The road to Cheongmun climbed through a world Sori had not known was waiting for her.

She had seen the mountain only once before, in the grey fog of a fever dream, jolting in a cart with her head against Mokryeon's shoulder. Now she walked it on her own feet, her borrowed legs still weak but willing, her sleeves tucked up and her skirt gathered in one hand, and the spring poured over her like warm water.

Plum blossoms were everywhere. They hung from the trees in drifts of white and blush, thick as a snowfall that had decided to stay. The slope on either side of the path was a river of petals, and every breath of wind sent a few of them spiraling down onto her shoulders and into her hair. Streams ran loud with snowmelt. Birds she could not name called from the branches, bright and unseen. The air smelled of wet earth and green shoots and something sweet and faint and very old.

She stopped on a bend in the path, one hand on a mossy boulder, and simply looked.

It was beautiful. She had been so frightened, so lost, so busy surviving, that she had not once let herself notice. This was a real place, wide and wild and alive, and she was standing in it. Whatever else was true, this world was not a dream, and it was not a stage, and it was not a punishment. It was simply somewhere, as real as the hospital corridors she had walked her whole life, and it was offering her its spring.

"Elder sister?" Gyuhan had stopped a few paces ahead. He glanced back, his brow creased. "Are you tired? We can rest."

"No." She smiled, and was surprised to find that it came easily. "I was only looking."

He followed her gaze up the slope and was silent for a moment. "You used to hate this road," he said, almost to himself. "You said the climb made your chest hurt."

"Perhaps I was wrong about it."

"Perhaps." He did not sound convinced, but he did not sound suspicious either. He sounded like a boy trying very hard to be patient with a mystery. "Come. We are not far."

Mokryeon, puffing behind them with the basket, muttered something about young people and their endless enthusiasm. Sori laughed, and the sound of it startled the birds out of a nearby tree, a flurry of wings against the blossom, and for a moment all of the air was filled with white.

---

Madam Bae met them at the gate.

She was a tiny, stooped old woman with a face like a walnut and a back bent almost double, leaning on a stick of knotted pear wood. Her hair was a thin silver braid. Her clothes were patched and faded. But her eyes, black and bright and sharp as a crow's, missed nothing, and they fixed on Sori the instant she stepped through the gate.

"So," she said, in a cracked, cheerful voice. "This is the little mistress. The one who woke up."

"Madam Bae," Gyuhan said, bowing politely. "We have come for the physician's medicines."

"Of course you have. Of course." The old woman did not take her eyes from Sori. "Come in, come in. The boy is in the back. He will be glad to see you. Not that he will say so." She cackled. "He never says anything."

She led them in at a hobbling pace, her stick tapping the flagstones. The courtyard was exactly as Sori remembered it, small and neat and quiet, with the great silver tree standing at its center. In the full spring light the bark was even stranger than she recalled. It was not truly grey, she saw now, but a pale, metallic, shimmering silver, and the whole trunk gleamed faintly as if it had been dusted with moonlight.

The buds on its branches were tight, small, and closed.

"That is the silver plum," Madam Bae said, following her gaze. "The oldest in the district. Older than the clinic. Older than me, and I am older than dirt."

"It is lovely."

"It is a liar." The old woman said it cheerfully. "It looks as if it will bloom every spring. It never does." She cast a glance at Sori. "Are you well, child? You look pale. Sit. Here. Mokryeon, there is tea in the kitchen. Boy, you can help her."

Sori sank down gratefully onto the bench beneath the eaves. She was warm from the climb, and the sun was soft on her face, and the air was full of the smell of bruised leaves. She had a moment of pure, unguarded relief. She let her shoulders drop.

"This place is so peaceful," she said, half to herself. "It is okay. I mean. It is all right to just sit for a while."

The word dropped into the air like a stone.

She heard it a moment late. *Okay.* A single syllable of English, slipped out in a tired, unguarded moment. She had not said it in front of anyone in three weeks, and now it hung between her and the old woman, strange and sharp and impossible.

Madam Bae had stopped.

She stood with her stick planted on the flagstones, and her hands had tightened around the knot of wood. Her face did not change. But the old black eyes had gone very, very still. In her other hand she had been holding a gourd dipper, half full of water, and as Sori watched, the dipper tilted slowly in her fingers and the water ran out and splashed onto the stones.

Neither of them moved.

"What did you say, child?" the old woman said softly.

"Nothing," Sori said. Her voice came out high and thin. "I only. I said it is peaceful."

"Ah." Madam Bae looked at her a moment longer. Then she looked down at the spilled water, and at the empty gourd, and she gave a short, dry laugh. "My hands. Old things drop. Pay no attention to me."

She bent, with a creak of knees, to pick up the dipper. When she straightened, her face was as open and comic as before. But she did not look at Sori again until the tea was brought.

---

The meeting, when it came, was the most awkward thing Sori had ever witnessed.

She was sitting on the veranda with a cup of barley tea in her hands, listening to Gyuhan ask Mokryeon an endless series of questions about herbs, when the door to the dispensary slid open and the physician came out.

He was carrying a tray of small paper packets, and he stopped dead when he saw her.

For a heartbeat, nothing moved. The wind stirred the blossoms in the courtyard. Somewhere a bird called.

Then Taesan took a step back.

It was a tiny retreat, hardly more than a shifting of weight, but she saw it. And before she could stop herself, she took one back too, her heel scraping against the veranda boards. They both bowed at the same moment, stiffly, formally, exactly as far as courtesy demanded and not a hair more. They both straightened. They both looked, with the fierce, elaborate concentration of people who were absolutely not looking at each other, at a point on the wall about a foot to the left of the other's ear.

"Physician Yeom," she said.

He inclined his head.

"I have come for. The medicine."

He lifted the tray an inch, as if to say, *Here it is.*

"Thank you."

A pause.

"It is a fine day."

He glanced up at the sky. He nodded, gravely, as though she had made a profound observation.

Beside them, Gyuhan had stopped speaking in the middle of a question about licorice. He turned his head to the left, to the right, from his sister's face to the physician's, back to his sister's. His expression of polite innocence was so perfectly maintained that it took her a moment to realize he was enjoying himself enormously.

"Elder sister," he said, in the blandest voice imaginable. "You are very red."

"It is the sun," she said.

"Ah," said Gyuhan. "The sun."

Taesan turned abruptly and busied himself with the tray. His ears, she noticed, were a most remarkable shade.

---

Madam Bae stole her away after the tea.

She did it neatly, with a casual hand on Sori's elbow and a remark about the blossoms behind the clinic that the young mistress simply must see. Gyuhan was deep in a conversation about dried ginger. Mokryeon was at the well. No one noticed the old woman steering her charge along the narrow path that curved around the back of the house, until the sound of the courtyard fell away and they were alone in a small, mossy hollow under the first trees.

Madam Bae sat down heavily on a flat stone and patted the one beside her.

"Sit, child. My knees will not stand much more of this."

Sori sat. Her heart was beating hard. "Madam, about before. I did not mean."

"Hush." The old woman waved a hand. "I am not going to ask. Not today. Today I am going to tell you a story, because old women like to tell stories, and because I think you might want to hear it." She settled her stick across her knees. "Do you know the silver plum?"

"Only that it is in the courtyard."

"It is more than that." Madam Bae gazed out between the trees, her eyes far away. "They say it bloomed here before the village. Before the kingdom. Before anyone put a name to this mountain. They say it blooms only once. Not once every year, mind. Once, in all the long life of the tree, for a single night, in the deepest winter, when the snow lies on the branches and the whole valley is quiet. On that night, the blossoms open all at once, silver as moonlight, and for as long as they last, the world." She paused. "Thins."

"Thins?"

"That is what my grandmother's grandmother said. The world grows thin. Things pass through that are not meant to." She turned her bright black eyes on Sori. "They say a door opens, child. A door to somewhere else. And those who stand before it must choose."

The wind had dropped. The blossoms hung motionless in the trees. Sori had stopped breathing.

"Is it just a story?" she whispered.

Madam Bae said nothing for a long time.

"The buds on that tree," she said at last, "have been swelling for three winters. Each year a little more. I have never seen them so full as they are now. I am an old woman. I have watched that tree for fifty years. And I will tell you what I think, little mistress. I think it is going to bloom soon. This winter, perhaps. The next at the latest."

Her face was lined, and weathered, and very kind.

"I do not know what I am telling you," she said. "I only know that you looked at that tree when you came through the gate the way a person looks at a thing they have been told about, and are afraid is true."

Sori's hands had curled into the folds of her skirt. She opened her mouth, closed it, and tried again, and the question came out in a rush, quiet and unsteady.

"Madam. If someone were. If someone had come from somewhere. very far away, and wanted to go back."

"Mm."

"Could they?"

The old woman looked at her for a very long moment. When she spoke, it was slowly, with great care, as though each word had been weighed.

"A door opens once," she said. "That is all I know. It opens one time. What it costs to walk through it, or to refuse it. that depends on the person." She reached over and patted Sori's cold hand with her dry, spotted one. "But there is always a price, child. Always. Whichever way you go."

She rose, groaning, on her stick. "Come. The boy will be wondering where his sister has gone."

Sori sat where she was. After a moment she reached into her sleeve and took out a small, battered notebook, the one she had bought from a village stall on the road, bound in rough paper, with a stub of charcoal tied to its spine. She had not told anyone why she wanted it.

She opened it to the first blank page and began to write, in English, in her own cramped, cursive hand.

*Mom's laugh. The sound of her laugh, how it started low.*

*The smell of the pharmacy on Fourth Street.*

*The sign for rain, the way Mom does it, with the little flutter at the end.*

*My own name. Ha Sori. Ha Sori. Ha Sori.*

She did not know why she was writing it. She only knew that there were things she was afraid of forgetting, and that she had just been told she might have a deadline.

---

The path back led through the plum grove, and he was waiting there.

She did not see him until she nearly walked into him. He was standing beneath the largest of the old trees, at the edge of the grove, one hand resting on a low branch. He had been waiting, she realized, and not very well. He started when he saw her, and the branch sprang up out of his fingers and showered them both in petals.

They stood in the falling blossom and looked at each other.

He was holding something. A bundle of dried herbs, tied with a cord. He held it out to her, awkwardly, in both hands, and she took it. Their fingers did not touch.

Then he turned and began to walk, slowly, along the path that wound between the trees. After a second she understood. He was going the same way. He was not leaving.

She fell into step beside him.

They did not speak. There was nothing to say, and no words to say it with, and no need. The grove was very quiet, and the light came down through the branches in long gold bars, and the blossoms drifted down around them like slow white snow. Sori could hear her own footsteps and his, matched almost exactly, and the sound of her heartbeat, which seemed to have decided to be rather loud.

Halfway through the grove, a low branch blocked the path. It hung just above head height, heavy with flowers, bent nearly to the ground by its own weight. She reached up to push it aside, and at the same instant he did too.

Their hands met on the branch.

Hers was beneath his. She felt the warmth of his palm settle over her knuckles, the rough edge of a callus against the back of her fingers. A shower of petals fell between them and caught in his sleeve.

Neither of them moved.

She thought, quite distinctly, *I should take my hand away.*

She did not.

He did not either. For three long seconds, four, five, they stood with their hands tangled together in the blossoms, and the whole forest seemed to hold its breath. She could see the pulse beating in the side of his throat. She could see the faint tremor in the fingers that held the branch. When she finally lifted her eyes, his were already on her face, dark and unguarded, with an expression so naked and so startled that it stole the air from her chest.

Then, with great care, he lifted the branch, and held it up out of her way.

She ducked beneath it. When she straightened on the other side, her face was burning, and her hands were not quite steady, and a single petal had come to rest on the back of her wrist, light as a breath.

She did not brush it off until they reached the gate.

---

The prescription was waiting on the veranda.

Gyuhan had it in his hands when she arrived, a long strip of paper in the physician's clear, strong script, and he was reading it with a thoughtful, hooded expression. Beside him, Taesan stood with his hands folded, looking at nothing.

"What does it say?" Sori asked.

Gyuhan held it out. She took it and read.

It was a formal medical order, written to the standard form. It stated that the patient, Mistress Jang Ihwa, had suffered a relapse of weakness in her limbs on the journey. It stated that for the proper restoration of her strength, thirty days of rest in the clinic were required, under the daily supervision of the physician, with no journeys, no visitors, and no obligations of any kind. At the bottom was his seal, in red.

She looked up, startled. He was not looking at her.

She thought of her own words, spoken weeks ago in the great hall, hardly more than a thread of hope. *I ask only for time.* He had remembered. In his own way, with brush and ink and a seal, he had given her exactly that.

Gyuhan read the paper over her shoulder. His eyes moved from the page to the physician's face, and then back to his sister's. He tilted his head, thoughtfully, and for a moment looked far older than fifteen.

"It seems a sound prescription," he said. "Our mother will be relieved to hear that you are being so well looked after, Elder sister." He paused. "I will explain it to the Steward. I think I can manage it."

There was the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth. It was not quite a smile. It was a boy's conspiratorial, careful, grown-up acceptance of a secret that was not his to ask about.

Sori's eyes pricked. She bowed to her brother, and he bowed gravely back.

---

They left at dusk. It was decided that Gyuhan and Mokryeon would return to the Jang house to arrange things, and that Sori would follow in two days, when the physician's order had been formally presented and the household had been given time to adjust. She stood at the gate in the failing light with a bundle of herbs in her arms and watched them go down the mountain, the boy walking straight and the maid scolding him about something over her shoulder.

The gate closed behind them. The courtyard was suddenly, enormously quiet.

She turned. The physician was standing at the other end of the courtyard, beneath the great silver tree, with his hands at his sides and the last rose-gold light on his face.

He lifted his right hand.

She watched, her breath held, as he made the sign. It was one she knew now. The one she had seen on the first day, rough and unpolished and sure. A hand pressed to the chest, and then spread open, palm up, as if offering something.

*I will be here.*

The petals of the silver plum, which had not bloomed in six years, were still shut tight. But the tree seemed to lean, very slightly, toward the two of them, as though it were listening.

Sori raised her own hand. She did not sign anything. She only laid it, for a moment, flat against her heart.

Then she turned, and walked through the gate, and did not look back, because she was afraid that if she did, she would never be able to leave.

But as she went down the mountain path in the blue evening, with the first stars pricking out over the ridge, she counted the months on her fingers. The plum would bloom in winter, Madam Bae had said. Perhaps this winter. Perhaps the next.

Ten months, perhaps. Perhaps less.

It was the first time in her life that she had counted time toward something, and wished for it to be slower.