On the second morning, Sori learned that her new body was afraid of water.
She discovered it by accident. Mokryeon came into the room with a copper basin held against her hip, steam curling from the surface, and said brightly that it was time to wash the young mistress's face. Sori saw the water tilt, saw the light slide across it, and her whole body folded inward before she could think. Her shoulders rose, her breath stopped, and her hands came up in front of her chest like a child's.
The basin froze in the air. Mokryeon's smile slipped.
"Mistress?"
"I'm fine," Sori said. The words came out in careful, formal Korean, the borrowed grammar sitting in her mouth like a stone she had not yet learned to carry. "I only. The steam surprised me."
Mokryeon looked at her for a long moment, and then she set the basin on the floor, well out of reach, and wrung out a dry cloth instead. She did not say anything about it, but her hands were gentle, and her eyes had gone soft in a way that made Sori's stomach turn. *This body remembers something,* she thought. *Something that happened to Ihwa, near water. And I am the one who has to flinch for it.*
She let herself be wiped and combed and tucked back into the quilt, and she kept her eyes on the ceiling.
---
The clinic, in daylight, was not what she had first imagined.
She had seen only fragments the day before, shapes swimming at the edge of fever. Now, propped against a bolster with the screens slid back a hand's width, she took inventory the way she had once learned to take inventory of every new interpreting job: the exits, the people, the things that could go wrong.
The main room was long and low, with a floor of oiled wood worn pale in the places where feet had passed most often. The wall of tiny drawers ran from corner to corner, and each drawer had a brush-written label that she could read without effort, which was both a relief and a horror. *Angelica root. Licorice. Dried tangerine peel. Skullcap. Cassia bark.* Bundles of leaves hung from the rafters, turning slowly in the draft. A low work table stood near the brazier, scattered with a stone mortar, brass scales, and a rolled mat of cut roots. Beyond the open screen was a courtyard no bigger than a modest garden, with an ancient, twisted tree at its center whose bark shone faintly, strangely, like tarnished silver.
And in the far corner of the room, half hidden by a tall wooden screen painted with grey mountains, there was a place she was not meant to look at.
She looked anyway.
The floor behind the screen was scorched. It was an old burn, years old, she thought, long cooled and scrubbed and walked over, but the wood had never recovered. A dark scar ran across the boards and up the base of the wall, black as a brushstroke, with a ragged shadow at its edge where something had once stood. The air near it smelled different. Colder. Like a room that people had agreed not to enter.
She turned her face away.
She was still staring determinedly at the tree when the screen slid open and the physician came in with a tray.
---
He moved the way she remembered, quietly, without wasted motion. He knelt by her bedside, set the tray on the floor, and lifted a lacquer bowl in both hands. Steam rose from it, smelling of rice and ginger and something deep and earthy. He held it toward her.
Sori took it. Her hands shook, and he waited until they steadied before he let go.
"Thank you," she said aloud, then felt foolish, because he would not answer, because Mokryeon had called him mute, because he was looking at her mouth as though the sound of it were something fascinating and slightly sad.
She tasted the porridge. It was bland and warm and almost unbearably comforting. She ate half of it before she remembered to be careful, and when she looked up again he had settled on his heels with his hands on his knees, watching her.
There was a silence. It was not awkward, exactly. It was more like standing at the edge of a river with no bridge, both people aware of the water and neither willing to be the first to wade in.
Sori set the bowl down. She lifted her hands.
*Hello,* she signed, slowly, in the clear, round shapes she used for strangers. *My name is*
She stopped. Her fingers hung in the air, half-formed.
She could not say her own name. The man did not know who she was, and if she spelled *Sori* into the air, she did not know what he would do with it. She did not know what she wanted him to do with it. She only knew that it was the one thing in this world that was truly hers, and she was not ready to hand it to someone who might not be able to hold it.
His eyes followed her unfinished sentence. He watched her fingers fold slowly back down into her lap.
Then he raised his own hand.
It began as it had the day before, rough and idiosyncratic. He touched two fingers to his lips and turned them outward, then spread his palm and tilted it like a leaf falling. She frowned. He did it again. Then he mimed a cup lifted to his mouth, and lay his cheek against his folded hands.
*Eat,* she thought. *Sleep.*
"Rest?" she guessed aloud. "You want me to rest?"
He shook his head, impatient, and tried again. His hand drew a slow arc across his chest, then fluttered downward in a quick pattering motion, his fingers drumming the air.
*Rain,* she realized. *It's going to rain.*
She signed it back, her own version, the fingers falling soft and loose from above. His whole face changed. It was a small thing, a loosening around the eyes, the corner of his mouth tucking in, but she saw it, and she understood that she had just done something he had waited a very long time for.
She tried the question again. *Who are you?* The right hand flat, thumb up, then the quick sharp question. He tilted his head, lost, and she had to say it three different ways before he understood. When he did, he made a face of mock distress, as though to say, *You are asking too much, too fast.* She laughed. It was the first real laugh she had managed since waking, and it came out cracked and astonished, and it hurt her ribs.
He was struggling. She could see it. He understood perhaps one sign in three, and the rest he pieced together from her face and the flow of her hands, a language made of guesswork and instinct. Half of what she said went past him like birds. Half of what he said went past her. But when the signs met, the click of it was almost physical, a latch dropping into place.
She grew impatient. "I just want to say *thank you,*" she muttered in English, and then bit her tongue, but he had already noticed the shape of her frustration. He pressed his lips together hard, and she realized with indignation that he was trying not to laugh.
She glared at him. He lifted both hands in surrender, and somewhere under the grey hemp and the long careful face, she saw a person who had once known how to be amused.
---
The door slammed open.
"Mistress! I have your medicine, and the steward says. Oh!"
Mokryeon stood on the threshold with a tray of small clay cups, and her eyes were fixed on Sori's raised hands. Sori's fingers were still caught mid-sign, curled and bright in the air, her wrists turned in a pattern that no one in this kingdom could possibly have understood.
Her heart stopped.
The physician did not look at the maid. He reached out and caught Sori's hand, lightly, and moved it. He folded her fingers one at a time into an open palm, then straightened them again, then bent them, a slow, deliberate, repeated exercise. He took her other hand and did the same. He glanced up at Mokryeon and gave her a short, serious nod, and then, with an expression of the most impeccable medical gravity, he pointed to his own wrist and then to Sori's, and made a small kneading motion in the air.
Mokryeon's face cleared.
"Oh," she breathed. "Is that part of the treatment, Physician? Exercises for the hands?"
He nodded once, solemn as a temple bell.
"After such a long fever," Mokryeon said, wide-eyed, "the joints stiffen. My grandmother's did." She set the tray down with an apologetic bow, retreated a step, and added in a rush, "I will just leave this, and fetch more charcoal. I will not disturb you."
She backed out of the room, still bowing.
The door closed. Sori let out a breath that she felt she had been holding since the previous morning.
"Hand exercises," she said, and then began to laugh, helplessly, silently, shaking against the pillow. The physician's shoulders were shaking too. He pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth and turned his face away, and for a few seconds they were two conspirators in the middle of a very quiet room, unable to look at each other without breaking.
It was a lie, and they had told it together.
The laughter faded. Sori wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. When she looked up, his face had gone serious again, but it was a different seriousness than before. It was the look of a man who had just crossed a line and was surprised to find that the ground held.
---
He took her pulse again that afternoon.
It was part of his routine, she gathered. Morning, noon, and evening, three fingers laid gently on the inside of her wrist, his eyes unfocused as he listened to some rhythm deep beneath the skin. Sori held still and tried not to think about how close he was, and how carefully he held her arm, as though it might turn to glass.
This time he did something different.
When he was done, he did not release her. He turned her hand over, palm up, and drew the tip of one finger across the soft skin of her wrist.
It was a tiny movement, no more than a breath. But she felt it all the way up her arm. He drew a curve, then a short line, then two small strokes crossing, and she realized with a shiver that he was *signing on her skin.* The gestures his hands usually made in the air were being traced in miniature onto her wrist, the sign for a flower, or a bell, or perhaps neither. A message he did not want to be seen, in a room where anyone might look through the screen.
Her breath caught. She could not help it. His fingers stopped.
They both sat very still. His hand was light as a leaf on her arm. She could feel the warmth of him, the faint roughness of a calloused fingertip, the way her own pulse was suddenly loud under his touch, speeding, betraying her.
He heard it. She knew he did. A physician could not fail to. His eyes flicked up to her face, then quickly away, and a faint color rose along his cheekbones.
He released her wrist. He cleared his throat, a dry, soundless motion in the air, and busied himself with the cloth and the cups. She stared at the ceiling and told herself, very firmly, that it was nothing. He was a physician. She was a patient. She had been alone in an impossible place for two days, and she was starving for any kind of human touch.
Both of them very carefully did not look at each other for a long minute.
---
Later, when the light had turned amber, Sori gathered her courage.
She waited until Mokryeon had gone to the courtyard to haggle with a vendor, and until the only sound was the dripping of the eaves. She sat up against the bolster and lifted her hands, and she made them slow, and plain.
*Why,* she signed. *You know I am different. You saw. Why do you not tell them?*
He was seated by the brazier, grinding something in the mortar, and he stopped as soon as her hands began to move. He set down the pestle, wiped his palms, and looked at her for so long that she began to fear she had broken something.
Then he answered.
His signs were still rough, but he used the ones they had built together over the day. His hand pointed to her, then to his own chest, then made a gesture she could only read as *keep.* He lifted a finger to his lips, the oldest sign for silence in the world. And then he did something new. He touched his index finger to the center of his own chest, and then drew it outward, as if pulling something from his heart and laying it on the floor between them.
*Not mine,* it said. *Not mine to tell.*
It was a sentence that contained, she thought, an entire philosophy. It was not *I will protect you.* It was not *I believe you.* It was only an acknowledgment that what had happened to her belonged to her, and that he would not take it and spend it on other people's curiosity.
Sori's eyes stung. She had been translated, spoken for, represented, interpreted, her whole life. Not once had a stranger told her that her story was hers alone.
*Thank you,* she signed, and this time the sign was her own, the true one. The flat fingers touching the chin and sweeping outward like an offering.
He watched it carefully. She did it again, slower, and then again. He lifted his own hand and copied the motion, and it came out stiff and unpracticed, like a man writing his name in a script he had only just learned.
She took his hand in hers without thinking. The gesture was automatic, the way she would have corrected any student. She straightened his wrist, shifted his thumb, adjusted the angle of his palm. "Like this," she said aloud. "From your chin. Like you are giving someone something."
His hand lay in hers, large and warm and very still. She realized, a little late, what she was doing, and let go.
He tried again. This time the sign came out almost right.
He held it in the air for a moment, his palm open, his fingers just slightly curved. Then, at the very edge of his mouth, something moved. It was only the barest curve, a single crooked line pulling upward at one corner, and it came and went so quickly that she thought she had imagined it.
But the memory of it stayed with her for the rest of the evening, small and bright as a coin.
---
The steward came on the third morning, earlier than he had promised.
Sori heard the horse first, the stamp and snort in the lane outside, and then the creak of the gate. By the time the clinic door slid open she had arranged herself against the bolster, hands folded in her lap, the way she had seen Mokryeon arrange her own hands when she was nervous.
The man who stepped across the threshold was in his fifties, tall and spare, in a robe of dark green silk so fine that it seemed to drink the light. His hair was oiled and neatly bound, his beard trimmed to a precise point, and his shoes were spotless despite the muddy lane. He carried himself with the effortless, unhurried confidence of a man who had never once been refused.
Steward Jang Gwangseok. Her late father's cousin, Mokryeon had whispered, who had managed the household accounts since the master's death.
He bowed to Sori, a perfect, shallow, correct bow. "Young Mistress. I rejoice to see you well."
"Thank you, Steward," she said. She kept her eyes lowered, the way Mokryeon had coached her.
He smiled. It was a very good smile, warm, composed, concerned. It did not touch his eyes at all. His gaze moved past her and began to travel around the room. It lingered on the wall of drawers, on the scorched corner behind the screen, on the herbs, on the tray of untouched medicine cups. It was not the look of a man making polite conversation. It was the look of an auditor.
Then it came to rest on the physician, who knelt silent at the edge of the room with his head bowed.
Gwangseok looked at him for a very long time.
"I wonder, Physician," he said at last, pleasantly, "how long you intend to keep my mistress from her own home. A clinic is no place for a lady of her station. There is a wedding to be considered. The household has waited long enough."
Taesan did not raise his head. He lifted one hand, slowly, and made a small gesture of apology and deference, and then touched two fingers to Sori's wrist, and shook his head.
*Not yet,* the gesture said. *Not well enough.*
Gwangseok's smile did not move. "I see," he said. "Then I shall return tomorrow, and the day after, until the Physician judges otherwise. His devotion to his patient is. admirable."
The pause before the last word was so slight that she might have imagined it. She did not think she had.
He bowed again, turned, and went out. His shadow slid across the paper screen, paused for a second just outside the door, and then moved on. The horse stamped in the lane.
Sori let her breath go.
She looked at the physician. He had finally lifted his head, and his face was calm, but one hand was pressed flat to his knee, and the knuckles were white. He met her eyes. For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then, behind the steward's retreating back, and where no one outside the room could possibly see, Sori lifted her hand to her chin and swept it outward. The sign that was now, quietly and unmistakably, theirs.
*Thank you.*
He watched it, and slowly, unhurriedly, as if he were setting down something heavy that he had carried for a long time, he nodded.
You've reached the end of this chapter
On the second morning, Sori learned that her new body was afraid of water.
She discovered it by accident. Mokryeon came into the room with a copper basin held against her hip, steam curling from the surface, and said brightly that it was time to wash the young mistress's face. Sori saw the water tilt, saw the light slide across it, and her whole body folded inward before she could think. Her shoulders rose, her breath stopped, and her hands came up in front of her chest like a child's.
The basin froze in the air. Mokryeon's smile slipped.
"Mistress?"
"I'm fine," Sori said. The words came out in careful, formal Korean, the borrowed grammar sitting in her mouth like a stone she had not yet learned to carry. "I only. The steam surprised me."
Mokryeon looked at her for a long moment, and then she set the basin on the floor, well out of reach, and wrung out a dry cloth instead. She did not say anything about it, but her hands were gentle, and her eyes had gone soft in a way that made Sori's stomach turn. *This body remembers something,* she thought. *Something that happened to Ihwa, near water. And I am the one who has to flinch for it.*
She let herself be wiped and combed and tucked back into the quilt, and she kept her eyes on the ceiling.
---
The clinic, in daylight, was not what she had first imagined.
She had seen only fragments the day before, shapes swimming at the edge of fever. Now, propped against a bolster with the screens slid back a hand's width, she took inventory the way she had once learned to take inventory of every new interpreting job: the exits, the people, the things that could go wrong.
The main room was long and low, with a floor of oiled wood worn pale in the places where feet had passed most often. The wall of tiny drawers ran from corner to corner, and each drawer had a brush-written label that she could read without effort, which was both a relief and a horror. *Angelica root. Licorice. Dried tangerine peel. Skullcap. Cassia bark.* Bundles of leaves hung from the rafters, turning slowly in the draft. A low work table stood near the brazier, scattered with a stone mortar, brass scales, and a rolled mat of cut roots. Beyond the open screen was a courtyard no bigger than a modest garden, with an ancient, twisted tree at its center whose bark shone faintly, strangely, like tarnished silver.
And in the far corner of the room, half hidden by a tall wooden screen painted with grey mountains, there was a place she was not meant to look at.
She looked anyway.
The floor behind the screen was scorched. It was an old burn, years old, she thought, long cooled and scrubbed and walked over, but the wood had never recovered. A dark scar ran across the boards and up the base of the wall, black as a brushstroke, with a ragged shadow at its edge where something had once stood. The air near it smelled different. Colder. Like a room that people had agreed not to enter.
She turned her face away.
She was still staring determinedly at the tree when the screen slid open and the physician came in with a tray.
---
He moved the way she remembered, quietly, without wasted motion. He knelt by her bedside, set the tray on the floor, and lifted a lacquer bowl in both hands. Steam rose from it, smelling of rice and ginger and something deep and earthy. He held it toward her.
Sori took it. Her hands shook, and he waited until they steadied before he let go.
"Thank you," she said aloud, then felt foolish, because he would not answer, because Mokryeon had called him mute, because he was looking at her mouth as though the sound of it were something fascinating and slightly sad.
She tasted the porridge. It was bland and warm and almost unbearably comforting. She ate half of it before she remembered to be careful, and when she looked up again he had settled on his heels with his hands on his knees, watching her.
There was a silence. It was not awkward, exactly. It was more like standing at the edge of a river with no bridge, both people aware of the water and neither willing to be the first to wade in.
Sori set the bowl down. She lifted her hands.
*Hello,* she signed, slowly, in the clear, round shapes she used for strangers. *My name is*
She stopped. Her fingers hung in the air, half-formed.
She could not say her own name. The man did not know who she was, and if she spelled *Sori* into the air, she did not know what he would do with it. She did not know what she wanted him to do with it. She only knew that it was the one thing in this world that was truly hers, and she was not ready to hand it to someone who might not be able to hold it.
His eyes followed her unfinished sentence. He watched her fingers fold slowly back down into her lap.
Then he raised his own hand.
It began as it had the day before, rough and idiosyncratic. He touched two fingers to his lips and turned them outward, then spread his palm and tilted it like a leaf falling. She frowned. He did it again. Then he mimed a cup lifted to his mouth, and lay his cheek against his folded hands.
*Eat,* she thought. *Sleep.*
"Rest?" she guessed aloud. "You want me to rest?"
He shook his head, impatient, and tried again. His hand drew a slow arc across his chest, then fluttered downward in a quick pattering motion, his fingers drumming the air.
*Rain,* she realized. *It's going to rain.*
She signed it back, her own version, the fingers falling soft and loose from above. His whole face changed. It was a small thing, a loosening around the eyes, the corner of his mouth tucking in, but she saw it, and she understood that she had just done something he had waited a very long time for.
She tried the question again. *Who are you?* The right hand flat, thumb up, then the quick sharp question. He tilted his head, lost, and she had to say it three different ways before he understood. When he did, he made a face of mock distress, as though to say, *You are asking too much, too fast.* She laughed. It was the first real laugh she had managed since waking, and it came out cracked and astonished, and it hurt her ribs.
He was struggling. She could see it. He understood perhaps one sign in three, and the rest he pieced together from her face and the flow of her hands, a language made of guesswork and instinct. Half of what she said went past him like birds. Half of what he said went past her. But when the signs met, the click of it was almost physical, a latch dropping into place.
She grew impatient. "I just want to say *thank you,*" she muttered in English, and then bit her tongue, but he had already noticed the shape of her frustration. He pressed his lips together hard, and she realized with indignation that he was trying not to laugh.
She glared at him. He lifted both hands in surrender, and somewhere under the grey hemp and the long careful face, she saw a person who had once known how to be amused.
---
The door slammed open.
"Mistress! I have your medicine, and the steward says. Oh!"
Mokryeon stood on the threshold with a tray of small clay cups, and her eyes were fixed on Sori's raised hands. Sori's fingers were still caught mid-sign, curled and bright in the air, her wrists turned in a pattern that no one in this kingdom could possibly have understood.
Her heart stopped.
The physician did not look at the maid. He reached out and caught Sori's hand, lightly, and moved it. He folded her fingers one at a time into an open palm, then straightened them again, then bent them, a slow, deliberate, repeated exercise. He took her other hand and did the same. He glanced up at Mokryeon and gave her a short, serious nod, and then, with an expression of the most impeccable medical gravity, he pointed to his own wrist and then to Sori's, and made a small kneading motion in the air.
Mokryeon's face cleared.
"Oh," she breathed. "Is that part of the treatment, Physician? Exercises for the hands?"
He nodded once, solemn as a temple bell.
"After such a long fever," Mokryeon said, wide-eyed, "the joints stiffen. My grandmother's did." She set the tray down with an apologetic bow, retreated a step, and added in a rush, "I will just leave this, and fetch more charcoal. I will not disturb you."
She backed out of the room, still bowing.
The door closed. Sori let out a breath that she felt she had been holding since the previous morning.
"Hand exercises," she said, and then began to laugh, helplessly, silently, shaking against the pillow. The physician's shoulders were shaking too. He pressed the back of his wrist to his mouth and turned his face away, and for a few seconds they were two conspirators in the middle of a very quiet room, unable to look at each other without breaking.
It was a lie, and they had told it together.
The laughter faded. Sori wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. When she looked up, his face had gone serious again, but it was a different seriousness than before. It was the look of a man who had just crossed a line and was surprised to find that the ground held.
---
He took her pulse again that afternoon.
It was part of his routine, she gathered. Morning, noon, and evening, three fingers laid gently on the inside of her wrist, his eyes unfocused as he listened to some rhythm deep beneath the skin. Sori held still and tried not to think about how close he was, and how carefully he held her arm, as though it might turn to glass.
This time he did something different.
When he was done, he did not release her. He turned her hand over, palm up, and drew the tip of one finger across the soft skin of her wrist.
It was a tiny movement, no more than a breath. But she felt it all the way up her arm. He drew a curve, then a short line, then two small strokes crossing, and she realized with a shiver that he was *signing on her skin.* The gestures his hands usually made in the air were being traced in miniature onto her wrist, the sign for a flower, or a bell, or perhaps neither. A message he did not want to be seen, in a room where anyone might look through the screen.
Her breath caught. She could not help it. His fingers stopped.
They both sat very still. His hand was light as a leaf on her arm. She could feel the warmth of him, the faint roughness of a calloused fingertip, the way her own pulse was suddenly loud under his touch, speeding, betraying her.
He heard it. She knew he did. A physician could not fail to. His eyes flicked up to her face, then quickly away, and a faint color rose along his cheekbones.
He released her wrist. He cleared his throat, a dry, soundless motion in the air, and busied himself with the cloth and the cups. She stared at the ceiling and told herself, very firmly, that it was nothing. He was a physician. She was a patient. She had been alone in an impossible place for two days, and she was starving for any kind of human touch.
Both of them very carefully did not look at each other for a long minute.
---
Later, when the light had turned amber, Sori gathered her courage.
She waited until Mokryeon had gone to the courtyard to haggle with a vendor, and until the only sound was the dripping of the eaves. She sat up against the bolster and lifted her hands, and she made them slow, and plain.
*Why,* she signed. *You know I am different. You saw. Why do you not tell them?*
He was seated by the brazier, grinding something in the mortar, and he stopped as soon as her hands began to move. He set down the pestle, wiped his palms, and looked at her for so long that she began to fear she had broken something.
Then he answered.
His signs were still rough, but he used the ones they had built together over the day. His hand pointed to her, then to his own chest, then made a gesture she could only read as *keep.* He lifted a finger to his lips, the oldest sign for silence in the world. And then he did something new. He touched his index finger to the center of his own chest, and then drew it outward, as if pulling something from his heart and laying it on the floor between them.
*Not mine,* it said. *Not mine to tell.*
It was a sentence that contained, she thought, an entire philosophy. It was not *I will protect you.* It was not *I believe you.* It was only an acknowledgment that what had happened to her belonged to her, and that he would not take it and spend it on other people's curiosity.
Sori's eyes stung. She had been translated, spoken for, represented, interpreted, her whole life. Not once had a stranger told her that her story was hers alone.
*Thank you,* she signed, and this time the sign was her own, the true one. The flat fingers touching the chin and sweeping outward like an offering.
He watched it carefully. She did it again, slower, and then again. He lifted his own hand and copied the motion, and it came out stiff and unpracticed, like a man writing his name in a script he had only just learned.
She took his hand in hers without thinking. The gesture was automatic, the way she would have corrected any student. She straightened his wrist, shifted his thumb, adjusted the angle of his palm. "Like this," she said aloud. "From your chin. Like you are giving someone something."
His hand lay in hers, large and warm and very still. She realized, a little late, what she was doing, and let go.
He tried again. This time the sign came out almost right.
He held it in the air for a moment, his palm open, his fingers just slightly curved. Then, at the very edge of his mouth, something moved. It was only the barest curve, a single crooked line pulling upward at one corner, and it came and went so quickly that she thought she had imagined it.
But the memory of it stayed with her for the rest of the evening, small and bright as a coin.
---
The steward came on the third morning, earlier than he had promised.
Sori heard the horse first, the stamp and snort in the lane outside, and then the creak of the gate. By the time the clinic door slid open she had arranged herself against the bolster, hands folded in her lap, the way she had seen Mokryeon arrange her own hands when she was nervous.
The man who stepped across the threshold was in his fifties, tall and spare, in a robe of dark green silk so fine that it seemed to drink the light. His hair was oiled and neatly bound, his beard trimmed to a precise point, and his shoes were spotless despite the muddy lane. He carried himself with the effortless, unhurried confidence of a man who had never once been refused.
Steward Jang Gwangseok. Her late father's cousin, Mokryeon had whispered, who had managed the household accounts since the master's death.
He bowed to Sori, a perfect, shallow, correct bow. "Young Mistress. I rejoice to see you well."
"Thank you, Steward," she said. She kept her eyes lowered, the way Mokryeon had coached her.
He smiled. It was a very good smile, warm, composed, concerned. It did not touch his eyes at all. His gaze moved past her and began to travel around the room. It lingered on the wall of drawers, on the scorched corner behind the screen, on the herbs, on the tray of untouched medicine cups. It was not the look of a man making polite conversation. It was the look of an auditor.
Then it came to rest on the physician, who knelt silent at the edge of the room with his head bowed.
Gwangseok looked at him for a very long time.
"I wonder, Physician," he said at last, pleasantly, "how long you intend to keep my mistress from her own home. A clinic is no place for a lady of her station. There is a wedding to be considered. The household has waited long enough."
Taesan did not raise his head. He lifted one hand, slowly, and made a small gesture of apology and deference, and then touched two fingers to Sori's wrist, and shook his head.
*Not yet,* the gesture said. *Not well enough.*
Gwangseok's smile did not move. "I see," he said. "Then I shall return tomorrow, and the day after, until the Physician judges otherwise. His devotion to his patient is. admirable."
The pause before the last word was so slight that she might have imagined it. She did not think she had.
He bowed again, turned, and went out. His shadow slid across the paper screen, paused for a second just outside the door, and then moved on. The horse stamped in the lane.
Sori let her breath go.
She looked at the physician. He had finally lifted his head, and his face was calm, but one hand was pressed flat to his knee, and the knuckles were white. He met her eyes. For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then, behind the steward's retreating back, and where no one outside the room could possibly see, Sori lifted her hand to her chin and swept it outward. The sign that was now, quietly and unmistakably, theirs.
*Thank you.*
He watched it, and slowly, unhurriedly, as if he were setting down something heavy that he had carried for a long time, he nodded.
You've reached the end of this chapter