmurs against your calves. Your hair is combed until it crackles and pinned into an obedient, shining shape. When they set the final hairpin, something within you clicks shut with it.

In the bronze mirror, a stranger blinks. The stranger’s mouth is soft and quiet; yours has lines bitten into it. The stranger’s eyes gleam; yours are rimmed with sleepless red. You lift your gaze and meet yourself anyway. The silk is beautiful. You are not moved.

The matron looks you up and down. “Better,” she says. “Remember, your head must bow and your voice must sweeten. Remember whose air you breathe.”

The words taste like iron on your tongue. “Whose?” The matron’s smile does not reach her eyes. “The Crown Prince’s, of course.”

A tremor starts in your left hand. You crush it by curling your fingers into the silk and anchoring them there. You have the sudden, foolish thought that if you run—now—you might still find the street outside your house where the fishmonger shouts and the stray cats argue over fish heads and your father—

Your father, who could not meet your gaze that morning when the men came.

The memory unfurls without permission. The yard smelled of damp straw. Your father’s hands shook, the dirt forever lodged under his nails. He kept saying your name, and you kept thinking he would laugh, he would swing you into his arms and say you were too old for such tricks, he would tell the men to go. But the men did not go. They had papers. Seals. The smooth, expensive silence of men who move with the weight of the palace behind them.

“It’s only service,” your father said then, as if words could blunt the blade. “Honourable. You will be fed. You will be safe.”

“You sold me,” you said, and watched the words reveal the truth in his face.

Now, in the palace, the matron claps, and the memory snaps shut. “This way,” she says, and you are shepherded into a low room whose floor smells of rice paste. A group of women sit on cushions, wrapped in silks like yours but better. Their mouths are lacquered into timid roses. Their eyes roam over you the way crows consider shiny things.

A lady in pale jade presides at the head, her hair adorned with pearls that drip from their pins. Her face is beautiful the way a blade is beautiful. She does not introduce herself either. She does not need to. You bow because your world depends on it.

“She is the new one,” the matron announces.

A low flutter moves through the room. You hear your name—your real one, the one your mother used to sing into your hair—offered up to their mouths and rewritten there. The jade lady studies you with palate-cleanser calm.

“Stand straight,” she says. “Smile. No teeth.”

You shape your mouth.

“She is plain,” murmurs a woman to your left.

“But fresh,” another counters.

The jade lady raises a hand, and the whispers die. “You will be instructed,” she says, “in comportment and conversation. You will learn the Prince’s preferences and how not to become troublesome. You will not forget your place, which is below the law and within my sight.”

A soft laugh moves around you. You do not laugh. You regard the jade lady’s hands: long fingers, nails dull, the skin where a ring once sat a little paler than the rest. She has been here long enough to shed pieces of herself and learn not to be noticed.

“Today,” the matron says, “you will learn the corridors.”

Corridors. A dull word for a labyrinth. They unfold like a thousand lines: the passage with its painted lotus floor, the corner smelling of cedar and women’s nervous sweat; a narrow door leading to a courtyard where carp make slow turns beneath the lily pads; another door to a colonnade that frames an inner garden. You file with the other women behind the matron as she narrates the rules you must memorise to go on breathing.

“Do not cross the Red Pavilion without express summons. The Prince walks there when he pleases.”

“Do not speak to men unless they speak to you, and then only what is pleasing to hear.”

“Do not eat fruit unless it is offered by the proper hand.”

“Do not look directly into the Queen’s eyes if you are questioned. It is taken for insolence.”

At the mention of the Queen, the women’s shoulders tighten. The jade lady’s mouth softens a breath. The matron leads you into a hall resplendent with a painted flock of cranes. You think their wings must know the shape of escape.

As you pass, the women brush you with words disguised as kindness. “Poor child.” “Lucky girl.” “Do you know how to sing?” “Can you embroider?” “The Prince admires quiet.” “The Prince admires beauty.” “The Prince admires obedience.”

You admire air. You admire roads. You admire a door that opens onto a street that is not guarded by men with spears.

In the afternoon, they bring you to another room. A girl with moth-soft hands paints your lips the proper red and draws a crescent moon at your temple. “Pretty,” she murmurs, though her eyes look far away, as if searching the backs of her eyelids for a different life.

The jade lady returns with graceful disapproval. She adjusts a fold of your robe with two fingers and a sigh. “You will not stare,” she instructs. “You will keep your voice low. You will bow until you are told to rise.” Her gaze drifts to your hands. “You have worker’s scars.”

“They are mine,” you say.

A thin smile. “Not anymore.”

They take you to the antechamber of the Red Pavilion. The floor gleams with the kind of care that requires someone else’s back to break. Outside, pine trees shape the courtyard. A small fountain speaks to itself. The guards at the far doors remain perfectly still.

The jade lady arranges you on a cushion with the others. You are placed near the back, the place for fresh acquisitions.

“You will be summoned as he wishes,” says the jade lady. “Do not speak unless address is clear.”

Time passes achingly slow. Somewhere, a bell counts the hour. Your knees ache; the silk grows hotter; the scar at your right thumb throbs its small, stubborn drumbeat. You watch a bee struggle against the paper lattice of the window until it finds a hole and escapes into the courtyard. You wonder if you are the bee or the lattice.

Footsteps. The eunuch emerges from the inner chamber, his expression the practised neutrality of a man who has mastered both service and survival.

“Her Highness will see you,” he says, and the words fall over the room.

The Crown Prince’s wife enters not with a flourish but with a silence that forces the air to still. She wears white, the exact shade of disdain, and her hair is a temple of jewels. Her face is beautiful the way winter is beautiful: precise, bloodless, absolute. The women bow low; you follow, the floor’s wax kissing your forehead. When she speaks, her voice is clear.

“Rise.”

You rise. Her eyes pass over you as one might pass over a ledger. “The new one,” she says; it is not a question. “Stand.”

You stand. The jade lady shifts; a note too careful in a composition of carelessness.

The wife comes closer. “You understand your good fortune,” she says, and the line between statement and threat is a hair’s breadth.

You hold her gaze because you have not yet learned not to. Behind her eyes, there is calculation; behind the calculation, a certain fatigue. You realise with a jolt that she is not old. Power has made its mark upon her early.

“I understand I am here,” you say.

The wife’s mouth tilts, not precisely a smile.

“Pretty,” she responds. “Untrained, but pretty.” She turns away dismissively. “See that she is taught the songs he favors.”

The jade lady bows. “Yes, Your Highness.”

“And the rules,” the wife adds, lightly, like a benediction. “Especially the rules.”

She glides away. The room exhales, and the jade lady’s fingers tighten on your shoulder for the briefest moment—possession or warning, you cannot tell.

Evening sinks its ink into the lattices; the light stains the floor a last amber and then withdraws. Lamps are lit, their halos small domestic suns. Dishes appear—fruits cut into half moons, rice plump, soups breathing steam. You taste none of it. The other women eat with beautiful mouths, telling small, careful jokes. Laughter hangs and vanishes.

Then the inner door opens.

He enters without ceremony, which is a ceremony of its own. The Crown Prince is tall, his shoulders kept rigid by the invisible hands of expectation. His robe is cerulean blue, the embroidery at the hem the colour of gold you were never invited to have. His hair is bound with a simplicity that must have cost someone else an hour. His face is handsome, yes, in the unimpeachable way a coin is stamped. But his eyes are somewhere else entirely, tilted towards a horizon that can never be reached.

The women bow, and you bow with them, forehead to the floor, silk hushing around you. The Prince pauses; you feel it in the small hairs at the back of your neck. You want to look up because you were born with that flaw, the one that insists on knowing the source of the shadow. You do not look up.

“Rise,” he says finally.

He does not look at you. He does not look at anyone in particular. He accepts tea with a flick of his fingers; he accepts a song with a nod of his head. His voice is quiet when he uses it; mostly, he does not.

You watch him from beneath your lashes and understand what this place is: a stage with one audience whose gaze is averted. A shrine whose god has elsewhere to be. A game of fortunes played with pieces that bruise and bleed.

When he stands to leave, he leaves as he came: with his attention neatly folded. The women’s eyes follow him. Your eyes stay on the floor.

The jade lady tilts her head. “You will be shown your quarters.”

You rise. Your knees complain.

In the small chamber that is now yours, a single lamp flickers on a low table. The bed is narrow, its frame plain wood lacquered in black, the blanket neatly folded, the pillows stacked too high and too soft. On the chest at the foot of the bed lies a folded bundle of garments—another silk robe, underlayers, and a set of instructions neatly stitched into the fabric.

You lower yourself onto the mattress, the silk of your robe whispering against itself as you move. The pins in your hair tug sharply with every tilt of your head, a constant reminder of the weight now fastened to you.

You press your palms together and feel the calluses the matron noticed—the humble proofs of a life that asked your hands to work honestly. They are not gone. They are only hidden.

It is only service, your father’s words echoing in your head. You will be fed. You will be safe.

Safe feels like a word someone else invented to sell you to a softer cage.

You close your eyes and see the Prince’s profile—aloof, disinterested, a mountain that will not acknowledge the pilgrim. You open them and see the ceiling—plain, immovable, yours for the staring. Between the two is a sudden realisation that tastes like iron: you are not here to be loved. You are here to be arranged.

The palace has always had a particular way of reminding Mingyu of his station.

It does not scold; it arranges. Rank is the angle of a roofline, the hush inside a threshold, the way a corridor seems to narrow for one son and open for the other. Even the flagstones participate: they remember which feet matter.

As a boy, he misread all this. He thought the carp rose because they loved his humming, that the cranes in the painted screens shifted their eyes to follow him, that the moon collected itself in the slick of stone for his delight. He learned the true alphabet of the palace the first time his brother’s name moved through a room and every head turned toward that sound.

There was a spring day, blossom heavy in the air, when he sent an arrow clean through a tossed gourd. It broke in a fragrant shiver; men turned; boys shouted; the captain’s brows lifted—brief, real recognition. Mingyu tasted it, sweet and new. He ran to where the King stood beneath the pines, the Crown Prince at his side, and held up the bow as if holding up a relic.

“Appa, did you see?”

The King’s gaze slid past him and landed, gentle as habit, on the elder son. “Your brother will require men who shoot true,” he said, not unkindly. “You will be one of them.”

A wall disguised as a blessing. Mingyu clapped when his brother’s arrow later missed by the width of a fingernail, and the court applauded as if the sun had learned courtesy. Such applause is the palace’s native weather: it falls where it falls.

He remembers a winter morning when ink bled obediently beneath his brush and the calligraphy master let praise escape him. The King studied the page, nodded once.

“You will copy your brother’s edicts someday. Write them clean.”

Recognition turned to utility so neatly that one could mistake it for generosity. Mingyu looked for it for years afterwards—on the hunt for the moment affection becomes function, family becomes committee, son becomes instrument.

He did not envy the title. He watched the Crown Prince carry an egg-shaped stone—delicate and impossible, always threatening to crack into something living or to remain, stubbornly, a stone. Mingyu did not want that egg. He wanted to be counted in the room where it was weighed.

The Queen once told him he was fortunate. “Spared the crown’s hunger,” she said, smoothing his hair.

“Then why am I still eaten?” he asked without planning to, and her laugh—that soft, tired sound—was the first time he understood that comprehension and power sleep in different beds.

So he learned to build a smaller country where he could be sovereign: the patient release of a bowstring; the blade that sings if you angle it right. He became competent in the quiet things.

Mingyu is in the practice yard, a staff warm in his hands, body moving through drills when the summons arrives. The eunuch’s bow is exact.

“His Majesty requests Daegun’s presence.”

Request is a courtier’s word for come now. Mingyu wraps the staff with oiled cloth and follows.

The throne room is a landscape arranged to remind you of scale. Mountains glide along the walls; a single chair insists that altitude can be sat in. The King sits as if carved there. The Crown Prince stands to his right, straight-backed, attentive, a man who has trained his breath to serve him in public.

Mingyu bows, the floor meets his forehead.

“Rise,” says the King. “You are appointed to the Guard.” The words drop with finality, leaving no room for rebuttal.

“You will see to the new girl,” his father continues. “A debt sent her. She will require… supervision. It will give you purpose.”

Purpose settles sour in his mouth. He has always had purpose, but this is the kind that arrives with a leash and calls itself benevolence. “Yes, Father.”

The Crown Prince’s eyes flicker—relief, perhaps, or gratitude at having one complication removed from his circumference. Mingyu does not resent him. The Crown Prince must live at the point of every circle. Second sons learn to measure radius.

“Discretion,” the King adds. “The palace is a drum; whispers are hands.”

Mingyu bows again and leaves. He stands a moment beneath the eaves and lets that nearly-rain cool his face.

Purpose. Fine. He will do it. He will also resent it in the particular way he has trained himself to resent: tidy, bloodless, silent.

The women’s quarters receive him with professional quiet. The matron arrives, lacquered hair and careful eyes.

“Daegun.”

“The King sent me,” he says, which is to say: do not pretend this is avoidable.

She leads him through the halls and shows him the room.

You sit too straight to be comfortable, hands folded in your lap. Silk tries to tame you and fails; it makes the attempt obvious. Your chin tilts that fraction above obedience; your mouth is a line that understands it is being asked to become a flower and refuses. Eyes forward, not glassy—focused.

Recognition is the first danger. It finds him before he can duck.

It isn’t your beauty that strikes him first, though beauty is there—unvarnished, a river rock shown to light. It is the way you refuse to let the room name you before you have finished pronouncing yourself. He knows that refusal. It has lived under his tongue for years in the shape of swallowed retorts and renegotiated breaths.

The jade lady—he knows her as the wife’s favourite instrument—bows in polished reverence. “Daegun honours us.”

“The King honours order by believing it lives here,” he replies dryly.

Her eyes measure him, then flatten. “We keep peace.”

“Peace without bruises is the durable kind.”

He doesn’t say why he’s here. To announce you are to be watched is to place a hat on a fox and call it a hunter. He will do this the way he knows—constant, invisible.

“Continue,” he says, and steps back into a pillar.

A zither starts quietly. Women move in practised patterns. He allows his gaze to pass. When it reaches you, he does not let it stop. He will not give the room a place to set its hooks.

Still, he catches the first thread of your voice when a woman leans over her own prettiness. “How fortunate you are.”

Your answer is for yourself and for anyone listening. “Fortune is a word with a debt inside it.”

Mingyu rolls the sentence on his tongue, surprised at how it tastes like the truth. He catches the faint scars across your knuckles—work’s punctuation. He thinks of his own years spent excelling at things that made other people comfortable.

The lesson ends. You rise with the others.

“Daegun,” the jade lady says, “shall we show you the new girl’s quarters?”

“Briefly.” He is not here for spectacle, but sometimes the corridor you are forced to walk offers a view worth noting.

Your chamber is the same geometry of comfort they all are: a lamp, a bed, a window. You pause before entering, as if the threshold might bite. He remains a respectful distance behind, as etiquette requires.

“Welcome,” the jade lady says to you, and Mingyu hears the softest note of contempt.

Your nod. “Thank you.”

Without looking at you, he speaks to the air near your window. “The nights here are colder than they look.”

A glance. “Cold reminds you that you are alive.” He allows a breath to become almost a smile. “So does heat.”

That is enough. He cannot overstep. “Ensure she knows the rules,” Mingyu tells the jade lady. “And ensure the rules know her.”

By the time he returns to his compound, the sky opens up. He sits and lets the storm comb his thoughts. Memories linger, uninvited.

Once, fever held him like a tight-laced robe. The tutor insisted on lessons regardless; the Crown Prince sat upright, preventing the indignity of a second-born lying down in his presence. Mingyu recited until each character tasted like copper. The Prince’s head nodded toward sleep and then jerked back, again and again, a bird refusing the water. When the lamps finally sank, the Prince patted the chair. “Sleep,” he said. No argument, no pity, only that one syllable.

In the morning, their father said, “Your brother was dutiful to keep you from idleness. Learn from him.”

There are others: the first time Mingyu beat a captain at the cutting of straws—and the captain’s grin was wide and delighted until the King walked past and turned it into an advisory nod for the Crown Prince to receive. The afternoon when the Queen smuggled him a handful of roasted chestnuts and said nothing, which was better than saying the wrong thing. The evening he stood on a roofline and stared at the city lights, wondering how many lives do not hinge on a month and a womb.

He thinks of your chin, which refuses instruction, and the way silk fails to domesticate you.

Mingyu stands, the world beyond his door glistening. He walks the outer ways, the backs of buildings, where servants laugh softly when they think they are alone. A guard nods. Mingyu nods back.

He pauses beneath the eaves facing the small court outside your chamber. He does not look directly at your lattice; there is safety in angles. A servant passes with linens. Another with empty cups. Rain beads along the roof’s lip and drops, evenly spaced.

His mind returns to the throne room. “This will give you purpose,” the King said, and meant: Be useful inside the shape I have cut for you. Mingyu hears it and translates: Take the sharp thing that lives in you and dull it against obedience.

But there are sharp things the palace cannot reach. He has kept some of them where they cannot be seized—quiet loyalties, a private hunger for a kind of justice that is small and meticulous, rarely grand. He has done harm in the palace’s service and learned to call some of it unavoidable. He has also learned the leverage of a half-hour, the use of a hinge, the power of getting someone the right fruit at the wrong time. The world turns on such pettiness. The world is saved by such pettiness.

He thinks of you. Fortune is a word with a debt inside it, you said, and he wants to know what you would name the creditor. He suspects you will not grant the palace that dignity. He hopes you won’t.

He turns back, takes the long path to his rooms, knowing every board that will creak under his steps. The rain slims into a fine veil, each drop a small pin prick in the night’s fabric. He lies down on his mat, waiting for sleep to overtake him.

In the morning, duty will put on its robes and call his name. He will watch. He will speak softly. He will do what needs doing.

“Purpose suits a spare son,” his father had once said.

Perhaps. Perhaps purpose will have to be taught how to suit him.

You measure the palace by shadows.

They stretch long across the flagstones in the morning, cut sharp at noon, and pool by the evening. Every corridor teaches you a different shape of darkness, and you come to know them better than the painted walls or the gilded beams. Sometimes you walk faster, thinking you might step free of them; sometimes you slow, testing if they will loosen their grip. They never do. The palace is a sundial, and you are the mark it keeps drawing, whether you consent or not.

Prince Mingyu is there. Always there.

The first day, he is little more than a blur at the edge of your vision, a presence you convince yourself you’ve imagined. By the second, the pattern is undeniable—every corridor carries him like a second shadow, every doorway frames him just long enough for you to notice. By the third, his persistence grinds at you; what was once ignorable now presses like a stone inside your shoe, small, constant, impossible to forget.

He keeps a distance so exact it must have been measured by rule and string. A length of silence between you—respect on paper, surveillance in practice. His footsteps do not hurry you, yet you walk faster, as if speed might shear him off. It does not.

When you sit to learn songs in a room full of women who have already mastered the art, he takes a place along the far screen. He studies the pattern of bamboo someone has painted there: black leaves, white joints. You want to believe he is enthralled by paint. You want to believe you are not the subject of a lesson about obedience.

His face—when you allow yourself a fraction of a glance—is ironed into neutrality. You cannot read what language his eyes speak. They are too calm for comfort, too steady for safety. He is not looking at your mouth; he is not looking at your hands; he is not looking at you—until he is, and then it is a fraction, a glance that comes and goes.

You tell yourself you have survived worse gazes. This is merely a prince, and you are merely a woman he will forget to remember.

“Again,” the tutor murmurs, and your voice joins the others. You shape the court’s favoured melodies as if they were delicate bowls you might chip with breath. The jade lady makes small approving sounds. Your throat aches with politeness.

The day unrolls in its appointed knots. Etiquette, posture, embroidery. “Smile without teeth,” the jade lady says.

When they release you for air, you go hunting for a piece of sky; the inner garden offers a rectangle of it. Pines lift their hands in permanent prayer; carp idle like old men beneath lily pads; a stone lantern wears its moss as if it had grown it deliberately. You sit at the edge of the path and tell yourself you are resting. What you are doing, in fact, is listening.

There: the steady presence, a few steps behind, as if he, too, were a lantern given legs. You refuse to look. A silence you cannot stomach makes your jaw knot. Finally, you say, without turning, “Is there a crime in my steps I have not been told?”

He responds. “None that I have seen.”

You look then. He stands under the eaves, his robe disciplined into lines your fingers would refuse to follow. You hate, abruptly, the way the palace makes people into statues and then blames them for being stone.

“Then why are you there?” you ask. The words fall hard. His expression does not change. “I am assigned.”

“Assigned,” you repeat, tasting the letters. “Like a guard to a doorway. Am I a doorway now?”

He looks at your eyes because to avoid them would be to concede shame. “You are under the palace’s protection.”

“Protection,” you scoff. “Call it what it is.”

There is a flicker in him so small you would miss it if you were not the sort of person who has taught herself to live on the crumbs of honesty. The flicker is not gloating. It is not apology. It is something more troubling: understanding.

“If you prefer another word,” he says, “I will use it in my head.” You laugh, a single chortle of sound. “Use it in your orders instead.”

He does not defend himself. He does not say the obvious thing—that orders do not consent to be rewritten by the mouths of those who receive them. He inclines his head, the gesture so perfectly measured it angers you anew.

You stand, unable to bear his stillness. “Of course,” you say, the words sharp enough to cut. “Why should I expect otherwise? A prince is a prince—trained to keep his mask still, to hold himself above the rest of us.”

Mingyu does not flinch. His hands remain easy at his sides. Where the Crown Prince had seemed untouchable, distant in the way thunder is distant even when it shakes the ground, Mingyu chooses another kind of distance: a refusal to give you the satisfaction of breaking his calm. His silence offers you nothing to strike against, and that denial stings worse than open disdain.

“Say something,” you snap, before you can stop yourself. “Defend him. Defend yourself.”

“What would satisfy you?”

The question is not a challenge; it is a bench offered to a woman too tired to stand. You refuse to sit. “Truth. At least once, in this palace built of lacquer and lies.”

“Truth is a guest here,” he says quietly. “We are asked to feed it but not to let it sleep.” You make a sound that resembles amusement if only you were feeling giddy. “You speak like a book that learned despair.”

“Books do not despair,” he replies. “People do. Books keep them from drowning.”

The conversation has gone off the rails that were meant to keep you safe. You cannot bear it. You bow a fraction—a mockery of courtesy—and leave him beneath the eaves.

Back in the women’s hall, the jade lady’s scent arrives before she does.

“You should not address the Daegun unless he speaks first,” she murmurs. “It is… unbecoming.”

“What does it become?” you ask.

Her smile is perfectly polished. “Trouble.”

That afternoon, you see the Crown Prince once. He does not look your way. In that neglect, there is a relief you hate yourself for needing.

All the while, the other prince is there. You keep your eyes on the floor, or the bowl, or the seam you are stitching into a flower. Still, you feel him like a shadow.

On the second evening, you slip through a side door you tracked earlier, the one that opens onto a narrow court where the stars shine more brightly. The stone is cool beneath your soles; the air carries a thread of sandalwood. You lean against the red wall and let your skull press into the wood. One, two, three—your heart counts itself.

“You should not be here,” says a voice.

You open your eyes and do not turn. “I have learned the rules. I am trying to meet them halfway.” Mingyu steps into your peripheral vision. He keeps his distance, that faithful dog. “Halfway,” he repeats. “The palace prefers obedience that is given fully.”

“And yet you are here.”

A pause. “I am the exception that proves the cruelty.”

“You mean the rule.”

“Rules are cruel,” he says.

You close your eyes because exhaustion is a tide and you are tired of building sandcastles in its path. “Then let me break one.” Silence, then. You expect the lecture. You expect a hand on your arm. Neither comes.

“Five minutes,” he says instead, so softly the wind drifts the words away. “Then return by the long corridor, not the near, and if you pass the Red Pavilion, walk like a woman who has a good reason.”

You turn despite yourself. “What reason is good enough to be me?”

“Almost any reason, if you walk as if it were yours.”

A humourless smile lifts the corners of your mouth. “Is that how you live here?” He does not answer, which is answer enough.

You look away, toward the slice of sky, taking in the ragged clouds. Your five minutes feel like stolen grain: small, coarse, sustaining. For them, you are grateful, and gratitude makes you disloyal to your anger. You hate that.

On the third morning, you decide, as you tie the last ribbon on your robe, that you will ignore him. You will make him into furniture, a column to be circled. You will not give the palace the theatre of your agitation. You step outside with your head the proper angle above humility.

You last until midday.

In the practice court, the women rehearse bows—such useful rehearsal, bowing to the space where a man might be. Your back complains; your knees recite their chagrin. After an hour, your temper flexes and demands air. The jade lady raises an eyebrow. You bow once more and step away.

A boy is sweeping the far colonnade, the broom pushing dust over stone. Beyond him: a red painted gate. You walk toward it, not because you intend to cross—for that would be stupid, and you are done being stupid—but because you want to see the world framed by another red than the pavilion.

You make it halfway when the air announces his presence.

“Do you plan to test the guards?” he asks calmly.

“Do you plan to leash me in the courtyard?”

“If I intended to leash you,” he says, “you would not be this close to the gate.”

You stop. The gate is a portal. Beyond it, you imagine streets that do not end in doors guarded by men. Your throat tightens. “Then let me stand here and pretend I have legs.”

You hear him exhale. “Pretend is often the first draft of freedom.”

“And the last,” you say.

Another silence. The palace is full of them; you are beginning to distinguish their idioms. This one says: I understand, and I refuse to help you destroy yourself while proving it. Anger rises again because it is easier than grief. You pivot and step toward him. “Ask me to be quiet. Give me a rule I can hate.”

“No,” he says, which is not what you expected. “I will not teach you to hate the wrong thing.” You flinch. You do not ask what the right thing is. You are afraid he will name it, and you will be forced to admit you already knew.

That evening—the third—brings you a third glimpse of the Crown Prince you receive in these first days. He crosses a veranda diagonally to your antechamber, attendants flocking around him. You bow because there is a floor. He passes without a glance downwards.

You straighten slowly. Your neck feels older by a year.

Later, in your small room, you sit on the edge of the bed and inventory your chains. Costumes. Rules. The shape of corridors. The jade lady. The Prince you barely see. And the other—this quiet sentinel whose presence drags on your mood. You add them up and arrive at a number too large for your throat.

You shake the thought away.

Somewhere in the corridor, a step pauses—Mingyu’s, you are sure of it—and then moves on without claiming your sleep.

You do not thank him. But, for the length of one breath, you admit that the chain he is may not be the chain you thought. Then you bury the admission and dream of a road that does not end in gates.

The summons arrives at dusk.

The Crown Prince has returned from council, his steps louder than usual, his attendants hurrying to keep up. There is a tightness in his jaw, and when he lowers himself onto the raised platform of his chamber, the silence about him is as sharp as unsheathed steel.

Mingyu is waiting. He has learned to be near whenever the council ends, because the aftertaste of politics is unpredictable—sometimes his brother will drink it down with ease, sometimes it will sour his temper so quickly the servants tremble before the wine is poured. Tonight it is the latter.

“Send for the new girl,” the Crown Prince says abruptly, his voice clipped. “If I must endure poison in daylight, I will have balm at night.”

The attendants bow and prepare to obey. Mingyu feels his body stiffen before his mind has caught up. The words are ordinary, the command no different from others his brother has given. And yet, dread lands in him. He cannot name why, only that the image rises unbidden: you walking into this chamber, forced to kneel, your defiance curling useless against the weight of his brother’s ennui.

It is not the act itself that sickens him. He has seen such summons before. He has learned to silence the disquiet they bring. But tonight, the thought of you as a concubine, stripped of your unyielding chin and bitter wit, feels unbearable.

He steadies his breath and steps forward.

“Hyungnim.”

The Crown Prince glances at him, irritation already sparking. “What is it?” Mingyu bows, not too deep. A second son’s bow must always hover between humility and presence. “The new girl has been… unwell.” His brother narrows his eyes. “Unwell?”

“Yes.” Mingyu keeps his voice flat, factual. “The matrons reported fever after the lessons. They were concerned the timing was ill-omened.”

The Crown Prince scoffs. “Ill-omened? Since when do I heed the gossip of old women?”

“Since the Queen herself placed weight on such signs,” Mingyu answers smoothly. “If the new girl enters your chamber under sickness or omen, tongues will wag. Some will call it an insult to your dignity. Others will say the heavens frown upon it.”

The words are a gamble, but he has learned how to shape them like dice weighted to his favour. He watches his brother’s face for the small flicker of hesitation.

“You speak as if you are my keeper,” the Crown Prince says at last, voice cold. Mingyu bows his head again. “I speak as your brother.” The silence that follows is thin and dangerous. Mingyu holds it without blinking. Finally, the Crown Prince exhales, long and sharp. “Very well. If she is weak, I will not waste my night. Choose another.”

The attendants bow deeper, grateful for the decision that spares them from carrying out a command turned sour. A name is whispered, a different girl’s fate sealed for the evening. Mingyu steps back, his pulse loud enough that he fears it may be heard.

He leaves the chamber without haste, though every part of him aches to run. He closes his eyes for the briefest moment, steadying the lie he has set loose.

When he opens them again, he knows where to go.

You are in the women’s hall, seated apart from the others. Their laughter runs carefully and rehearsed. Yours does not join. Instead, your fingers play with the hem of your robe. Mingyu takes a place near the column and watches, content to let you believe the night is simply another night without summons.

The other concubines, however, notice.

A girl with glossy hair leans close to you, her smile sugared. “Strange, is it not? The Prince usually favours the newest among us first. Perhaps you do not please the stars.”

Another laughs softly into her palm. “Or perhaps he is merciful. Some would envy your reprieve.” A third tilts her head, voice dripping pity. “But what is a concubine without summons? A vase that is never filled with flowers. Decorative… but unnecessary.”

They scatter their words like petals—pretty, fragrant, hiding thorns.

Mingyu watches you lift your chin, watches your eyes gleam. “Then I am fortunate,” you answer evenly. “An unnecessary vase does not crack under use.” The women titter, feigning admiration at your sharpness. But when their laughter dies, they exchange glances that do not mask their contempt.

Mingyu sees your hand tighten on your robe. Outwardly, you are untouchable. But when you look away, he sees it: the flicker of doubt you cannot quite swallow.

When the others go to their quarters, he hears your whisper to yourself. “If I am not summoned, then why am I here?”

You laugh, quiet and bitter, and shake your head to yourself.

One of the concubines pauses at the doorway, just long enough to murmur: “Perhaps you were meant only as ornament.” Then she drifts away, her silks floating behind her.

Mingyu lets the silence absorb the insult, though it burns in him. If only you knew. If only you knew that your bitterness is built on the scaffolding of his deceit, that the reason you sit untouched is because he has painted you with sickness, with omen, with danger. That he has risked his brother’s anger to keep you free for one more night.

But he cannot tell you. If he does, you will see the chain for what it is, and chains are never forgiven, even when they save. So he remains silent, watching as you rise and leave the hall too, your shadow long against the paper screen.

In the courtyard, he finds you alone. You stand with your hands clasped behind you, staring at the pond.

He does not mean to speak, but the words slip out. “Why do you laugh if it wounds you?” You turn, startled, your eyes narrowing. “What does it matter to you?”

He shrugs, though his heartstrings are pulled taut. “Laughter should be a blade you choose, not one that cuts you in passing.”

Your mouth twists. “Spare me philosophy, Your Highness. If you shadow me to measure my obedience, then write your report and be done.”

“I was not ordered to report,” he says quietly. That silences you for a moment. The pond ripples. Finally, you look back at the water. “Then perhaps you are simply bored.”

He lets you think it. Better bored than revealed. Better unwanted than a secret saviour you would resent. You sigh, and the sound is heavy in the silence. “At least he does not call for me. That is something.”

Mingyu feels the words strike. They are gratitude directed at the wrong man. He clenches his hands behind his back until the ache steadies him. “Yes,” he answers. “That is something.”

You do not see the way his throat tightens. You do not see the storm gathering inside him. You only see a prince who refuses to step closer, who lets the night close around you.

When he returns to his own quarters, the storm breaks within him. He sits at the low table and stares at his hands. They are steady, capable hands, hands that have strung bows and carried swords, hands that have obeyed orders all his life. And tonight they lied. Tonight they shielded. Tonight, they proved themselves useful in a way no one will ever know.

He thinks of you, laughing at your own undesirability, and feels a strange fury—at his father, at his brother, at the palace itself, at the fact that you, who burns brighter in defiance than any of the silken women who bow too easily, should sit alone and believe yourself unwanted.

For now, he chooses silence. For now, he lets you believe you are overlooked. For now, that lie is mercy.

The banquet hall is a world unto itself.

Lanterns hang from gilded beams, their light spilling over rows of tables set low to the ground. Musicians sit at the far end of the chamber, plucking zithers and striking drums in patterns meant to please, though the sound is mostly drowned by laughter and polite cruelty.

You sit among the concubines. Silk hems brush against yours, and hairpins glint sharply when the women turn their heads. They lean toward each other, their laughter subdued yet barbed, a constant stream of comparisons and insinuations.

“His Highness smiled today.” “At you? Surely not.” “He preferred the song, not the singer.” “Still, a smile counts as a favour.”

The words fall on deaf ears with you as you keep your eyes on your cup. The plum wine burns your throat when you swallow, but at least it reminds you that you are alive.

Before you, the table groans under a feast lavish enough to shame hunger itself. Whole gilt-skinned pheasants glazed in honey, their wings tucked neatly. Towers of jeon—egg-battered pancakes layered with fish, zucchini, and lotus root. Porcelain bowls of steaming rice, flanked by soups fragrant with beef bone and ginseng. Platters of yakgwa and honeyed persimmons glisten beside trays of nine delicacies—gujeolpan—arranged like a painter’s palette, each sliver of meat and vegetable awaiting thin crepes to wrap them. Even the humble kimchi is dressed in elegance: baek-kimchi, pale and delicate, perfumed with pear and chestnut.

You taste little of it.

At the head of the chamber, the Crown Prince sits beside his wife. She is resplendent in white, her posture a picture of perfection, every gesture a performance of control. He leans toward her often, speaking in tones too low for others to hear, his attention a gift he only grants her. When he turns from her, it is only to acknowledge another concubine who has positioned herself artfully in his line of sight.

Not once does his gaze find you.

You tell yourself this is mercy. That his neglect is protection, a shield you did not earn but will take all the same. And yet—something in you knots with each moment of dismissal. A murmur rises near your elbow. A concubine in pale lavender tilts her head toward you, her smile syrup-sweet. “The Prince must not favour wildflowers. He seems to prefer blossoms already trained to bloom.” Another, her lips lacquered in the deepest red, chuckles. “Or perhaps our new sister is too shy to catch his eye. Shyness can be charming—if it doesn’t fade into invisibility.”

You shape your mouth into a smile and say nothing. To answer would be to prove them right.

The Queen sits further down the hall, her expression unreadable, the weight of her presence pressing. Her gaze slides across the rows of concubines and lingers only briefly, as though she is tallying currency. When her eyes pass over you, they do not pause. You are counted but not considered. The heat in the room builds, oppressive, the smoke of braziers and roasted meats heavy in your lungs. You shift, longing for air. Your gaze drifts against your will.

And finds his.

Mingyu sits on the opposite side of the chamber, slightly apart. His robe is as dignified as ever, but the space around him is barren. No wife at his side, no concubines clustered near to curry favour. Even the servants approach him more cautiously, as though wary of the silence that clings to him. He eats sparingly—just a spoonful of clear beef broth, a bite of rice, a morsel of grilled fish—his movements deliberate, careful not to demand notice.

Like you, he is a shadow in a hall of lanterns.

But unlike the others—who do not see you, who refuse to see him—his eyes do not pass over. They linger. Not boldly, not enough to draw whispers. Just long enough to remind you what it feels like to exist in someone else’s sight.

And it terrifies you.

Because in that gaze there is no dismissal, no condescension. There is recognition. The kind that threatens to undo you, to unravel the careful armour you have been weaving since the day your father sold you into your newly designed fate. You tear your eyes away and fix them on the untouched platter before you, where honey-glazed chestnuts gleam. But the knowledge remains, thrumming beneath your ribs: you are seen.

The music swells, the courtiers toast, and the Crown Prince leans back in his seat. His gaze shifts across the hall, then lands on Mingyu. “You are quiet, brother,” he remarks, loud enough for the nearby guests to hear. “Do you not find the feast to your liking?”

Mingyu bends his head, his voice steady but soft. “The food is well prepared. I have eaten.” A thin smile curls on the Crown Prince’s lips, one without warmth. “Always measured. Even at a banquet, you train yourself for restraint.”

“Restraint keeps the blade sharp,” Mingyu answers. The air stills. Before the Crown Prince can reply, the Queen speaks from her place, her voice calm but weighted. “Sons should not quarrel where wine is poured. The court looks to you both for harmony.”

Mingyu bows slightly in acknowledgement, while the Crown Prince raises his cup and drains it. The musicians play on, their notes sharper than before.

You find yourself staring—unable to look away from the tension strung tight between the two men. Brothers, yet each word between them feels like a weight laid on a scale, one shift away from imbalance. You risk another glance towards Mingyu. He has turned back to his plate. Yet, you know that he had been watching, and that he will again.

You hate him for it. You hate yourself more for the comfort it brings.

When the banquet finally ends, you walk in silence, your chin lifted. You are unseen by the Prince. You are ignored by the Queen. But in the corner of your vision, you still feel the weight of eyes that refuse to erase you.

And you do not know whether that is salvation or another chain.

The palace does not celebrate as the city does.

Within the walls, the Lantern Festival is a rehearsal, not a revelry. Lanterns line the garden paths in rigid order: lotuses, dragons, scrolls, all painted with approved verses, each tassel cut to an identical length. The Queen parades among them at dusk, the Crown Prince and his wife close behind, courtiers bowing on cue. Every flame burns at the same height, every reflection in the ponds lies flat as if too afraid to ripple.

Beyond the walls, joy ignores rulers and lines. Lanterns bloom where hands can reach and where they cannot—dangling off eaves, clustered along alleys, bobbing from poles hoisted by laughing boys, drifting out on the river. The air fills with voices that do not wait for permission to be heard.

Mingyu knows this difference in his bones. He learned it as a boy when the Queen’s carriage rattled past a street fair and he pressed his forehead to the lattice, trying to draw the colour through the wood. That ache returns tonight, the moment he sees you angle toward the southern gate.

He steps from the shadow before you lay your hand on the latch. “The southern path is watched,” he says, not unkindly. You halt as if his words bit you. “Then I will test their eyes.”

“And be seen,” he answers. “Being seen is the only crime that never requires proof.” You don’t back away. You tip your chin, daring him to make you relent. “You spend your days shadowing me, and your nights telling me where I may place my feet. Is there anything not owned by your rules?”

He could tell you the truth: that this is the shape of protection in a place that carries wrath inside compliments. He doesn’t. Instead, he reaches past you and lifts a different latch—the one hidden behind stacked cords of wood—and opens it into a slit of dark.

“This way,” he murmurs.

You study him as if this might be another trick. The lanterns outside the wall wobble with a breeze and paint your cheek in strokes of gold. Then you nod once, quick and fierce, and slip through.

The passage smells damp. Slits in the stone catch light from above and spill it in thin bars across the floor. You say nothing. He counts your steps and notices how your hands hover at your sides, unsure whether to grip your robe or let it swing. You catch on a loose stone, stumble, and right yourself. He stops his hand before it can reach you. Touch is not a language he’s allowed to use.

At the end waits a low door hidden behind stacked kindling. Mingyu pushes it open, and the city rushes in.

Lanterns. Hundreds. The first of them close enough to warm your face, the farthest making a trail to the river. A vendor passes with skewers of grilled mackerel, the skin blistered and salt-flecked; a girl runs with a rabbit-shaped lantern; a monk moves among the crowd with a wooden clapper. A man balances a bamboo pole across his shoulders—the pole hung with paper fish that jostle like live ones—shouting “Fresh rice cakes! Hot!” while steam escapes a clay pot at his hip.

You stay still, taking everything in. It’s as if your whole body has turned into listening. Then your mouth remembers how to smile, and the surprise of it hits him hard, sharp and sudden.

Mingyu thought he knew the shapes you could take—angry, proud, sharp-tongued, or silent. But not this: eyes widening at an ink-seller painting blessings onto fans, feet carrying you closer to a string of bird-shaped lanterns until their painted claws almost catch your hair, breath slipping out freely, as though you’ve just remembered the world might still hold places where you aren’t punished for being alive.

You turn your head toward a candied haw stall. Red hawthorns gleam under lacquered sugar, skewered three to a stick. The vendor’s smiles. “Princess,” he croons to no one in particular, “make a sweet night sweeter.”

Mingyu steps forward with coins before you can decline. He pays too much, and when the vendor tries to offer change, Mingyu only shakes his head. It isn’t generosity; it’s habit—never linger long enough at a stall to be remembered.

He hands you the skewer. “Try,” he says, his voice careful. You part your lips and bite. The sugar shell cracks, giving way to the tart fruit beneath. Your eyes widen, then brighten, and an unguarded laugh escapes you. You lift the skewer in mock defence. “It bites back.”

“Good things often do,” he answers.

You take another bite, and he watches you—ridiculously, helplessly—as your mouth wrestles with sweetness and sharpness all at once. The sight leaves him aching. He despises himself a little for the hunger it stirs, a hunger that isn’t for food. He tells himself this is simply what it means to be alive, to have eyes and a heart that refuses to stay asleep.

A drum troupe takes one end of the square. Their leader, bare-armed and grinning, raises his stick; the others follow. The rhythm starts. You step closer to the ring of watchers, your shoulder near his sleeve, and for a moment, he lets the crowd’s jostle decide the distance between you.

“I thought the palace had drums,” you say. “It does,” he answers. “They behave.” That earns him a side glance, lit with something almost like mischief. “These do not.”

“No,” he agrees. “And they’re better for it.”

He buys sweet rice cakes from the man with the clay pot because you look at them too long, and because he wants to know what else makes you laugh. The rice is hot enough to push heat through the crack in the paper; you juggle it between your fingers and hiss through your teeth, then break it open. He does not note the way the sesame–honey paste glistens. He is busy pretending he does not want to lick the sweetness from the crease of your knuckle.

You move through the crowd like a leaf finally choosing its current. A puppet show gathers a knot of children, and you pause, kneeling briefly behind them. The puppet—a fox with a paint-chipped grin—snatches a paper coin from a farmer, only to return it with exaggerated shame when the farmer’s baby begins to cry. The children shriek forgiveness, as children always do.

You don’t join them. Your mouth shifts, folding then unfolding, caught between mockery and something sadder. Mingyu can’t tell which it is, so he looks at the puppet instead of your face, giving you the dignity of privacy.

As you rise, he asks quietly, “What would you buy if you had a coin?” “A door,” you answer without hesitation. Then, hearing the weight of your own reply, you soften it. “And a pair of shoes that don’t squeak when I try to be quiet.”

“You don’t squeak,” he says. You shoot him a look that hovers between humour and defence, a shield masquerading as jest.

The festival draws you onward. Mingyu shows you where the older women sit with lacquer boxes, their tiny brushes painting lantern skins with careful symbols—cranes for longevity, carp for perseverance, plum blossoms for endurance in winter. You linger near the stall, eyes moving over the painted lanterns without reaching for one. An auntie with walnut-brown hair pats the space beside her. “Come,” she beckons, as though you were a niece overdue for a visit. “A word for your light.”

You shake your head once. “I don’t ask for favours anymore.” The woman only tsks and dips her brush into ink. “Then call it advice, not favour.” She picks a lantern the colour of milky tea, draws a single bold character across its centre, and blows gently until the shine fades into matte. Holding it out to you, she lifts her brows. “Take it. You have a face that argues with the dark.”

You glance at Mingyu. He feels the pull of two instincts—one to nod, one to shake his head. He chooses the first. You accept the lantern. Your thumb finds the edge of the brushstroke and lingers there, as though touch might soften meaning.

“What does it mean?” you ask. “견,” the woman answers. “Steadfast.” The word makes you almost flinch. “Cruel word.”

“True word,” the woman replies. “You can hate it later. Tonight, carry it.”

You carry it. You let Mingyu tie the thin cord around your wrist—not a tether, just a way to keep from dropping what glows. His fingertips graze your pulse.

Later, a boy with a brush and a pot of ink calls, “Wish-scrolls! Hang your wish!” A rope has been strung between two posts, bowed by slips of paper: I want a brother back from the war; I want a mother to live to see spring; I want to be tall; I want to marry the one who laughs like rain. You stop in front of them and read quickly. You nearly reach for the brush. You pull your hand back as if burned.

“No wish?” Mingyu asks gently. “I have had enough of wishes not being granted,” you say. “What about curses?” he offers, and your head snaps toward him, astonished. He shrugs. “Ink doesn’t only make blessings.” You smile. “I wouldn’t waste a curse on paper.”

He is supposed to be clever. He cannot find a clever way to say I would defend you from any god you wrote to that would not ruin the night, so he says nothing.

The river calls next. People kneel at its edge, the mud sucking quietly at their knees, and place small, floating lanterns onto the ink-dark surface of the water. You stand just behind the line of kneeling backs and hold your rented light a little higher, as if it could guide ships. He stands at your shoulder, slightly back, so he will not be the first thing you feel if you step into the notion of turning.

You say, almost to yourself, “If I put one out there, the river brings it to the sea, and the sea brings it to larger things, and somewhere it burns unseen and is still flame.”

“Yes,” he says. The answer seems insufficient. He tries again. “Some lights are only themselves by leaving.”

“Are you trying to teach me philosophy again?”

“I am trying to agree with you,” he says, and you huff a giggle. A girl of seven drags her grandmother toward you. “Ajumeoni,” she says to you without shyness, “your lantern has a strong word.” She points. “Does it work?” You crouch to eye level, the silk of your robe dragging over the mud. “Only if I carry it.” The girl thinks very hard about this answer and then nods with gravity. “Good.” She looks at Mingyu then, very seriously. “Ajusshi, your face looks like you forget to sleep. You should sleep.” Mingyu bows to her solemnly. “Yes.”

You laugh, and for a second, he feels foolish and young. It is not a sensation he despises.

The crowd thins near a shrine built where the river narrows. In the shrine courtyard, a man plays a reed flute poorly, and his wife looks at him as if talent had nothing to do with staying.

You drift toward the courtyard’s edge. He stops choosing to watch the crowd and chooses to watch you. You feel it. You turn. The lantern hangs between you, swinging once, twice.

“Why?” you ask, and the question returns. “Why this?” You do not name what this is—city, night, you and him standing in a shrinking pocket of unattended space.

“Because the walls were swallowing you,” he says. “Because I have desired to do something right and small for so long that I forgot right can be small.” You search his face. “And what do you want in return?”

“Nothing,” he says, because the right answer is nothing. The wrong answer is everything. “Only for you to breathe.”

“I do not owe you breath,” you tell him. “I know,” he responds.

You stand with that, weighing it, and he can almost hear the balance creak. A breeze lifts the ribbon on your lantern, brushing your wrist. Far behind you, someone drops a tray, porcelain shattering into astonished silence, then noise. The world makes space, accidentally or by mercy.

He raises a hand. He makes it slow enough so it can be refused without pain. You do not refuse. His knuckles skim your cheekbone. The skin is warmer than night but cooler than his palm; he did not know that would matter until this second. Your breath hitches—not in fear. He is practised enough at fear to recognise when it isn’t in the room.

Mingyu kisses you.

He is not a boy. He knows the difference between wanting and rushing. So he does not press. He offers. Your lips are soft, but they do not yield; you meet him as an equal, not as someone conquered. His hand steadies along your jaw, anchoring you both. Somewhere in the distance, a child laughs, a dog barks, the river stirs—but none of it touches the space he shares with you.

You lean toward him, though it feels less like surrender and more like a choice. Your lips part, and he tastes the memory of sugar, the tart ghost of hawthorn, and something nameless he knows will haunt him long after tonight. He closes his eyes, not to deepen the kiss but to honour it. Above, the lantern swings once, its glow circling your joined shadows.

When he pulls back, it is only slightly—just enough to breathe. Your faces remain close, your exhales tangled, the air between you charged. Any closer, and restraint would break. Any further, and the moment would be denied. He holds the fragile middle ground.

You whisper: “Why?” The question is the same as before, but now it asks something deeper—what of him answered in this act.

“Because I could not bear not to,” he replies. The words feel reckless even as he knows they are the only true ones he has. You look down at the lantern tied to your wrist. The brush character pulses. 견. Steadfast. The auntie declared a wish when you refused to make one.

He wants to speak; he will not. It is your turn to decide if the night broke you or mended something. You lift your gaze again, meet his with an expression he has never been given: allowance, not surrender.

“Do not ruin it,” you murmur. “I am already trying not to,” he answers, and finds the truth is bitter and redemptive both.

He kissed you in a city whose gossip moves faster than lanterns. He led you through a passage no one should know he knows. He set himself not only against the King’s notion of usefulness but the wife’s notion of comfort and the Crown Prince’s sense of ownership. He taught his mouth a habit that his duties cannot forgive.

And worst: he gave the night a version of you that the palace will want to erase if it learns of it.

“We should go back,” he says, very low. You nod without saying why now. He is startled by your acceptance. He admires it. He hates the necessity that demanded it. He guides you through streets beginning to empty of their brightness. Vendors stack away their product; a drunk sings a war ballad with the wrong words in the right places; two boys quarrel over who gets to carry the last lantern home.

The hidden door opens quietly. You duck through first; Mingyu follows, and the passage closes the world behind you. The silence lingers between you until you reach the cooler air of the women’s quarters. Then he stops. You stop too.

“If there is a summons tonight,” he says, “it will not be for you.” You look up sharply. “Have you—”

“No,” he interrupts, lying. “I only think the Crown Prince has grown tired of pageantry.” It is a poor excuse, and he knows you hear it. Quickly, he adds, “I will be near.”

Your mouth almost curves into a smile, but then it fades. “If I am not summoned, and not free… what am I?” The word Mine rises in his throat, reckless and unwise. He swallows it and says instead, “You are the one who tied a lantern to her wrist, called it cruel, and carried it anyway.”

You blink at him, startled. “That sounds like a curse.”

“It is admiration,” he answers.

You study him for a quiet moment. At last, you nod and turn away, your lantern flickering in the draft before catching the light again.

He remains very still until your shadow has vanished from the corridor. Only then does he move.

At his brazier, he goes through familiar motions—charcoal, water—yet none of it soothes him. The kiss returns again and again, burning brighter than the lanterns he saw. It should make him feel alive, and it does. But with it comes the sharp weight of consequence.

He knows what he has risked: his brother’s suspicion, his father’s judgment, the palace’s cruel appetite for disobedience. More than that, he knows he has crossed a line he cannot uncross. Not because of the kiss alone, but because it was a beginning.

He sits in silence, tasting both sweetness and dread, and understands what he has done is reckless. He knows it may cost more than he can pay. Yet he also knows he would not take it back.

He has made his mistake. He has made his vow. The night can keep both.

The morning after the festival, the concubines are speaking.

Every corridor carries their voices, thin threads of sound that dare not rise above a murmur. Behind painted screens, in the shade of pavilions, between the sweep of silk sleeves. Their language is not the bluntness of commands, but the slanted cruelty of whispers.

“She was gone during the festival.” “Ungrateful girl. Others would give their life for a glimpse beyond the walls, and she hides.” “Perhaps she thought herself too fine to join the procession.” “Or perhaps she hoped to be missed, to test His Highness’s patience.”

The words float, impossible to wave away. You keep your face still, your steps measured, but each sentence presses closer, like fingers at your throat.

By the lotus pond, two concubines lean together, their fans raised in mock secrecy. “She plays at being invisible. It will not last. The Crown Prince grows weary quickly.”

“Do you think he will cast her out?”

“If he doesn’t, the Queen’s patience will.”

Your hands clench in your sleeves. You do not stop to give them the satisfaction of your presence. Still, their laughter follows.

That night, sleep evades you. The paper walls are too thin, the silence between candle flickers too loud. Every sound in the hall becomes a herald of doom: a eunuch’s cough, the shuffle of feet, the hollow clap of doors. You lie rigid on your mat, braced for the inevitable summons that never comes.

By dawn, the hearsay has multiplied. You hear it whispered in the garden as you pass—how you feigned illness, how you refused your duty, how the Crown Prince has already tired of you. Each comment wears a different robe, but all of them bear the same face: your ruin.

And then, as suddenly as they rose, the whispers falter.

The Jade Lady speaks.

Her words move fast, carrying to every corridor, every mouth: “The girl was unwell. A fainting spell during the procession. His Highness himself ordered her to rest.”

Shock sweeps through the harem. “Unwell? I saw her walking.”

“The Jade Lady never lies. If she says the Prince excused her—”

“Then it must be so.”

The whispers still, but you know better.

The Crown Prince has never spared you more than a flick of his gaze. He would not excuse your absence. The Jade Lady would not bend her tongue for your sake.

There is only one name the lie can belong to.

Mingyu.

The memory of him at the festival—the brush of his hand as he tied the lantern cord around your wrist, the taste of hawthorn still clinging to your lips, the kiss stolen under swaying light—returns with a sharpness you were not prepared for. He has shielded you. Not once, but twice.

The question seethes inside you until it burns. You cannot keep still.

You find him at dusk.

The palace is quieting, servants retreating, the courtyards heavy with the scent of pine smoke. He stands at the edge of the training grounds, back straight, hands folded behind him, his figure cut against the orange bleed of the sinking sun. He looks as though he belongs to another world entirely—untouchable, distant, carved from the very walls that cage you both.

Still, you step forward.

“It was you,” you say, your voice sharper than you intended.

He does not turn. “What was me?”

“The Jade Lady’s words. The alibi. You gave her the lie that saved me.”

At that, he glances over his shoulder, his expression infuriatingly calm. “If you already believe so, why ask?”

Your nails bite into your palms as you clench your hands. “Because I need to hear you say it.”

He exhales through his nose, something between a sigh and a laugh. “Need?” he echoes. “Or want?”

You falter, heat prickling at your cheeks. “What difference does it make?”

His gaze sharpens, though his tone remains steady. “Enough of one.”

The air thickens between you. You take another step closer. “Why? Why protect me? You could have left me to their teeth. You should have.”

His jaw tightens, the smallest crack in his composure. He looks away, toward the distant roofs gilded by the last of the sun. For a long time, he says nothing. Then:

“Because they are already waiting for you to fall. I will not help them push.”

Your breath stutters.

Anger, confusion, and something far more dangerous twist inside you. His words are not a vow, not a declaration—just a simple refusal. And yet, the ground beneath you feels altered, unsteady.

You search his face. “Is that all?”

He holds your gaze. “Does there need to be more?”

You swallow hard. The memory of his mouth on yours re-ignites in your chest. You want to strike him. You want to thank him. You want to demand the truth he is keeping behind his silence.

Your voice trembles despite yourself. “I don’t understand you.”

A faint curve touches his lips. “Then you understand me perfectly.”

The words sting, though not in the way you expect. You take a half step back. Gratitude wars with suspicion, longing with rage. You are a woman made of contradictions, and he is the fire that keeps them alive.

You turn before the tears gathering at your lashes can betray you.

Behind you, his voice reaches softly, barely more than a whisper in the air. “Do not thank me. Gratitude is a weight I never asked you to carry.”

You pause, your back still to him. A hundred words rise to your tongue, none willing to be spoken.

So you walk away, your footsteps too quick, your heartbeat too loud.

That night, you lie awake once more, but the silence is different. The whispers have died; no one speaks of you now. The palace has moved on to a new target, a new cruelty.

But the echo of his words clings to you.

I will not help them push.

You turn onto your side, fists pressed against your lips, the memory of lantern light and the taste of candied hawthorn flooding your senses until you cannot tell if you are burning or drowning.

Mingyu has placed himself between you and ruin. And you do not know whether to hate him for it—or to let yourself breathe in the space he has carved.

You have always liked the rain.

Even as a child, when the roof leaked and the floor grew slick, you would press your face against the open window and breathe in. Rain was honest. It did not flatter or deceive. It did not whisper behind doors or weigh you against your neighbours. It simply fell—on tiled roofs and thatched ones, on fields rich and poor, on children who danced barefoot until their mothers dragged them inside.

The palace does not welcome it. Here, rain is a nuisance: courtyards flooded, silks ruined, servants scolded for letting water sneak past the eaves. But for you, rain is a reprieve. It blurs the sharp corners of your cage, muffles the laughter of concubines, washes clean the air that so often smells of resin and incense.

So when the storm breaks, you do not run from it. You walk into the garden and let yourself be drenched. The silk clings, heavy, but you lift your face and open your mouth to the night. The water tastes like memory, like hills you once climbed and roads you once promised yourself to follow. For the first time in weeks, you feel as if the world belongs to you again.

“You will make yourself ill.”

Mingyu’s voice has learned how to arrive without scaring you. You open your eyes and find him: the fringe of his hair pasted to his brow, robe heavy with water. He looks taller in the rain, or perhaps it is only that he’s closer than the palace permits.

“Leave,” you say. “This is my storm.”

He steps into your rain as if you’ve told him the opposite. He unclasps his cloak, shakes it once, and settles it across your shoulders. The wool holds the day’s heat and, absurdly, the faint scent of pine smoke. The weight drags you back into a body you had almost let the rain carry away.

He touches your sleeve, and you let him guide you toward the pavilion at the garden’s edge.

The pavilion is small and open; you sit with your back to a beam worn smooth by generations. Mingyu lowers onto the bench beside you and says nothing. The cloak anchors your shoulders. Water threads off the roof and splits into droplets before hitting the ground. The world shrinks to the square of floor you share.

“Why are you here?” you ask, keeping your eyes on the watery curtain. “Truly.”

“Because you are,” he answers.

You let out a breath. “You keep saying that as if it’s a reason.”

“Sometimes reason is only that simple.”

You pull the cloak tighter and stare past the rain at the dark shape of the apricot tree, leaves shaking. “I cannot trust you.”

“I know.”

“You are the palace.”

“I was born in it.” He considers. “It was not my choice.”

“None of this is,” you say, and you hate how fragile your voice sounds.

He doesn’t reach for your hand, doesn’t move closer, doesn’t push—only waits with you. The waiting loosens something inside you. Words rise, and this time you don’t silence them.

“When I was little, there was an apricot tree just beyond the paddies,” you say, tilting your chin toward the dark shape beyond the pavilion. “The fruit wasn’t ours. The tree leaned into the path, the way generous things do. In spring, the petals would fall like late snow. I used to lie under it and pretend I could hear the petals land.”

“Could you?”

“No.” A thin smile. “But I told myself I could. My mother said that was a good beginning for a writer.”

The word hangs between you. Mingyu turns toward you, interest softening his mouth. “A writer.”

“I wanted to be one.” The admission comes out small. “Not a poet for court—don’t laugh, I wasn’t foolish—but a woman who keeps memory with ink. The kind who can write a village into staying, even when people leave it. The kind who puts the right names to things so they won’t be stolen.”

Clouds thunder. You can see it now: your mother’s hands stained with chili and salt from autumn kimjang, rinsing again and again until the sting eased; the way she pushed a stray lock behind your ear with her knuckle because her fingers were busy; the sound of hemp thread humming through a needle; the bowl of soot you stole a pinch from to grind with water and pretend it was ink.

“There was a scribe who came through each season,” you go on. “He carried a box of brushes and hanji and a quietness that made people lower their voices without being told. I used to watch him copy petitions. He made the characters bloom as if they’d always been waiting in the paper. Once, he let me sharpen a brush. He said, ‘Soft, always soft, or the hair will sulk and refuse to hold the ink.’”

“Did you write?” Mingyu asks, voice so gentle you almost miss it.

“I learned hangul from an auntie who taught children their letters,” you say. “The men laughed—they always do—but the auntie said letters make good company when food is scarce.” You smile, then swallow it. “I wrote on scraps. On leaves. In dust behind the granary. My mother saved rice paper for me whenever the scribe sold to us cheap. I kept a little book under our floor mat, stitched out of flour paste.”

“Where is it?”

You lift the cloak as if it might produce the book like a parlour trick. “Gone. The night before—” The words stick. You force them through. “The night before the broker came, I took it out to read and found the pages damp. A pot had cracked; water crept in. The ink bled until my words turned into indecipherable pools.”

You are grateful for his stillness. You would have resisted comfort.

“I made maps,” you admit quietly. “They weren’t good. Lines for the river and dots for the houses, a crooked square for the market, a bigger dot for the apricot. I thought if I drew the road far enough toward the hills, it would reach the sea.” You rub your thumb along the cloak’s seam. “Once I climbed the ridge and the whole world opened. I could see the river glinting, then twisting away. I promised myself I’d follow it. I promised myself I’d write down what it told me.”

“What did it tell you?”

You look at him. “That leaving is not the same as being lost.”

You wipe rain from your cheek and don’t pretend it’s only rain.

“I liked markets,” you continue, because stopping now would be cowardice. “Not for buying. For watching. There was a woman who sold thread by looping it around her fingers and letting it slide, clicking her tongue at knots. A man who could carve a bird from a piece of gourd and make its beak open and close. A boy who learned every vendor’s shout and mimicked them until the whole lane laughed. I wrote the shouts down and practised them alone. I wanted a voice that could gather people without scaring them.”

“You have one,” he says.

“Not here.”

A gust flings rain under the roof; drops spatter your wrists. Mingyu shifts closer to shield you with his shoulder. The gesture—unadvertised—makes you want to cry more than pity ever did.

“Say the worst of it,” he says after a moment.

You brace your elbows on your knees and interlock your hands. “My father taught me how to lift sacks by bending the knee, not the back,” you say. “He taught me the feel of good rice from its chaff. He taught me to look a horse in the eye before judging its gait. And then he taught me something I didn’t ask to learn: the sound of a man lying sweetly.” The cloak tightens with your small shrug. “Debts. They pull like traps. First your ankle, then your knee, then your soul.” You fix your gaze on the edge of the floor. “I don’t know when the number he owed became a number I was worth.”

Mingyu exhales. “Worth,” he repeats. “That is a word men soil with their hands.”

“They made a ledger of me,” you say. “Measured like grain.”

Silence.

“My mother tried to stop it,” you finally continue. “She shut the door and pushed the bolt across with her hip and told me to run. I didn’t.” You look down at your crossed fingers. “I thought if I ran, I would lose the ground my mother was standing on.” Your mouth twists. “The brokers laughed in our courtyard and called my mother dramatic. My father said it would be an honour.”

“It was not,” Mingyu says flatly.

“No,” you agree. “The morning after they came to measure me, I climbed the ridge once more. I took my small book. I drew the apricot blossom at the corner of a page and wrote, ‘I, who wanted to write the world, am being written by it.’” You lift your hand to the lantern’s trembling glow. “The ink bled in that corner too.”

Your breath shudders in your throat.

“Say the best of it,” Mingyu asks then, and the question surprises you.

“The best?”

“Give me a scene that refuses to make your hope die.”

You search in the caverns of your mind. The memories come easier than you expect.

“New barley,” you say. “The year the rain remembered to come in time. The fields were low, green, and then high, green, and then green with a gloss of gold. My mother sent me with a bowl of cold barley tea to the men in the field.” The memory blooms. “After harvest, the whole village put mats in the lane and ate outside. Someone burned pine cones. The scribe told a story about a princess who kept her name hidden in a gourd. That night, I dreamed I could put mine in one and plant a new life.”

You look at him and find that he is already looking at you.

“What would you write about me?”

You shoot him a look that wants to be scorn yet keeps failing. “That depends on what you do next.”

He huffs, almost a laugh, and tilts his head toward the rain. “Write me as a man who knows the sound of a closed door and the weight of it, and is tired of holding it shut.”

“That’s too many words for a line,” you say.

“You can make the letters smaller,” he says, and you smile again.

Lightning strikes the sky. Thunder follows.

Mingyu shifts, his arm brushing against yours. His hand rests in his lap, fingers flexing once as if he is deciding something. Then, slowly, he turns his palm upward and reaches for yours. The touch is gentle—his fingers finding yours as though he expects you to flinch away.

But you don’t.

The surprise is not in his boldness but in your own stillness. You do not pull back. You do not hate the warmth that seeps through your damp skin. Instead, you let your hand remain inside his, the silence between you deepening.

“Tell me another,” he says. “Something with honey in it.”

“Persimmons,” you answer at once. “We dried them on strings behind the house, little lanterns turning slowly in the wind. My mother would nick the skins with her fingernail and say, ‘Patience is a sweet-maker.’ When the frost came, we ate them with our hands and licked the honey off our wrists.”

His mouth softens. “And the worst thing you ever wrote?” he asks.

“A letter I never sent,” you say. “To a future me. I told her I hoped she had learned to be brave. I told her to keep a clean brush and a clean heart. I told her she would not have to apologise for wanting more.” You press your fingertips against his. “I ended it with my name. The only time I wrote it large.”

“Say it now,” he asks, “as if the person you wrote to is here.”

You shut your eyes and breathe air into your lungs, then you speak your name. It sounds different in a pavilion with a prince listening. You open your eyes and find he has not flinched from it.

“Thank you,” he says simply.

“For what?”

“For saying yourself aloud.”

Something in you shifts. You should have guarded that shift; you let it happen. His face is closer now, so close you can count his lashes.

You are the one who swipes your mouth to his.

The kiss begins softly, tentatively, but it does not stay that way. Mingyu’s hand comes up to cradle your face, thumb brushing the damp edge of your jaw. When his mouth parts, yours answers without hesitation, letting grief and hunger spill into the space between you. You lean closer, closing the small gap until your chest brushes his, until the storm outside feels like nothing compared to the storm you’ve invited in.

His lips coax, then deepen. When your mouth opens to him, his tongue finds yours, tasting what words cannot carry. The lantern above you swings, throwing light and shadow in trembling circles, and for one suspended heartbeat even the rain seems to forget itself.

You move even closer, drawn by something older than reason, and his grip on your jaw tightens—as if he is afraid you might vanish mid-breath. Heat climbs through you, fierce and disarming.

And then you feel it—that terrifying ease, how natural it is to fall into him, how quickly you are becoming willing. The realisation sears through you. You tear yourself back, breath shattering, the echo of him still on your lips.

“I can’t,” you say.

He doesn’t chase you. He doesn’t comment on your refusal.

“All right,” he simply responds as he lowers his hand.

You stand too fast; the cloak slips. You catch it and shove it at him, then realise you don’t want to give up its heat, then hate yourself for wanting anything, then hate the palace because it is easier. The storm yawns; you step into it.

“Wait.” He doesn’t say it loudly. It still stops you. “Let me walk you to the eaves.”

“No.” Your head shakes of its own accord. “If you come, I will not go.” It’s too honest. You turn and vanish into the rain before the truth can blush.

You run until the pavilion is a ghost and the garden takes itself back from your feet. Rain finds every seam and insists on becoming you. Your hair plasters to your neck; the silk drags; your teeth click once and then refuse to. You slip under the women’s eaves, into your chamber and hold a post at your doorway until the world decides to stop moving.

You do not send yours tonight.

The storm takes a long time to end. You let it. You have been speech for too many other mouths. In this thunder, at last, you heard your own.

The doors to the antechamber part, and she enters.

The Crown Prince’s wife arrives without spectacle. The concubines rise and fold themselves to the floor in practised angles.

“Jeongsil,” they chorus, and the room bows as one body.

She saunters, as if inspecting furniture she did not order. The jade lady trails at her shoulder, eyes bright with the pleasure of usefulness. Every few paces, the wife’s fan snaps open and closed—shade, light, verdict, reprieve. She pauses to compliment the neatness of one girl’s hair, to correct the set of another’s shoulders, to ask a third whether she understands the difference between sweetness and cloying.

When she stops before you, the room holds its breath.

You kneel correctly. You look at the floor, not at her face. Your hands rest where they should, palm to palm, no tremor.

The fan opens. “There is an edge to your gaze,” she says, her tone calm but edged with disdain. “In a man, such sharpness may be called resolve. In a woman, it is untidy… unbecoming.”

She lets the silence stretch, then adds, “Do you know what men want from the women they are given? Softness. Patience. A voice that does not bruise when it speaks.” Her smile is rehearsed. “Learn this quickly. A concubine is chosen to adorn, not to argue.”

Her eyes flick down and then back up, appraising you once more. “You are new. New things are sometimes indulged, but indulgence is not affection. Do not mistake one for the other.” The fan snaps shut. “Jade madam, see that this one learns how to lower her eyes without lowering her worth. Wildness belongs in poetry, not in the chambers where men collect promises.”

The concubines do what they do best: they let their faces become mirrors to whatever authority wants to see. A ripple of sympathetic sighs that says, ‘Ah, the lesson has been learned.’ You bow your head further and say nothing. You do not break. Mingyu feels you choose not to break.

He stands behind a screen, exactly where a daegun is meant to stand when the wife inspects what the palace calls delicate things. He cannot see your eyes, only the angle of your neck, the way your shoulders hold. The first hot note of anger hits him in his stomach and refuses to settle. He thinks, with treacherous clarity: you are speaking to a woman, not a piece of property.

At the threshold, the wife slows. She bends her head toward the jade lady, her words so low the concubines cannot hear—only Mingyu does.

“She will be trouble if she learns she can be. Watch where she looks.”

The jade lady nods, eyes glittering.

A seed, planted. Not yet watered. Seeds remember rain.

Mingyu later finds you at the turn where the Willow Cloister becomes the narrow servants’ corridor. Your face wears no injury; only the skin beneath your eyes has discovered a new shade.

You try to pass him, eyes lowered, determined not to draw notice. But as you step by, his voice cuts softly through the corridor.

“Walk with me.”

You study him, as if testing for a trap. He does not offer explanations. He turns and walks, expecting you will follow. Your steps arrive behind his at the fourth flagstone.

He takes a path no one chooses on purpose: past a dead-end storeroom where old festival banners hang, under a beam whose carvings the servants have stopped dusting, behind a shed where kindling is stacked. A low door waits, half-swallowed by ivy. He lifts the bar, the wood answering with the patient groan.

Inside, the garden is alive with quiet sound: the low hum of bees, the soft creak of bamboo brushing against itself. Four walls of old brick hold the space, open to the sky above—a hidden square the palace has forgotten to name.

At its centre, a stone basin catches water from a narrow spout, each drop falling with steady patience. Moss carpets the ground where no feet tread. Along the sunlit ledges, chrysanthemums push toward their season, while beneath the eaves, orchids burn like delicate flames. A crooked plum tree leans freely, unashamed of its shape. Two shallow tubs cradle lotus long past their bloom, their round leaves still holding the storm’s last drops like scattered pools.

You stop at the threshold. Your eyes widen in a way Mingyu has learned to recognise—the way you look when the world offers you something and does not ask you to pay for it.

“What is this?”

“A mistake the palace forgot to correct,” he says. His voice feels different here; it belongs to him.

He leads you along a path edged in river stones he carried in two at a time the first winter he found this place. A low table sits by the plum, an inkstone worn smooth, brushes drying in a rack, a roll of hanji that looks innocent if you didn’t know the price of paper. A small knife. A lacquered case half-open, revealing neat stacks of sketches weighted down.

Mingyu sits, waiting to see whether you will ask.

You rise and drift toward the table. Your gaze lands on the rack with its brushes. “You paint,” a statement, not a question.

“I try to,” he answers. He pulls a few sheets from beneath the weight and sets them where you can see: One shows a bouquet of plum—three quick strokes for each petal, a darker mark anchoring the flower at its calyx. Another sketch features bamboo, with its straight segments and pointed leaves evoking a sense of patience. A third shows orchids, their round leaves curved, their blossoms modest and unshowy. The last is a chrysanthemum, dense and layered, rendered with the slow weight of endurance.

“The Four Gentlemen,” you murmur. “Plum, bamboo, orchid, chrysanthemum.”

“They behave better on paper than people do,” he says, and for the first time, laughter comes out of him freely. It startles both of you. The sound is lighter than he remembers it being.

You look up at that laugh, a smile touching your mouth. “You laugh like a man,” you say. “Not like a prince.”

“Here I am allowed to be smaller,” he says, honest in a way he cannot be elsewhere in the palace.

You circle the table and let your finger hover above the case. You do not touch the paper. You have a village girl’s surety around work that is not yours. “Do you show anyone?”

“No.” He taps the inkstone with a knuckle.

You turn your head toward the entrance in the wall you had walked through. “How did you find it?”

“By following a cat,” he says, and when your eyes flash, amused, he adds, “Very dignified story.”

He points at a gap near the base of the far wall. “I was a boy and angry. A cat’s curiosity was louder than my anger. I chased it and ended up here. I shared my food. We signed a treaty.” He gestures to the ivy. “The garden was forgotten when I came. Yet, the water still ran. Someone once meant this to be a place.” He pauses. “I decided to finish the meaning.”

You kneel, touching the moss at your feet. “Do you tend all of it?”

“Most.” He shows you the chisel marks where he braced loose stones, the way he has trained the plum not to go where it will break itself, the slender bamboo he planted three years ago that just now has learned the word stand. He names the moths that come in late summer and the way lotus leaves grip rain.

“And you hide,” you interrupt, gentle but not blind.

“Not hide. Breathe. Out there, every glance asks something of me. Here, no one is watching to decide what I am worth.” He admits.

You sit back on your heels, weighing the truth of it. Mingyu sees the wife’s words still clinging to you, but here, under this square of open sky, the weight of them seems lighter. You lift your gaze, following the strip of blue, then lower it back to him.

He does not look away. He lets you catch him watching, lets the silence between you stretch. The caution of the past days remains, but it is no longer alone.

“Show me,” you say, nodding at the brushes.

He sets the stone near you, pours just enough water, and grinds an ink cake until the surface is covered in colour. He hands you a soft brush. You hold it incorrectly at first—fist, not fingers—and he moves closer, letting his hand hover over yours to show the angle. You correct yourself. You dip. Your first stroke is too shy; your second is better. You do not try to be perfect. You draw not a flower but a road: a line that wavers and then firms, a bends toward something unseen.

“I always draw the road,” you say confidently.

“Keep drawing it,” he responds.

You set the brush down and look at him across the table. “The wife will not forgive me my eyes.”

“She forgives nothing she cannot control,” he replies, and his anger returns. “It is her practice.”

“That is also the palace’s practice.”

He wants to reach for your hand; he lays his palm on the table’s edge instead. “I wanted to take the fan from her hand.”

Your eyes widen a fraction—surprised at his boldness. “And then?”

“And then I would have destroyed what little protection I can still give you,” he continues. “Anger makes good kindling. It does not keep anyone warm.”

You breathe out. “I hate this fate,” you confess. “The rules that make me force smiles. The way absence becomes a crime, presence becomes an expectation. How a woman must show herself to survive and hide herself to live.” You look down at the road you just drew. “I hate the way I can already hear my voice imitating theirs when I am tired.”

He closes his eyes because he recognises the shape of that hatred. “You are describing me,” he murmurs. “With different words.”

You consider him for a long time. “You look like a man who knocks and waits,” you say at last. “Who has learned to stand straight while doors decide whether they will be doors.”

He opens his eyes and lets you see him without the second skin he wears for court. Loneliness must be visible in him; it is a muscle that has been doing labour too long. You see it. He watches you see it. The look on your face is not pity. It is comprehension.

“If I were only myself,” he says, “I would leave this place, follow a river, hire a cart when my legs complained, lie under a different tree each week, and draw every roofline I met.” He smiles, but sadness creases the lines of his mouth. “And perhaps I would follow a woman who laughs like she is learning a new country.”

Colour fills your cheeks. “If I were only myself, I would sell a good story to pay for ink and keep walking.”

A bee tacks between chrysanthemum buds.

Mingyu takes a clean sheet and, without looking at you, draws a single line that could be a stem or a horizon. He stops. He pushes the brush toward you.

“Finish,” he says.

You add a second line, and the two become a path in the act of being a plant. You chuckle at the trick and shake your head at yourself. He laughs back—an easy sound, unarmoured. This time, you don’t look surprised.

He thinks, not for the first time, about choosing: passion over loyalty.

He pictures consequences as a soldier would: who bleeds, where, and how long it takes to stop. The two visions of his life overlap until he cannot tell which one is the lie he has lived and which one is the truth he has been avoiding.

A foot scuffs a pebble outside the garden wall—someone passing by, no more—but both of you still. He waits. No second sound. He hears instead the echo of the wife’s words: Watch where she looks. He remembers how suspicion grows in this place—first a seed, then a trellis appears, and no one admits to building it.

“We cannot be careless,” he says, quietly.

“We have not been,” you whisper back.

“Not yet.”

You set the brush down and wipe a dot of ink from your knuckle with the corner of your sleeve. You lift your hand then and extend it across the table. He meets you halfway. Your fingers, stained now in the same places, rest against his.

No one will know that for the span of three breaths, two people decided to be less alone. No one will suspect that in a walled square of green, a prince learned how to laugh without an audience and a concubine remembered what it felt like to choose the next line on a painting.

You draw your hand back first. You stand. Mingyu rises with you.

At the door, he looks once more around the garden, memorising where the shadows fall at this hour, as if he could set them back in place with his hands later if someone disturbs them. He bars the door when you have slipped through, the ivy falling back into its place.

In the corridor beyond, the air smells of the public world again. Somewhere behind a screen, a maid from the wife’s household lingers longer than a maid needs to linger, the way a person does when they know where to stand to hear without being seen. Mingyu marks her face without letting his own change.

Watch where she looks.

He walks you to the bend at the edge of the Red Pavilion. You do not thank him. Gratitude would make this a transaction.

“Remember the road,” he says instead, nodding at your ink-stained hand.

“Remember the door,” you reply, and he grins.

Mingyu leaves you there and turns toward the duties that will wear his other face. As he walks, he carries the weight of what you look like when you do not belong to the palace.

And for the first time since he learned the word duty, he lets himself imagine a different word as his future.

The summons reaches you by accident.

Two women speaking behind screens in the washing court — the jade lady’s voice overlapping with the matron’s. “The Prince will request the new girl tomorrow. The King has pressed him to renew his vigour. She will be sent.”

The words fill you with dread. Tomorrow. The chains will tighten tomorrow.

And so, tonight, you go.

The corridors are melancholic, bathed in moonlight and the hush of sleep. Your steps are soft but urgent, your robe pulled close, your heart a drum within the cavern of your chest. At the old ivy door, your fingers hesitate only once before sliding it open. The wood gives way.

Inside, the hidden garden waits. And him.

Mingyu is already there, sleeves pushed to his forearms, brush laid aside. The lamplight he keeps pools beside the inkstone. When the door closes, he looks up. His stillness does not last. “What has happened?”

You swallow. “They said—” Your voice breaks. “Tomorrow, he will summon me. The Crown Prince. If you do nothing—if I do nothing—”

A muscle jumps in his jaw. He takes one step and then another.

“You came here,” he says, the rough edge of disbelief sanding the words.

“I could not—” You shake your head; your hands tremble, and you order them to be still. “I could not let the first time be with him. I will not give him what I did not choose.”

You lift your face to him, and the admission is final. “I choose you.”

He exhales harshly, his lungs struggling against his ribs. “Do you know what you are saying?”

“Yes.” The word leaves no room for hesitation. “If tonight ruins me, then let me be ruined by my own will.”

Mingyu reaches you. His hands rise—hesitate at either side of your face—and then cup your cheeks. His forehead tips to yours, his brow brushing yours. “You undo me,” he whispers, the confession raw. “You are my undoing.”

“Then be undone,” you answer.

The kiss feels inevitable.

It is not careful, not the way you have kissed before, soft and untested. His mouth covers yours and claims, the sound he makes vibrating onto your tongue. You clutch his robe and feel muscle, heat, the build of him. He moves you without thinking until your back hits the garden wall, the roughness of old brick shocking against the silk you wear. His body shields you from the night.

Your lips part; breath mingles with breath. The kiss deepens—first cautious, then certain—as he listens to every sound you cannot keep back. When he pulls away, it is only to trace your cheek with his mouth, to find the tender skin beneath your ear, to press against the pulse that carries your blood.

“Tell me you want this,” he pleads, mouth warm at your throat, “Tell me now, and I will never let him touch you.”

The answer is instant. “I want this,” you say, and the truth falls between you. “I want you.”

He groans against your skin, relief and hunger braided into the sound. He sinks to his knees, robes darkening as they gather the damp of the moss. His hands travel the lines of your hips, leaning the curve of your body. When his forehead presses to your stomach, you feel the breath he releases warm your skin through the fabric.

The garden keeps its silence as he bares you. Cool air brushes your thighs, and gooseflesh prickles—not from chill, but from the startling reverence of being seen this way. He lifts your foot and sets it gently on a low ledge, spreading you wide—not to claim, but to look, to take you in. His hands stroke the insides of your thighs in long, unhurried passes that make you arch before his mouth has even lowered.

“Beautiful,” he murmurs, breath ghosting over your core, “My light.”

Your head thuds softly against the wall. Your fingers fall into his hair as he parts your folds with his tongue, slow at first, mapping the length of your core, then deeper. His hand comes up, two fingers circling your entrance before slipping inside, the stretch making you gasp as they learn how your walls flutter with every curve inwards. Mingyu doesn’t stop—his lips and tongue work a steady pace that unravels you. Your world fixes to this: the wet heat of his mouth, the slip of his fingers, the claiming grip of his hand on your hip, keeping you against the wall.

Release takes you by surprise, smothering your cry against your wrist as the wave crashes over you. He does not rush you through it—he stays, patient, murmuring soft praise while your body trembles and stutters against him.

He rises. His mouth glistens, his eyes dark, tender, dilated by want. You grab for him: his collar, his neck, the truth that he is yours because you chose him. Your palms skim down his chest, learning the shape of him through his silks until you find the hardness straining against his trousers. He shudders, breath shaking as you rub his clothed cock gently, squeezing and pressing against the heat. Your fingers tug at his sash; fabric loosening.

With trembling care, you free him, and the weight of his hardness fills your hand. You brush your thumb over the flushed tip, slowly and curiously. Mingyu curses low, his hands tightening on your face as if to anchor himself.

“If I take you now, there is no going back. Do you understand?”

“I don’t want to go back.”

His restraint breaks. Mingyu gathers your thighs and lifts you, the wall holding your balance. When he presses forward, his cock finds your hole—thick shaft sliding into your wet cavern. He pushes slowly, a single steady stroke that parts you, fills you, and stretches you until the sound that breaks past your lips is half pain, half awe. He stills, buried deep, trembling with the effort not to move, his mouth pressing to your ear.

“Easy… I have you. I have you.”

You breathe through it. The ache folds—your body relearning itself around him. You tighten your grip on his shoulders; the tremor in your thighs steadies. You nod, a small, wild yes pressed into his temple.

He begins to move. Slow at first, hips rocking, searching the place where your pleasure tips into need and makes you push back for more. The friction pulls a gasp from you. He buries his face in the crook of your neck in response.

When the angle shifts and he finds the spot that makes your vision blur, your nails biting his skin

“My light,” he gasps, the words falling out of him.

Your hand finds his jaw; you force him to look at you, eyes blown wide, heart in your throat. “My moon.”

He makes a sound that could be prayer, could be surrender. His mouth comes down hard, swallowing your gasp, and the rhythm builds. When he breaks away, you clamp a hand over your mouth to quiet the cry that wants to climb; Mingyu groans into your shoulder, whispers skimming over your skin—perfect… taking me so well… mine, only mine…

You clutch his behind with your free hand to pull him in deeper, greedier. He answers, thrusts quickening. He braces you higher, your bare heel slipping against his flank, your body opening like it had been made for this.

“I’ll fill you,” he groans, voice broken, “I’ll keep you so no one else can touch you.”

Heat envelops you—fearless, claimed. “Yes,” you gasp, head thrown, “Yes—please.”

The plea takes him. He thrusts deep, deeper, the last stroke a finality. He buries himself to the hilt and goes still, body locked. His groan is low, his forehead touching yours, breaths mingling as his seed spills into you, pulse after pulse searing a promise against your walls.

Time loses count.

When the world returns to its shape, you are still pinned between him and the wall, your heartbeat answering his. His cock softens inside you, and the slick heat escapes in a slow, indecent slide. The loss makes you whimper. He feels it, and it drags another sound out of him. His hand drops between your thighs, thumb circling your entrance.

“Keep it,” he murmurs, thumb pushing his cum back in. “Keep all of me inside you.”

You bite down on your lip, eyes closing, the gentlest tremor rolling through you at his careful touch. He holds you there, not moving until the shiver passes and only warmth remains.

He lowers your legs slowly, hands attending to every inch, steadying you when your knees threaten to buckle. Your robe falls closed, hiding the reddened marks his fingers left on your skin.

You do not feel owned. You feel kept—like something valuable you decided to give and were given back, more.

He tucks you against his chest, his breath easing finally. His mouth finds your hair, your temple, the place above your brow.

You pull back just enough to see his face. The mask is nowhere. He looks younger and older at once, a man who has finally taken something for himself and is astonished not to be struck down.

A breeze crosses the garden; the plum leaves answer in rustles.

You let your weight rest against him, your cheek pressed to his collarbone, and listen to the hush your bodies have left in the air. Tomorrow waits just beyond the walls. You feel it. He must, too; his jaw tightens, then eases, a decision deferred.

He does not say I will lie for you or I will burn for this. He does not break the fragile clarity of what you have made together. Instead, he takes your hand and lifts it to his mouth, kissing each knuckle slowly.

You tilt his face up with your palm, making him meet you. In his eyes, you find what he saw in yours the first night he kissed you: not rescue, not salvation. Recognition.

Your thumb brushes along his jaw. “Mingyu…” It is all you say, but it feels like a whole confession.

He bends closer, his voice raw. “If I had nothing else—no name, no place—tonight would still be enough.”

Your chest tightens.

“You should go before the patrols change.”

You swallow. “I don’t want to.”

“I don’t want you to.” His mouth curves, but the smile falters. He presses one last kiss to your temple. “But I’ll be here. Whenever you come, I’ll be here.”

You draw him down again, one more kiss—slow, sealing, ardent—and then you step back, your hand sliding from his body.

The ivy door groans. You glance over your shoulder. He is still standing there, the moon silvering his skin, his eyes fixed only on you.

The door closes. The ivy will fall into place. But the moon will remember. So will you. So will he.

The summons comes at dusk.

The eunuch’s voice is formal, but the weight beneath it is audible: the Crown Prince wants to claim what he is owed. It is time.

Mingyu’s body stills. He has known the night would come—has bought you time with excuses, with whispers of ill omens, with feigned rituals that delayed the inevitable. But he cannot stretch the thread forever. And now it frays.

Not tonight.

The thought comes with a violence he cannot temper. His hands curl in his sleeves as though his body means to shield you even here, in the hollow of his chambers.

When he enters the prince’s hall, the Crown Prince is lounging with his fan half-open, a glass of rice wine dangling loosely in his grip.

“Where is she?” his brother asks.

Mingyu bows low, his voice level, though his heart pounds. “Forgive me, hyungnim. She is unwell again. The matron feared her presence would bring illness to your chamber.”

The fan stills. His brother’s eyes narrow. “Unwell?”

“The signs were clear,” Mingyu presses. “The physician recommends she remain apart until the moon turns.”

For a long moment, silence stretches between them. Then the Crown Prince laughs hollowly. “If she proves useless, I will send her back where she came from.”

Mingyu bows again, concealing the fury in his throat. “As you command.”

He leaves with his pulse hammering, the echo of his brother’s disdain following him outside. By the time he reaches the women’s quarters, the decision is already made. He will not wait for tomorrow. He will not gamble with fate again.

He goes for you.

You startle when you see him—no servant, no matron, just Mingyu, his mask removed. He doesn’t give you time to ask. He only whispers, urgent: “Come with me. Now.”

Your robe swishes as you follow, steps light but quick, fear and fire tangled in your blood. You slip past courtyards, through the narrow ivy door, into the secret garden that has become your world.

The door closes, the ivy falls back, and the storm breaks.

He is on you before you can form words, his mouth claiming yours, his hands clutching at your hips. The kiss is frantic, teeth clashing, tongues tangling. He cups your face, then your breasts, desperate to feel your whole body pressed to his.

“We don’t have long,” you pant against his lips. “Please—just take me. I don’t want to lose this moment.”

His heart lurches at the plea. He wants to worship, to spend hours unravelling you again, but the truth is written in your eyes: you have only stolen minutes.

“Let me ready you,” he begs.

“Then be quick.” Your cheeks flush with urgency. “I can bear it—I want you too much not to.”

He curses softly, dragging you into the shadows of the wall, lifting your robe with trembling hands. His fingers slip between your thighs, finding your folds already slick, your body betraying its hunger. He strokes your clit once, twice, then presses two fingers inside. You gasp, your head falling against the wall, and he feels your walls clench, hot and needy around his digits.

“You’re perfect,” he murmurs, his lips at your neck. “So ready for me… my light.”

“Mingyu—” your voice cracks, “please. Now.”

The sound of your begging shatters his restraint. Mingyu pulls out his fingers, grabs your waist, and turns you swiftly. He bends you forward, his hand pressing between your shoulder blades until your palms find the wall. “Hold it,” he commands, voice rough, trembling with urgency.

You obey, fingers splayed against the cool stone, your breath hot and uneven. Behind you, he frees himself with shaking hands, the blunt head of his cock nudging against your slick entrance. He pushes forward in one swift thrust, burying himself, letting you accustom to the stretch. Your hips rock back in reply, impatient, desperate for more.

With a groan, he pulls back and drives even deeper.

You muffle your cry against your arm, your body arching beneath the weight of him.

The fit is perfect, unbearable. Your walls are tight around him, slick and hot, pulling him deeper. He braces one hand against the wall, the other gripping your hip.

“Mine,” he gasps, thrusting faster. “All mine.”

You push back against him, your voice breathless. “Even if the world condemns me… I would rather belong to you for one stolen night than live unloved for a lifetime.”

The confession undoes him. His rhythm grows faster, harder, his hips slam into yours with the desperation of a man who knows time is both enemy and witness. Each thrust jolts a cry from your lips, swallowed quickly into your skin to keep them hidden.

“So good… so perfect,” he praises, his words whispered against the shell of your ear. “Taking me so well… made for me.”

“Yes,” you gasp, shuddering beneath him. “Yours.”

Your words drag him closer to the edge. Mingyu reaches around, his fingers finding your clit again. You clench around him as his thumb rubs tight circles on the nub, your whole body shaking with the force of release.

Your orgasm tears him apart. He drives into you once, twice more, then spills deep inside, groaning your name into your hair, his body shuddering with the sheer violence of it. He presses himself tight against you, holding you there.

“Keep all of me inside you. My light… my only.”

You whimper at the fullness, clutching the wall as though it were the only thing anchoring you.

When he finally pulls back, his seed slips down your thighs. His thumb catches it, pushes it gently back into you, just as he did last night.

“Look,” he murmurs behind you. “Your body keeps me. You were always meant to.”

Your eyes flutter closed, a sound half-sob, half-laughter leaving you. You lean your forehead against the wall, then turn just enough to whisper back: “And you were always meant to find me.”

He gathers you against him then, despite the haste, despite the danger. He kisses your hair, your temple, every place his mouth can reach.

You have minutes left, perhaps less. But here, in this garden, pressed together in ruin and worship, it feels like eternity has bent just long enough to give you this.

The days after look peaceful from a distance.

Mingyu knows better. Calm is how the palace hides a storm.

He keeps you untouched—once, twice, three times more—by small moves that look like coincidence. A moon-day unsuited to intimate rites. A physician’s note, gently acquired, that suggests rest is prudent. Each excuse buys a night. Each night costs him something he does not calculate until dawn.

The Crown Prince’s wife counts, too. She is a woman who inventories absence.

She noticed that the new concubine—the one with the eyes that do not stay down—remains unclaimed.

She comes to the women’s hall without announcing herself, and the floor learns again how to shine. The concubines fold; the jade lady glides behind her. The wife’s fan opens and closes, a soft arithmetic of verdicts.

“How is the new one’s health?” she asks idly.

“Delicate, Jeongsil,” coos the jade lady. “The air still weighs on her.”

“The air weighs on all of us,” the wife replies. “Send for the physician. Send for the matron. Send for the girl.”

Mingyu hears about this not from the servants who owe him favours, but from the way the corridor itself changes—footsteps that begin to circle instead of passing straight through, voices that lower only after the first word. Danger is a scent learned in his childhood. He smells it now.

He widens the space between his shadow and yours. He takes different routes. He lets the captain of the guards find him on the captain’s terms, not his. He issues neat, forgettable orders that look routine. In the hidden garden, he slides the brush rack from the open table into a low chest—not because anyone will look, but because the act steadies his hands.

The jade lady examines your chamber. She admires your hairpins, your robes, your comb, and leaves a ribbon tucked deep under the folded silks—dyed a shade the Queen’s household uses for steward’s sashes, cut to a length no servant would wear. She watches a maid’s fear grow, then buys the fear with a handful of coins and a promised promotion. She visits the scribe who writes letters for women who cannot ask men for help and pays him twice to describe your hand. She sends a runner to a gate guard with a message that registers as a warning: Tell me what you see, or I will ask someone with sharper eyes.

The letters appear three days later, crisp and smelling faintly of cedar.

They are found, of course—tucked behind the lintel of your door where only a frightened maid would dare to dust. The jade lady holds them by their edges, as if avoiding blame. The physician, who was instructed to bring a brazier for colds, is instead made to warm wax for seals.

Mingyu reads the copies in secret. They are not given to him, but he knows how to find what others would keep hidden. The handwriting is wrong: too careful where yours would move, too ornate where you would choose simplicity. Yet the voice they have forged is perilously close to yours.

There are lines about secret meetings under eaves. About a lantern tied to a wrist. About a prince’s shadow that lingers too long. Some even name him—Mingyu—as if to knot the noose tighter, hinting at a bond between you that would shame his blood.

The Crown Prince had seen the forgeries before he did, and the smugness still clings to his words. “So much for your watchful eyes, little brother. You couldn’t even guard what was given to you. If she has strayed, perhaps it’s you she’s strayed with.”

Mingyu swallows the retort that claws up his throat. He cannot say this is not her hand without being asked how he knows. He cannot protest that the words echo things that have not happened without revealing how closely, how often, he has been in your presence.

Instead, he goes to the captain of the guards.

“Search again,” he instructs. “Truth behaves consistently. If there are letters, there are couriers; if there are couriers, there are payments. Trace them.”

The captain bows, loyal to a fault and to the Crown above faults. “We have a witness, Your Highness.”

“Who?”

“A gate boy who saw a woman pass a folded paper to a laundry girl near the Southern Eaves.”

“He saw without seeing faces?”

“He saw a sleeve and a hairpin.”

Mingyu’s fingers press the bridge of his nose.

He goes to the Queen, because her eyes sometimes see differently than the King’s. She receives him with the calmness of a woman who has shaped men into choices for longer than he has lived. He bows low; she gestures for him to rise. He speaks carefully, circling the truth.

“There is mischief in the women’s hall,” he begins. “If left unchecked, they could corrode more than reputation.”

Her fan stirs the air once. “Rumours are the palace’s second language. Why should this one trouble me?”

“Because it is falsehood with teeth,” he replies, his voice harder than he means. “And once it bites, it will not release.”

Her gaze fixes on him, unreadable. “What would you have of me, then?”

He holds her eyes, offering her a weapon that could as easily be turned on him. “Let it be examined quietly. No proclamations, no punishment until certainty is beyond question.”

She tilts her head, tapping her fan against her palm. “You are asking for time.”

“I am asking for fairness,” he says, though the words taste weak even to him.

The Queen studies him for a long moment. Then her mouth curves, the faintest shadow of a smile. “Fairness,” she repeats softly, as if testing the weight of the word. “Tell me, my son—fairness for which woman?”

He bows again and leaves without a reply.

His brother’s wife does not wait for justice. She cultivates certainty.

Two maids swear they have seen you slip out at night. A eunuch remembers—now—that your lantern burned longer than it should have. A gate boy repeats his story until he forgets who taught it to him. The jade lady produces a scrap of blue-green cord that once lived in Mingyu’s cloak hem, a thread she lifted weeks ago from the hidden garden’s threshold after a night when he was not careful enough to leave no trace. The cord is pressed into wax by the physician like a signet.

Word arrives that the King will hear the matter at noon.

Mingyu sits very still on the edge of his mat.

He could confess. He could ruin the letters by burning himself in front of them. He could say I took her to a garden that should not exist, I kissed her, I took her body as she took mine, and every lie you punish her with is a lie you owe me first. He could. He runs the scene in his mind and sees where the blade falls: on you. Confession from a prince is romance in a poem; in a court, it is a net that tightens around the smaller neck first.

He dresses. He ties his sash too tightly and does not loosen it. He goes to the hall at noon.

They come for you when the shadows are shortest.

The women’s hall opens its mouth, and the jade lady’s smile gleams from the gaping crevice. Guards stand in a neat row behind her. The concubines do not need instruction; they have been rehearsing their faces since morning.

“You are called,” the jade lady says, all duty.

“Called for what?” you ask.

“To answer,” she replies. “Bring only yourself. You will not need… ornaments.”

They remove your hairpins, they unhook your sash, not because they need to—your robe would hold—but because the looseness will read as shame when you walk. They take the finest silk and leave only the inner layer, which wrinkles when a hand presses it. Your hair falls in a single heavy rope you do not have fabric for to bind; a maid reaches with a strip of plain cotton and ties it with a firmness that says I am sorry without saying anything at all.

As you pass, the concubines show sympathy for each other and malice for you in alternating breaths.

“Poor thing,” one murmurs.

“Pride will do it,” another answers.

“She always looked beyond the walls,” a third offers, as if seeing were a crime.

The throne room is colder than your chambers. The King sits as if he has grown out of the seat. The Queen is a painting of calm. The Crown Prince wears a satisfaction that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with being bowed to. The wife stands a half-pace behind his shoulder, the jade lady behind hers, and together they form a line that points at you no matter where you move.

You kneel. The stone remembers every person who has pressed their forehead against it and records you now.

Mingyu is there.

He stands to the side where lesser men of royal blood stand when they are meant to be useful but not central. His face is a flawless mask. Under it, the muscles in his jaw are tight. You look at him only once, and you do not beg with your eyes, because you have learned that begging is a performance this room enjoys. You only look and place your breath where his breath is.

The jade lady reads the letters.

“Found hidden in the defendant’s chamber,” she says, “describing assignations and conspiracy. The hand is consistent. The content is damning.”

You do not rebut. You have no self to lend her lines. When she finishes, she offers the papers up to the Crown Prince’s wife.

The King nods. “Witnesses.”

The first maid cries delicately. “I saw her by the southern eaves with a folded paper.”

The second complements the first. “I was told to keep my mouth shut, but I must not place loyalty above truth.”

The gate boy bows so low his forehead will bruise. “I saw a sleeve. It was not plain. It moved like hers.”

The jade lady produces her piece of thread with a flourish. “A token,” she says, “caught where her path should never have crossed a daegun’s.”

Mingyu watches the thread and knows its history in a single flash—night air, ivy, his laugh unguarded—and understands that something he was careless with has learned how to be poison.

The King looks at you.

“What say you.” He does not waste a question mark on it.

Your mouth is dry. You hold the word innocent in it until it tastes like ash.

“I did not write those letters,” you say. Your voice is steady because you make it be. “I have left the women’s quarters only when ordered.”

A hum like interest moves through the hall. It is not sympathy.

The wife’s fan opens. “You lowered your eyes properly this morning,” she observes kindly. “One must learn to lower one’s habits as well.”

You turn your face without turning your head. “Jeongsil,” you say, “I am being made into a story you have written ahead of me.”

A soft intake from the concubines—audacity will always be admired when it is punished elsewhere.

The Queen lifts her chin a fraction. “Child,” she says, and the word is both balm and warning, “you stand before a throne. Be careful of speech.”

You bow again, your forehead to cold stone. “I speak only myself.”

Mingyu closes his eyes for the length of one breath. When he opens them, the wife is already looking at him. Her smile is revealing. She knows. Not everything. Enough.

The King says, “Strip her of these outer robes.”

You do not cry when the fabric is taken. You do not cry when your hair is untied fully and falls like a curtain along your back. You do not cry when the jade lady steps forward and draws a line of red across your name tag with a brush, striking it through. You save crying for places that have earned it.

“Pending sentence,” the King says, “she is to be held below.”

Mingyu hears the decision fall.

He takes the smallest step forward.

“Father,” he says, “the palace earns dignity when it matches accusation with care. Allow me to oversee—”

The King turns his eyes to him with slow displeasure.

“You will oversee nothing,” he says. “If you would like purpose, look to your brother’s campaigns and not to his women.”

The Crown Prince smiles, enjoying the old game. “Our daegun forgets where usefulness ends.”

Mingyu bows. When he straightens, he is a man with a rope around his throat pulled just tight enough to keep him breathing.

He leaves the hall before the Queen can call him back by name. He is not sure what his mouth would do in this room if he were to stay.

They take you then, not with violence, but with efficiency, which is worse. Two guards, one at each arm. You rise without stumbling. You walk without being dragged. The hall swallows your figure quickly.

The dungeons smell of metal and the apprehension of men who have counted days and lost track of them anyway. The light here is sparse, not right. It slopes through grates too narrow and leaves bars striped across the walls.

The cell is not the worst. It has straw that has been changed this week. It has a basin that has been scrubbed. It has a bench that remembers other backs.

When the gate slams, your breath trips.

You sit. You place your hands in your lap because that is how you have trained them to look calm. You stare at the wall, but you don’t see it. You see apricot petals. A little book. A river that promised you a road. A cloak that smelled of pine smoke. A man who learned how to laugh without permission.

You had not meant to rely on him. Reliance is a dangerous verb here. It invites ownership. It invites punishment. And yet, you had measured your days lately by small certainties: the direction his steps made across the stones, the way the air shared heat with your skin when he stood one pace closer than courtesy required, the existence of a door that opened with a bar you knew where to find.

How fragile, you think, and the thought is not bitter, only accurate. How beautifully fragile.

The women above you know your name again now that it is in trouble. Their whispers come down through the cracks.

“She did it.”

“She thought she was different.”

“She always looked like she was listening to walls.”

You lean your head back against the wall and close your eyes. Behind your lids, the garden squares itself: the basin, the plum, the little rack of brushes, the low table with ink pooled like twilight. If you breathe slowly enough, you can still smell wet moss. If you borrow the right memory, you can feel a thumb on your knuckles, counting without saying numbers.

Footsteps come and go. One set stops outside your gate and stays. You open your eyes.

It is not him. It is the jade lady, with a guard who looks everywhere but at you.

She holds the letters—and the way she holds them tells you they have already done their main work and are now props for an encore.

“Do you want to say anything useful?” she asks pleasantly. “Useful means true, of course.”

“Truth and usefulness are rarely related here,” you answer, and your voice is rough from disuse already.

Her smile is quick. “That is truer than it is safe. You must be tired.”

“I am.”

“Rest, then,” she says. “Tomorrow will require stamina.”

“Tomorrow?”

“A hearing that will look like mercy,” she says, and drifts away, satisfied with the taste she has left in your mouth.

You go quiet for a while. Then you let yourself cry.

You wipe your face with your sleeve and resent the fabric for not being silk anymore, and then resent yourself for caring about fabric.

You think of what you did not say at the throne. You think of what you did say.

You picture Mingyu standing in the throne room.

You do not let yourself ask if he will come. Men with freedom rarely walk toward cages, and princes are taught early to turn their faces from pity. And yet—you have seen him stare into a basin as if the water itself were teaching him how to be decent. You have watched him lift a brush as though each stroke could preserve more than paper. You have felt his mouth shape your name into something even the moon might choose to keep.

You rest your head against your arm and speak your name into the straw until it sounds like a promise again.

Above, the palace performs order—torches lit, incense burned, doorways bowed through, bells tapped to tell rooms they can sleep. Below, your cell practices the old, old art of not taking a person away from herself.

You open your eyes to the seam of light under the door and think:

I will not let their story be the only one.

Somewhere beyond the corridor’s curve, steps begin—measured, muffled, familiar in their way of refusing to hurry. The guard at the far end coughs and then decides not to. Keys do their metal screech. A flame lowers the dark by one shade.

You lift your head, not hope—readiness.

The steps stop. Silence stands up next to your gate.

You breathe in once. If it is Mingyu, there is danger. If it is not, there is danger. In both rooms, you plan.

The key does not turn. The footsteps move on.

You lean your head back and let your heartbeat slow one notch at a time.

In the hidden garden, a plum leaf loosens and settles in the basin. In a chamber with too much air, a prince sits on the edge of his mat and twists a paintbrush in his hand.

Night pools. The story sharpens its quill. You close your eyes and hold fast to yourself.

For now, it is enough to be unbroken where no one can abuse it.

Mingyu keeps to the edge of the dungeon, footsteps lighter than the guards deserve to hear. He had borrowed a key and chosen the moment between patrols when the path would have been empty. He breaks every law of his duty by walking downward—past storerooms; past the turning; past the last guard, who had been dragged underneath sleep’s weight.

The sound is too loud when he turns the key.

You are there on the other side of the bars. When you look up, the dim torchlight finds your face. Your name rises in Mingyu’s throat; he swallows it.

“My moon.”

Just that, and the whole journey crashes into purpose.

He grips the bars first, because the act of opening them would end you both. The iron is cold. His forehead bows to it, breath joining yours in the narrow space. He forces his voice into quiet.

“I am here.”

“You shouldn’t be,” you whisper, moving closer until your hands find his through the gap. “If they catch—”

“They will not.” He is not sure, but he lets certainty become a bridge anyway and walks you both across it. “I could not leave you to this silence.”

Your fingers tighten over his, the bars press between your knuckles.

“Are you hurt?” he asks, searching your face, the line of your throat, the place beneath your eyes.

You shake your head. “Only frightened. Not of death.” The smile that touches your mouth wavers. “Of what the palace will make of my name.”

He has no remedy for it. He has only his face, unmasked. He lets you see the man who has been walking the length of his room all day, learning the floor with a new kind of devotion.

“I tried,” he says, the admission low, raw. “I went to the Queen. I sent the captain back over every step. The thread they hold—”

“Is yours,” you finish, too gently. “And they shaped it into a noose meant for me.”

He hates that you are right. He hates that he did not notice the cord missing, the ivy disturbed, the way fate can be braided out of a single careless strand.

He leans in until the bars kiss his cheek and yours. Through iron, your mouths find each other, the kiss awkward, yet urgent, stubborn. Tears fall without permission; neither of you bothers to hide them. Salt meets iron and iron learns salt.

When he pulls back, it is only enough to speak against your mouth. The words arrive before caution can draft a replacement.

“I love you.”

They are not elaborate. They are not princely. They are only truth.

Your breath catches. Your eyes close, open. Your answer comes.

“I love you.”

The walls do not know what to do with such sentences. They have been trained to hold rulings, not vows.

He rests his brow to the bars and shakes with the relief and terror of having said it aloud. “Forgive me,” he whispers. “For being late. For not burning their lies before they learned to speak.”

“Forgive me,” you return, “for giving you something you must now keep safe from your own blood.”

He laughs brokenly. “Then we absolve each other.”

You fall into the small choreography of solace—his thumbs circling the backs of your hands, your forehead leaning to the cool iron and then to his, kisses like stitches placed where fear might tear. You speak in fragments that make a whole: “I will find a way.” “Do not ruin yourself.” “What else am I good for if not this?” “For living.” “Only if living keeps you in it.”

Footsteps brush the corridor and move on. A torch sighs. Your time thins.

He tries to plot aloud and gives up. He returns to vows because they are the only currency left that he owns.

“If they set a day,” he says, “I will cut it apart. If they send a rope, I will place my throat before yours.”

You flinch, not from the image but from the part of him that means it. “Do not offer death as if it were a gift.”

“And what would you have me offer?” He cannot keep despair from roughening the whisper. “Petitions? I am a petition they have never signed.”

Your hands slide down the bars and lower, until your lips meet again through the cold. “Offer me tomorrow,” you breathe. “Even if you must lie to do it.”

He nods, once, the movement small and decisive. “Tomorrow.”

Neither of you knows the corridor is not empty.

In the shadows, the Crown Prince stands, silent witness to his brother’s ruin. He does not interrupt. He only watches, storing every word, every touch, every tear, until the night has given him more than enough. Then he turns, leaving just as soundlessly as he arrived.

Mingyu kisses your fingers, one by one, and then the thin inside of your wrist where your pulse proves he has not lost you yet. “My light,” he says.

“My moon,” you answer.

He goes because to stay would be to choose discovery. He goes because leaving is sometimes the only way to carry a vow into motion.

Morning shows its teeth too early.

By midday, the court gathers, arranged into near architectural angles. The King sits in judgement; the Crown Prince’s smile is measured and expensive. Behind him stands the wife, fan shut; behind her, the jade lady glows with the satisfaction of a tool that fits the hand.

They bring you in. You do not stumble. Mingyu admires how, even now, you move as if rooms cannot quite claim you.

Charges are recited. Letters appear again, their false breath held steady by seals. Witnesses repeat what they were trained to remember. The cord—his own small sin of carelessness—enters once more, damning not by nature but by stewardship.

The King turns a stone gaze to the room. “The scandal has grown beyond patience,” he says. “The palace will not be made a stage for it.”

The Crown Prince speaks the sentence. His voice is steady and smooth, savouring every syllable with satisfaction. “She is to die by hanging. A concubine who stains the house is better ended than endured.”

Mingyu’s heart drops to his stomach. He steps forward before wisdom can chain him still. “Your Majesty—”

The King lifts a hand, silencing him. His gaze is angry, carved by disappointment. “You would defend her? Already, the court whispers that you failed your duty. And now, your brother tells me you did more—that you reached for what was not yours to touch. If she is guilty, then you are guilty too.”

The Crown Prince’s mouth tilts. “Little brother mistakes the women’s hall for his hunting ground. Here, his strength avails him nothing.”

Mingyu bows because to do otherwise is rebellion. But when he rises, the mask is gone. He chooses the only weapon left to him: himself.

“Then let the sentence fall on me,” he says, each word measured, unflinching. “If impropriety was born, it was in the space I carved for her to breathe. I failed my charge. I pursued what I should not, and I will not let her pay for what I asked her to share.”

He drops lower, his voice ringing across the chamber. “Strip me of rank. Exile me. Break me. But do not grind an innocent woman to dust only to make this hall smell clean.”

The room stirs, gasps curling like smoke. What he has held in secret is now naked before the throne—every vow, every trespass, every truth too sharp to bury.

The Queen’s fan pauses. Something like pain crosses her eyes but is folded away. The King regards him, then you. The room waits for the air to be less suffocating.

You lift your head. He watches you inhale. When you speak, your voice is clear—not to save yourself, but to take the blade from him.

“Your Majesty,” you say, bowing just enough to honour the throne but not enough to hide your face. “The daegun lies. He shoulders blame because he has always carried what others will not. But I acted alone. I let pride twist itself into secrecy, let rumor become a ladder I climbed with my own hands. No prince guided me. No prince touched me. Every misstep is mine.”

The room stirs.

Mingyu breaks. “That is not—”

The Crown Prince’s wife cuts him off. “You dare call a prince a liar? Even in your last moments, you reach for insolence.”

But you do not flinch. You do not answer her. Instead, you turn your eyes, pointed and unyielding, to the Crown Prince. The silence between you speaks louder than protest: you know where the true rot sits, and you are no longer afraid to let him see that you know.

The King nods once. “Very well. At dawn tomorrow, she will hang.”

Tomorrow. How cruel faith can be.

The Crown Prince bows, relieved to be done with this nuisance. “The house will be grateful for your decisiveness, Father.”

The wife’s fan opens—not for air, but in silent victory. The jade lady glows, already drafting the measures that make your quiet death look like good housekeeping.

They take you away. You do not look back, not because you are heartless, but because you are disciplined enough to follow up on your promises.

When the hall empties, Mingyu remains where he is expected to stand, because the thought of moving might make him collapse. The Queen passes and pauses. For a long beat, she says nothing. Then:

“If you mean to be a fool,” she murmurs, “be an excellent one.”

It is not permission. It is not a map. It is—perhaps—the only pity she can legally offer a son who has already chosen his path.

The evening bell sounds in the distance, counting the hour. The sound awakens Mingyu to start moving before the emptiness of the room can claim him.

Outside, the night waits, testing whether men can ever be braver than their titles. His pulse steadies as he steps—anger beaten into rhythm, resolve sharpening with every pace.

He does not know yet what saving will look like. He only knows the shape of ruin if he does nothing. And so, he chooses: he will not let you die while he still breathes.

Tomorrow, you told each other.

A whole rebellion can fit into that word.

The night before your death arrives, the palace has never been quieter, as if it were ashamed of itself.

You draw your knees closer and lace your fingers in prayer until the ache convinces you your hands still belong to you.

Keys rattle in the corridor.

You do not rise. There is no use in spending your body before the moment demands it. The keys pause, a breath, then try the lock. A second torch joins the first, and the shadows climb the wall.

Your gate does not open. It lifts.

The bar comes free in a single quiet motion, a hand catching its weight so the iron does not clatter. The lock turns with a softness that should be impossible for metal. The door swings open in a careful span.

He is there. Mingyu. Bareheaded, breath damp, his face stripped of every courtly habit. He has cut his hair at the nape. All that remains is the man. “Come,” he says, and the word is both plea and command. “There is no time.”

“You will lose everything,” you answer, because truth is the first language you shared.

He steps into the cell, into the narrow space of straw and stone, and kneels so fast his robe scrapes the floor. The chain at your ankle shivers when he lifts it; the lock clicks open. He moves to your wrists. Cold iron kisses air, and then your skin remembers how to be only skin. “I already did,” he says, eyes never leaving yours. “I lost it the first night I chose you.” A swallow. “I am choosing you again.”

You say the only thing that fits the shape of the moment. “Then I will not let you run alone.” He pulls you to your feet.

Mingyu blows the torch low with a careful breath as you pass through the corridor; the dark leaning in but not biting. He leads, counting steps under his breath in the old guard’s rhythm, and you find his count without being taught. At the corner, he holds up a hand. A guard turns in a chair, snorts, and returns to the bargain it made with wine. Mingyu slides a coin on the bench by the man’s elbow as if paying for silence were a courtesy, not a crime.

Stairs spool upward. A door. Another key. An empty courtyard. The moon hangs over the roofline and lays a paler path on the flagstones—just wide enough for two. “We will be seen,” you whisper. “Then they will learn we are faster,” he answers.

At the laundry eaves, he has left a bundle: a plain cloak for you, a soldier’s cap to shade his face, a strip of cloth for your hair. He ties it quickly, fingers gentle. A rope ladder waits inside a rain spout; he draws it out, hooks it to the lip, and tests the pull. The wall rises. You look at it and laugh—once, shocked at the boldness of your lungs.

“Do you trust me?” he asks, already bracing the ladder. “Yes,” you say, because you already leapt when you said I love you. “More than I trust the ground.”

You climb. Your feet remember the ridge above your old village, the way stone gives when you ask it properly. The wall’s top is a thin barrier between two lives. You throw your leg over, look back once—not at the palace, not at the lattice of windows where women fold and unfold their days—but at him. He comes up after you, eyes brighter than anyone should afford in this moment.

As you reach the far side, you see trees that were cleared out long ago and then grew back anyway. A lane where carts drag. Space. At the backside gate, a single horse stands, head down. Two bundles hang from the saddle: water, a pouch of coins, a roll of cloth, a wrapped packet that will turn out to be rice cakes and dried persimmons and a knife. Mingyu’s hands move like he memorised the motions.

He cups your foot and lifts you to the saddle. He mounts behind you, one arm circling your waist, the other finding the reins. His mouth is at your ear. “Hold,” he says. “And do not look back.”

You look forward at the lane, and he clicks his tongue. The horse answers, and the world begins. You do not look back.

The first alarm sounds much later than it should. A horn sounds from the inner court, then another. Torches wake like small stars. A gong beats the night, and the night throws it back.

In the King’s chamber, word arrives in a rush and collapses at his feet. He sits up with the cruelty of being summoned by betrayal rather than pain. “Which son?”

The servant does not dare say the name at first. “The daegun,” he answers because he must. “With the condemned.”

The King’s breath goes thin. A lifetime of choosing between father and law tightens into a single, exhausted line. He issues orders as if the words will stave off the ache.

“Strip him of title. Strip him of rank. By morning, he is no more than a man with a name. Send riders.”

In the Queen’s rooms, the message arrives softer, as if kindness could be folded around this kind of news. She closes her eyes because she had seen this end before it could be written. When she opens them, her gaze is clear.

“Tell the Jeongsil,” she says to her women, “that she has won a smaller victory than she thinks.”

The Crown Prince is already awake, as some men always are when they have invested in a bad harvest. At the report, satisfaction lifts his mouth and then falls. He motions with his hand, sharp and neat.

“Send riders,” he says, “fast and quiet. Bring the girl back before dawn. If you cannot bring her back, bring the proof that she will not walk again.”

He does not mention his brother. The omission is not mercy.

The wife stands at her window, watching the courtyard fill with hurried men. She holds only a cup. In the glass, she can see her own expression. She speaks to the jade lady without turning.

“Set another place at my table,” she says. “For absence.”

The jade lady bows her head. The Jeongsil drinks from her cup.

The road unwinds.

Fields sleep in their winter stubble. Ditches hold thin ice that breaks like old lacquer at the horse’s hooves. Your hands learn the sinew of the animal, the way it moves under your knees, the language of speed.

Behind you, faint at first and then less faint, a courier bell taps: one, two—silence—one. Soldiers. The old message: We are coming.

Mingyu’s arm tightens. You can feel his breath notch and smooth, notch and smooth. You lean into him to remind him on how to keep moving.

“Left,” you whisper at a break in the hedges, because a childhood of climbing walls gives you a nose for gaps. He turns the horse; branches scrape, then fall away; an ox track becomes a path becomes a trail becomes a thumbprint of hard dirt between scrub pines.

“You planned this,” you say, half accusation, half awe.

“I hoped for it,” he answers, then corrects himself. “I decided on it when I said I loved you to iron.”

There is only truth in his confession. Your chest loosens and tightens at once.

The path narrows. A stream, newly arrogant with snowmelt, chatters and then hides again. The horse takes a slope. You find a rhythm—breath, hoof, twig, the occasional call of a bird.

On a high shelf of ground, you dismount to spare the animal. Mingyu leads; you follow, your hand at the saddle, the horse tossing its head. When the trail kinks around a boulder, Mingyu halts, listening with his whole body.

“Two riders,” he says. “One farther back.” A pause. “No dogs. Good.”

“How—”

“Hoofs argue with gravel,” he says, as if it were a proverb.

You smile without meaning to. He catches it with a glance and—God, even now—finds a way to look a little astonished that joy would choose your face.

The first riders appear low on the slope. Mingyu takes your hand and pulls you into a cut where the ground has slumped, a pocket of earth with just enough thorn to suggest no passage here. The horse lowers its head and pretends to be a bush.

You press shoulder to shoulder, heart to back, breath to breath. The riders pass. One speaks and the other laughs. Their bells say nothing.

When the sound fades, Mingyu does not move. He turns his face into your hair.

“Say it again,” he whispers.

“What?”

“Anything that belongs only to us.”

You find the words easily now. “I love you,” you say, and everything in you says it with you.

He exhales as if he has been holding a plank above his head for a month.

“I love you,” he answers, and everything in him answers with him.

You move again.

The mountains meet you like old gods—aloof, patient, unconcerned with human names. A frozen fall locks itself to a cliff. Spruce lift black spires into the air.

At a fold in the ridge, a hut reveals itself. Mingyu pulls the door beam free. Inside: a low hearth, a broom worn to its last dozen straws, a pallet that remembers other fugitives, a jar with three chestnuts and a handful of cracked barley. Enough to call this a place.

He has stashed a bundle under the floor plank where the wood darkens. Coins. A second knife. A pair of coarse coats too large to be yours but small enough to be better than cold. He spreads a blanket, lights the ashes until a sigh of heat rises, and knuckles each log as if greeting a fellow.

You lower yourself. Mingyu drops to his knees in front of you and takes your feet in his hands as if feet were things princes cared to touch.

“Breathe,” he says gently.

“I am.”

“Again.”

You do.

When he looks up, he is smiling, a secretive, helpless tilt that lives on in your mind.

“I have no title,” he says softly, as if introducing himself. “No land. No right but what we make.”

“You have a name,” you answer, “and you gave it to me to keep.”

You eat in silence, grateful for barley that refuses to stop being itself even when boiled to softness. The chestnuts tilt toward sweetness. Mingyu unwraps the persimmons and hands you the one that kept its shape best. You bite and taste a memory you did not know you would need: frost and honey and the cleverness of patience.

When the light thins to the blue that comes before deep blue, he pulls another blanket around your shoulders and draws you outside.

The moon is polished tonight.

It hangs above the black line of the next ridge, round and gleaming. Beneath that calm and patient eye, he wraps his arms around you from behind and fits his chin to your shoulder.

“Do you regret it?” you ask tentatively.

“Choosing you?” His breath warms your ear. “If ruin were the price, I would have paid it sooner.”

You turn in his arms. The mountains do not look away. You touch his cheek with the back of your fingers, a gesture you learned from women who handled hot pots and loved grandly anyway.

“We are free,” you say. “We are hunted,” he says.

“Both can be true,” you answer, and the night, which has been listening impolitely, murmurs its approval in the firs.

From far down the valley a bell speaks—faint, uncertain. Riders at the foot of the mountain. You do not stiffen. You lean into him and feel how a body holds against another—how two warm places make a third.

“We can keep moving,” he offers. “North to where the river forgets its name. East to a village that never learned ours. West to a coast so wide your maps would have to be stitched to hold it.”

“Or we can stay,” you say, looking at the hut. “A season. Enough to learn what the wind calls this ridge.”

“And after?”

“After,” you say, and you smile, “we will see which direction wants us.” He laughs—the sound startles the night and then pleases it.

“Say it again,” he asks, selfish for once. “I love you.” He closes his eyes. “I love you,” he returns, no less greedy.

You finally kiss him. Slowly, knowing you will return to the motion tomorrow and the next day.

At the palace, banners are moved, seals are pressed, a name is stripped clean of its titles and set back on the table like a plain bowl. The King signs. The Queen folds her hands and does not open them again that night. The Crown Prince sends men with tired horses to bad ground and calls it diligence. The wife sleeps with a straight back and wakes with the taste of iron in her mouth.

A servant will say later that a plum leaf fell into the stone basin in the hidden garden and refused to float.

None of that lives here, on this shoulder of the mountain.

Here, your breath creates soft clouds that move in and out of each other. Here, the horse pushes its nose into Mingyu’s hand and tells him in the old animal language that it will carry you farther if asked. Here, frost writes thin letters on the plank, and you read them as permission.

You are cold. You are not unarmed.

When you finally lie down, he draws you into the hollow under his collarbone as if you were made to live there. He says nothing more of kings or brothers. He listens to your heart until his own decides to walk the same pace.

In the hours before dawn, you wake and realise that even hunted, even hungry, you are more yourself than you have ever been. You wake with your name intact.

“Ready?” Mingyu asks.

“Ready,” you say, and mean it twice.

The trail runs ahead, a thin thread on the foundation of the earth.

You step into the future. You are not forgiven. You are not condemned. You are chosen, and you are choosing.

The soldiers will come and then go. The Crown Prince will sit taller and then wonder at the ache in his back. The King will grow old, the Queen older, the wife will eventually learn that victory is a room with no windows. The jade lady will count seeds and someday lose track of which season she is in.

You will count streams. You will find a market where the thread-seller loops patience around her fingers. You will map a coastline that tastes of salt and forgiveness. You will stop under an apricot tree when spring remembers it is allowed, and you will lie beneath it and pretend you can hear the petals land.

My light, Mingyu will say, not because he wishes to own you, but because he needs a word for the way you turn the world visible.

My moon, you will answer, not because he lights your path every night, but because he knows how to stay when the sun decides to be elsewhere.

A/N: Have I ever written a piece this long? No. Am I very unconfident with how this turned out, but did I post it anyway? Yes. Did it break my heart while I wrote this? Heck yes. I hope you enjoy reading it! And I apologise in advance for any historical inaccuracies I may have made, I tried my best. 💟

Send me your thoughts - feedback/fangirling is always welcome.

(Collage created by me. Credits to owners of the pictures taken from Pinterest.)

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