Sori had prepared to hate him.

She had done it carefully, over several days, the way a general prepares a wall. A man who bought a bride with ten chests of silver and twenty bolts of brocade was not a man to be liked. A man who accepted a girl he had never met, from a household he had never entered, because a dead man's signature said so, was either a fool or a brute, and she had arranged her face for both. She had practiced a cool, level, faintly disdainful expression in the water of the washbasin, until Madam Bae caught her at it and asked if she had a toothache.

So she was entirely unready for the young man who came up the mountain path on the fifteenth day of her confinement, leading his own horse by the bridle, with a basket of persimmons hanging from the saddle and an expression of such open, anxious goodwill that she nearly dropped the tray she was carrying.

"Forgive me," he called, from the gate, before anyone had said a word. "I did not send word. I thought it might be a trouble, and I was afraid you would tell me not to come. Is this the clinic of Physician Yeom? I am Ko Seonwoo, of Hwayang. I have come to ask after the health of Mistress Jang."

He bowed. It was a real bow, deep, from the waist, the bow a man gives an elder. Then he straightened, and she saw his face properly for the first time.

He was perhaps twenty-three. He was not handsome in the way of a painted scholar, but he had a good, square, honest face, brown from the weather, with wide-set eyes and a mouth that seemed to be perpetually on the edge of an apology. His robe was fine but not showy, a deep indigo cotton with a modest brocade trim, and the hem was dusty from the road. He had clearly walked the last stretch. There was a thorn caught in his sleeve.

He was, in short, entirely unobjectionable. Sori felt her carefully constructed contempt slide off like water off a roof.

"Master Ko," she said, and bowed, because she had been taught to. "You are very kind to come."

"Not at all. Not at all." He turned a little pink. "I should have come sooner. My father said it was improper, with the household in mourning and then in rejoicing, and there was the matter of the Steward's letters. But I thought, if she were my own sister, I would want someone to ask." He stopped. "That is. I do not mean. I only meant that I was worried."

Behind him, Madam Bae had appeared in the door of the herb shed with her stick, and was looking at the persimmons with the shrewd interest of a woman who knew what they cost in the market.

"You had better come in," Sori said, helplessly. "There is tea."

---

They sat on the veranda, because it would not have been proper to sit anywhere else. Madam Bae took up her post at the far end with her beans, pretending to be deaf. Sori knelt on one cushion, and Seonwoo knelt on another, at a correct distance, with his hands on his knees and his back straight. Mokryeon, who had been summoned from the courtyard, hovered at the corner in a state of rapturous attention.

He talked for a while about nothing. The weather. The road. A cousin of his who had been thrown by a mule. It was a stumbling, slightly nervous sort of talk, the talk of a man who had rehearsed a great many things to say in the saddle and found that none of them survived the arrival. She found, to her dismay, that she liked listening to it.

Then, abruptly, in the middle of a sentence about mules, he stopped. He looked down at his hands. He drew a breath.

"Mistress Jang. May I speak plainly?"

She felt her stomach tighten. "Please."

"I did not choose this." He said it all in a rush, not looking at her. "The betrothal. I want you to know that. I was twenty-one when my father told me. I was in the counting house, going over the accounts for the autumn shipment, and he came in and said it as if he were telling me the price of rice. He and your late father were friends when they were young. They made a promise over a bottle of wine, and my father is a man who keeps his promises, even when they are rather old and rather damp." He gave a short, unhappy laugh. "I had never seen you. I did not know whether you would be kind or clever or cruel. I only knew that I was to marry a stranger, and that she would not be asked either."

Sori sat very still.

"I do not want you to think I am ungrateful," he went on. "The Jang house is an old and honorable one. It is a great privilege. I know that. But I thought, if it was to happen at all, you should hear from me that I would not wish to force you into anything. If, when the time comes, you find that you cannot, or do not wish to, I would rather know it from your own lips than be told by a steward."

The words hung between them. She did not know what to say. In all of her careful preparation, she had never imagined this.

"That is very generous," she managed at last.

"It is not generosity. It is only decency." He smiled a little, crookedly. "My mother taught me that a man who cannot be refused is not worth marrying."

He was telling the truth. She could see it as clearly as she had ever seen it in any speaker's face, in the open set of his shoulders, in the way his eyes held hers without sliding away. She had spent her life listening for lies, because a translator who cannot hear a lie is a translator who gets people hurt. And there was no lie in this man. There was only a decent, worried, slightly foolish person who had been handed a pen and told to sign.

Something heavy turned over in her chest. It would have been so much easier if he had been cruel.

"There is one more thing," Seonwoo said, lowering his voice. He glanced toward the corner, where Mokryeon was straining to hear. "I do not wish to alarm you. It is probably nothing. But my father has received two letters from the Steward in the last month. Both of them ask whether the remaining chests of the betrothal gift might be sent early. For the household's expenses." He frowned. "My father found it odd. A household as old as yours should not need to ask. He said nothing of it to me, but I happened to see the second letter on his desk."

Sori's pulse quickened. She thought of a smooth smile, and a seal that had been taken.

"I am sure it is a matter of ordinary business," she said carefully.

"I am sure it is." He did not look sure. "I only thought you might wish to know."

---

The door of the dispensary slid open, and the physician came out with a tray.

Sori had known he would. She had felt it, in a way she could not have explained, for the whole of the last quarter hour, the awareness of him moving about on the other side of the paper wall. She had heard the small sounds of the kettle and the cups. She had heard the soft rasp of his sleeve against the doorframe, which meant that he had stopped in the doorway and listened.

He came across the veranda in his plain grey robe, with his eyes lowered. He set the tray down at Seonwoo's knee with both hands, a small formal courtesy. There were three cups, and a dish of dried jujubes, and a pot from which a thin sweet steam was rising.

Seonwoo rose to his knees at once and bowed.

"Physician Yeom," he said. "I am grateful. I have heard much of your skill. I confess I did not expect to find the great healer of Cheongmun so young."

Taesan inclined his head.

"I wonder," Seonwoo said, with perfect earnestness, "whether you might advise me. My father suffers from a pain in the joints in winter. The local doctors have tried many remedies. I have heard that you use a decoction of notopterygium and angelica for the cold-damp type. Would that be suitable for a man of sixty?"

It was a genuine question. There was nothing mocking in it, nothing of the condescension that Sori had half feared. Seonwoo was addressing the physician as one man addresses another whose knowledge he respects, and he was waiting for the answer with his head slightly tilted, like a student.

Taesan did not answer at once.

She saw his hand rise, and falter, and fall back to his knee. She saw the faint tightening at the corner of his jaw. It had occurred to her, belatedly, that every other person in this kingdom had assumed he was a mute who could not read the kind of question he was being asked, and that no one had ever put it to him quite like this, as a question that deserved an answer.

He looked at her.

It was only a glance, a flicker, but she understood it. He could have written the answer. He had paper and a brush. But the paper was on the table in the dispensary, and the clinic was not a place where he used it before strangers, and he did not want to walk out of the circle of this conversation and leave her sitting alone with the man who was to be her husband.

"I can tell you what he says," she said quietly. "A little. I have been here long enough to learn some of his gestures."

"Ah!" Seonwoo turned to her, delighted. "Would you?"

Taesan lifted his hands. He signed it slowly, in the way he had learned for her sake, with the plain forms in front and the particular ones held back. It was a long answer, and it was careful, and she translated it as she went, with no hesitation, in the quiet, even voice she had used for ten thousand sentences before.

"He says yes, with caution. For a man of sixty the dose must be halved. The notopterygium is drying, and it can weaken the stomach in the old. He suggests adding a little dried ginger and honey to protect the digestion, and that your father should take it warm, never cold, and not on an empty belly." She paused. "He also says that it is better to begin in autumn, before the cold sets in, than to wait for the pain. Prevention is gentler than cure."

Seonwoo was writing it down in his head, nodding.

"That is exactly what the old physician in Hwayang never told us," he said. "Thank you. Thank you, both. It is rare to see a patient and her doctor understand one another so well."

He meant it kindly. He meant nothing else by it at all.

But Sori felt, as she lowered her hands, a faint warmth rising up her neck. She did not look at the physician. She was very conscious of the distance between his knee and hers, which was perhaps a foot, and of the fact that she had just said *he* over and over for three full minutes, and that every time she had said it, it had been easy.

---

Taesan did not know how to bear it.

He sat with his hands folded on his knee and his eyes lowered and a cup of tea going cold at his elbow, and he listened to the two of them talk. It was a thing he did well, listening. He had had practice. He heard the lilt of the young man's voice, the courteous rise and fall of it, the clean, open, effortless sound of a person who had never in his life been unable to say what he meant. He heard her answering, in that soft, quick, careful way she had, a voice that he knew was not her own and was somehow all the more hers for that, and he heard how she laughed, once, startled, when the young man said something about mules.

He had never heard her laugh aloud before. He had seen it. He had felt it, once, in the quiver of the quilt behind the screen. But she had never done it where he could hear.

The sound went into him like a nail.

It was ridiculous. He knew that it was ridiculous. He was a physician and a man of thirty-one and he had spent six years learning to feel nothing, with a discipline as exacting as any monk's. He knew exactly what a pang of this kind was. He had prescribed for it in other men, with a dry herbal tea and a stern look. It was envy. It was nothing but envy, the common, small, ugly ache of a man watching another man do something easily that he himself cannot do at all.

The boy could stand next to her in the daylight. He could say her name aloud before her mother and before the steward and before the whole of Hwayang. He could ask her whether she would walk in the garden, and she could answer, and the words would be heard, and no one would have to wonder what had been meant. He could give her a house. He could give her a life that had no burned floor in it, and no locked door, and no man standing at night in the passage with his hand against his throat.

And he was kind. That was the worst of it. He was kind, and he was honest, and he had looked at Taesan, a nameless country healer who could not speak, and bowed to him as to an equal.

Taesan could not even hate him.

He turned the cup in his hands and watched the surface of the tea shiver. He had no right, he told himself again, to want anything. She was a patient, and she was a stranger, and she had a life that was not his to enter. He had made certain, six years ago, that nothing in his future would ever again require him to be the man who is looked to.

But his hands, the traitors, would not stop remembering the weight of her fingers under them. A touch lighter than a leaf. A hand planted on a palm, saying *I will not run.*

He lifted his head. She was already looking at him.

The young man was speaking. She was not listening. Her eyes, over the rim of her cup, met his across the veranda for the space of a breath, dark and steady and a little afraid, and in that look there was nothing that anyone could have named, and everything.

He dropped his gaze. He took up the tea and drank it, though it was cold.

---

She felt it before she saw it, the quality of his silence changing.

Sori kept her face turned toward Seonwoo and her attention divided, as she had trained herself to divide it, listening with one ear to what was said and with the other to everything else. She heard the small sound of a cup set down. She heard a breath held and let go. She heard, as plainly as if it had been spoken, a kind of low, painful withdrawal, a door being gently shut from the inside.

"Mistress Jang," said Seonwoo, in the bright voice of a man who has just thought of something clever. "Forgive me. I do not wish to impose. But the plum grove behind the clinic is said to be very fine in spring. If you felt strong enough, I wonder whether you might care to walk there with me for a little while? Only a little. With your maid, of course, and the good lady over there, if she does not object."

He had turned the full warmth of his goodwill on her. He meant no more by it than he meant by anything. And it was, she thought, with a small hopeless clarity, the kindest invitation she had ever been offered by anyone who was not her mother.

On the edge of her vision, she saw the physician's hand move on his knee and then go still.

"You are very good," she said. "I am afraid I am not strong enough yet. The physician has forbidden me anything more than the veranda. I am meant to rest." She smiled, and made it a real smile, because he deserved one. "But I am grateful for the thought. Truly."

"Of course. Of course. How thoughtless of me." He colored again. "I should have known. Forgive me. Another time, then."

He did not seem to take offense. He rose, shortly after, and made his farewells with the same flustered, formal courtesy with which he had arrived, handing the basket of persimmons to Mokryeon with a flourish and bowing to Madam Bae, who bowed back with a faint cackle. At the gate, with the reins of his horse in his hand, he turned and looked back at the veranda, at Sori kneeling in the afternoon light.

"Mistress Ihwa," he said.

She had not been called that in a month by anyone who was not part of the household. It still sounded like the name of a stranger. She lifted her head.

"I will not make you unhappy," Seonwoo said. His voice was low and steady, and there was no hesitation in it at all. "Whatever comes. Whatever you decide. I give you my word on that. I will not make you unhappy."

He bowed again, and mounted, and rode down the path between the trees, and she watched the white of the persimmon basket jolting on his saddle until it was gone.

She stood at the gate for a long time.

It was a lovely promise. It was an honorable one. It was, she thought, exactly what a good man would say, and she had no doubt at all that he meant it. And it settled upon her, as she stood there in the thin spring light, like a stone laid gently on her chest.

It would have been so easy to resist a villain. It was very hard to refuse a man who was only trying to be kind.

---

He did not look at her when he came in.

She had returned to the main room to collect the tray, and he was already there, kneeling by the low table, his back to her, sorting a pile of roots with great and unnecessary concentration. The cups were gone. The jujubes were gone. The room was very tidy.

She stopped in the doorway.

"Physician," she said.

He did not turn.

"That was very well done," she said, trying to keep her voice light. "The advice for Master Ko's father. I think you may have won yourself a loyal patient."

He inclined his head by a fraction of an inch. It was an acknowledgment, and it was also a dismissal, and she felt the unfairness of it.

She crossed the floor, because there was nothing else to do. She knelt at the corner of the table and reached for the single cup that remained, a small clay one with a chip in the rim, and as she lifted it, he reached for it too.

His hand closed on the other side.

They held it between them. He still did not look at her. His eyes were on the grain of the table, and his jaw was set, and the tips of his ears were an alarming shade of red. His fingers were rigid. It seemed to her that he was holding the cup with enormous care, to prevent himself from holding anything else.

"You are angry," she said, very softly, aloud. Then, because he could not answer that, she lifted her free hand. *You are angry.*

He shook his head, once, quickly. *No.*

*You are.*

*Not angry,* he signed, jerkily. His hand fell. He seemed to search for the shape of what he wanted to say, and gave it up, and shook his head again, and pulled the cup out of her fingers with a rough little tug and set it down on the table.

It hit the wood harder than he had meant it to. The sound rang out in the quiet room, a sharp, small, unmistakable *crack.*

He flinched. She flinched. They both looked at the cup.

It had not broken. It sat there, askew, rocking very slightly on its base, a single drop of cold tea trembling on the rim. She stared at it. She stared at the stiff line of his shoulders. She stared at the ears.

Something rose in her that was either laughter or tears, and she genuinely could not tell which. It came up her throat in a hot, helpless wave and she pressed her lips together and bent her head so that he should not see her face.

Her shoulders shook. She could not stop them.

He glanced up, alarmed. She saw his expression change, saw the anger, if it had been anger, go out of it like air out of a bellows, saw him begin to say something with his hands and abandon it. He looked at her with a kind of helpless, wounded bewilderment, and it was this, in the end, that undid her.

She put her hand over her mouth. She was laughing, or crying, or both. She did not know. She only knew that there were two people in the room and one cup between them, and that neither of them had said a thing, and that it was the most honest conversation she had had all day.