Lady Heo packed the rice cakes herself.

Sori watched her do it, kneeling in the kitchen courtyard of the Jang house with her sleeves tied back and flour on her wrists, folding pale half-moons of songpyeon into a lacquered box and laying pine needles between the layers so that they would not stick. It was work a servant should have been doing. Three servants had offered. Lady Heo had sent them all away with a small, firm shake of the head, and Sori understood that this was the only way the woman knew to say what she could not say aloud.

"The physician is thin," Lady Heo said, pressing the lid down. "I noticed it when he came to the hall. A man who feeds the whole mountain should be fed once himself."

"I will give them to him, Mother."

"Give him half. Eat the rest. You are thin too." She lifted her eyes, and they were the same shape as the eyes in the face Sori wore, soft and dark and a little tired. "Ihwa."

"Yes?"

Lady Heo seemed to search for something. Her hands, dusted white, closed around the box. "When you were small you hid things in your sleeves," she said. "Chestnuts, pebbles, a dead beetle once. You thought I did not know. I always knew. I only waited until you were ready to show me."

The paper in Sori's sleeve seemed to grow heavy as a stone. She kept her face still. She had learned that much from a hundred and twelve rules.

"I am not hiding anything, Mother," she said, and hated how thin the lie sounded.

"No," Lady Heo said gently. "Of course not." She pushed the box into Sori's arms and folded her hands over the top of it for a moment, warm and floury and trembling a little. "Go. Be well. Come back to me whole."

Sori bowed. Then, because the woman looked so small in the grey morning, she did a thing no daughter of the house would have done. She leaned forward and set her forehead against Lady Heo's shoulder, only for a breath, the way she used to lean against her own mother's shoulder in the waiting room of the clinic on Fourth Street when the news was bad and neither of them had the energy to translate it.

Lady Heo did not say anything. Her hand came up and rested on the back of Sori's head.

That was all. It was enough to make her eyes sting all the way up the mountain.

---

The arrangements, when she arrived, had been made with a care that bordered on fortress-building.

Madam Bae had moved into the little outbuilding beside the herb shed, a one-room hut with a straw roof and a chimney that smoked, and she had declared herself chaperone with the cheerful authority of a general taking a hill. "I sleep lightly," she announced, sitting on her doorstep with her pear-wood stick across her knees. "I hear mice. I hear the wind change direction. If a man so much as clears his throat after dark, I will know."

"He does not clear his throat," Sori said.

"Then I shall know *that,*" said Madam Bae, and cackled.

Mokryeon would come up each morning with a basket and go down each evening before dusk, a rule invented by Gyuhan, who had presented it to the household as a matter of propriety and to Sori, privately, as a matter of keeping Steward Jang's questions as far from the mountain as possible. The household had accepted it. The Steward had accepted it too, with a smile.

Which left the nights.

By the third hour of her first evening Sori had worked the arithmetic out for herself. Madam Bae's hut stood fifty paces from the main house, past the herb shed and a bend in the wall. Fifty paces was not far. Fifty paces was also not a room with a door that could be knocked upon. In the long blue quiet after supper, with the lamp low and the old tree ticking in the dark courtyard, the clinic held exactly two people within easy hearing of each other.

She had known this, in theory. Knowing it in the body was another thing.

She stood in the doorway of the main room with the box of rice cakes in her arms, and the physician looked up from his mortar, and neither of them seemed to know what to do with their faces.

---

He had made a place for her.

She had expected the bedding by the brazier where she had lain before, a sickbed in the middle of the working floor. Instead he led her, with a small, formal gesture of the hand, to the far end of the main room, where a tall wooden screen had been drawn across a corner to make a narrow alcove. Behind it lay a thick mattress stuffed with new cotton. A quilt of deep blue had been folded at its foot, and beside the pillow stood a low table about the size of a tea tray. On the table sat a lamp, a pot of water, a cup, and a small bundle of paper tied with string.

Sori set the box down and went to look.

The paper was good paper, the kind the physician used for his prescriptions, thick and creamy and a little rough. Beneath the string lay three sticks of willow charcoal, wrapped in a scrap of cloth. Someone had sharpened the ends to fine points.

She turned, slowly.

He was standing a few paces away with his hands folded in front of him, his eyes on the floor. He looked like a man waiting to be told that he had done something wrong.

"You made this for me," she said aloud. Then, remembering, she lifted her hands. *You made this before I came.*

The tips of his ears went dark. He made a small gesture that she was beginning to learn, a flat hand tilted side to side, the sign for *a little* or *perhaps,* the whole of its meaning folded into a shrug. Then, as if the shrug were not honest enough, he lifted a finger and pointed, deliberately, at the calendar on the wall, where a column of days had been marked off in small black dots. Eight of them. Eight days since she had gone down the mountain.

He had been preparing for eight days.

Sori did not know what to do with this, so she did the thing she always did when she did not know what to do with something. She made a joke of it.

"Charcoal," she said, and picked up a stick. "Very dangerous. Someone might draw on the walls."

He watched her. The corner of his mouth moved, a faint, appalled twitch, and she knew with some pleasure that she had hit it exactly.

---

She was a terrible patient.

She had known she would be. She had spent her life being useful, carrying other people's sentences from one end of a room to the other, and the idea of lying on a mattress doing nothing for thirty days made her skin crawl. By the second morning she had walked the length of the clinic four times. By noon she had counted the rafters. By afternoon she had opened every drawer on the lowest tier of the wall of medicine, and had found out, with the awe of a child discovering a cave, that each one held something different, bark, seed, root, pressed flower, powdered stone.

She was reading the labels aloud under her breath, in a soft murmur of borrowed Korean, when her elbow struck a stoneware jar on the shelf behind her.

It did not fall far. It did not break. But the lid sprang off and a cloud of fine yellow powder went up into the air, and settled, softly and thoroughly, over her sleeves, her hair, the front of her jacket, and the entire surface of the work table.

She stood very still, coughing.

The door slid open. The physician came in from the courtyard with an armful of drying racks, and stopped.

She watched him take it in. The jar, the cloud, the yellow-dusted girl standing in the middle of it like a sugar-coated cake. His face did something complicated. She could see him weighing a dozen responses, annoyance, concern, the physician's instinct to ask what exactly she had inhaled, and she saw, too, the moment when all of them lost to something else entirely.

He set the racks down. He put one hand over his mouth. His shoulders began, very quietly, to shake.

"It is turmeric," she said with dignity, reading the label on the fallen jar. "I think. It is only turmeric."

He waved a hand at her, helpless, and turned his face to the wall.

"You may laugh," she said. "I will not tell anyone."

He turned back. He had tears at the corners of his eyes. He drew in a long breath, composed himself with an effort that was almost painful to watch, and then crossed the room and looked down at her, still faintly shaking, and lifted his hands.

*Wind,* he signed. His palm swept flat across the air, a gust, a draft. Then he pointed at her. *You. Wind in my house.*

It should not have been so warm. It was an insult, or a joke, or a clinical observation. But the way he said it, in his own awkward grammar, with his whole face loosened, made something in her chest turn over slowly like a fish in shallow water.

*I am sorry,* she signed, clumsily, because she did not yet have his word for it.

He shook his head. He took a clean cloth from his belt and began, with great care, to brush the turmeric off her sleeves.

---

The next day he gave her a job.

She understood what it was the moment she saw it. He had brought down every jar from the top three shelves of the wall and set them in rows across the floor, several dozen of them, stoneware and glazed clay and wood, some labeled in brush-script, some not, some with the ink long faded to a ghost. Beside them lay a bundle of fresh paper slips, a pot of ink, and a brush.

He pointed at the jars. He pointed at the slips. He mimed writing.

"You want me to label them," she said.

He nodded.

"All of them? Do you not know what is in them?"

He gave her a look so dry that it needed no translation.

"Ah," she said. "You know. I see. You want them *written down.*"

He nodded again. He seemed, if anything, a little embarrassed. He lifted one hand and made a stiff small motion, a brush on paper, and then shook it in front of his face and pointed at his own eyes. She worked it out slowly. *My writing. My eyes. Bad.* It was not true, she had seen his prescriptions, and the script was strong and clean. It was a courtesy. He had found a way to give her something to do that would not make her feel like a patient.

She sat down on the floor among the jars and began.

It turned out to be an easy kind of work, and an absorbing one. She opened each jar, sniffed, identified, and wrote out the name in neat characters on a slip, pressing the paper flat with the heel of her hand. The physician sat opposite her with the mortar in his lap and a bundle of fresh roots, grinding in the slow, steady rhythm she was coming to know, so that the clink and rasp of his pestle formed a kind of heartbeat beneath her brush. When she needed to compare two jars he passed the second across, and when she finished with one, she passed it back.

They did this for an hour, perhaps more. The light moved across the floor. Dust floated in the bright bars and turned gold.

Somewhere in the second hour he handed her a small blue jar and their fingers met on the neck of it. His was warm and dry and calloused at the tip. Hers, as it happened, was still a little yellow.

Neither of them let go for a moment longer than was necessary. Neither of them looked up.

She wrote the label. *Ginger, dried.* She was quite proud of the evenness of her handwriting, given that her pulse was suddenly very loud in the tip of the brush.

Some time later she realized that he had stopped grinding.

She looked up. He was watching her hand move across the paper, and he was wearing an expression she had not yet seen on him. It was not the guarded attention she knew, and it was not the amusement. It was wonder, plain and astonished. His eyes went from the neat black characters on the slip to her face and back again, as though the two did not seem to belong to one another.

"What?" she said.

He lifted a finger and pointed at the brushwork. Then at her. Then he made a gesture she could not read at first, a hand drawn across his own mouth and then spread wide. She frowned. He tried again, slower. The hand opened, closed, opened.

*Read,* she thought. *Write.* And then, with a small sinking shock, she saw what he meant.

Ihwa had been a lady of a good house. Ihwa could read. Ihwa's handwriting, according to Mokryeon, had been a delicate, crooked, anxious thing, and her mind had always been quick but slow to show it. And here sat the new Ihwa, writing a physician's materia medica in a firm, practiced, adult hand, and reading faded labels that would have stumped most scholars.

She had never thought to hide it. She had not known she should.

*Where did you learn?* he was asking, with all his face. *Where do you come from, that you learned like this?*

She set the brush down. Her heart had begun to beat faster, in a way that had nothing to do with his fingers.

"It is a long story," she said, very softly, and watched him decide, visibly, not to ask for it.

---

She made her proposal that evening.

It was not planned. She had been sitting at the little table behind the screen, her knees drawn up under the quilt and a stick of charcoal in her hand, drawing in the margin of a spare slip, small and aimless, a cat, a cup, a bird on a branch. The physician was across the room by the brazier, stirring the night's decoction. The lamp was low. The old tree outside made a tapping sound against the eaves, a branch moving in a small wind.

The silence was very full. It was not an uncomfortable silence. She had learned to tell the difference. But there were two hundred things in it, and not one of them could be said, and she suddenly could not bear to sit inside it any longer without doing something.

She got up. She crossed the floor in her stocking feet and sat down opposite him, closer than she would have dared a week ago, and said, aloud, in her careful borrowed Korean, "Teach me."

He looked up.

"Your signs," she said. "The ones you made. I only know a few and I am guessing at half of them. It is like trying to read a book with every third word missing. You know mine now, some of them, and I will teach you more. But I want yours." She lifted her hands, to be sure. *Trade,* she signed, the two palms exchanging places in the air. *You teach me. I teach you. Equal.*

He was very still.

She waited. She had waited for people her whole life, in doorways, in corridors, at the edge of conversations where her presence was required but her opinion was not. She was good at it. She let the silence run as long as it needed to, and in the end it ran so long that she began to fear she had touched something she should not have.

He was looking at his own hands. They lay open on his knees, scarred across the knuckles with old burns and the pale lines of herb-knife nicks, and she realized, watching his face, that he was not deciding whether to say yes. He had decided that, probably, the moment she asked. He was deciding whether he was allowed to.

At last he raised his head. He did not look happy. He looked like a man standing at the edge of a frozen river, testing the ice with his weight. But he lifted his right hand, slowly, and touched his two index fingers together in front of his chest.

*Agree.*

Then, the left hand flat, the right hand tapping it, once, twice, three times. *Begin.*

---

The first lesson lasted until the lamp burned low.

She taught him *morning.* She did it the way her mother had taught her, with the flat of one hand rising slowly out of the crook of the other arm, like the sun climbing out of a field. He copied it, awkwardly, and she corrected his wrist, and he did it again. She taught him *good* and *bad* and *hungry,* and he picked them up with the focus of a man who had been starved of speech for a very long time, and she saw how he held each new shape in the air a moment before letting it go, the way you might hold a coin to see if it rang true.

He taught her *tea.* It was a pretty sign. The fingers curled round an invisible cup, tipped it, and then the whole hand opened outward, scattering steam. He taught her *mountain,* a fist rising slow in three heaves, and *fire* and *door* and *waiting.* Some of them she could have guessed. Some of them she could not. He drew pictures in the air for the ones that would not come, and when she got one wrong, he did not scold, he only shook his head with a patient crooked smile and tried again.

At some point she noticed that he was not looking at her face.

His eyes were on her hands. They had been on her hands for some time. He watched every flicker of her fingers with an intensity that was almost unnerving, and yet it was not quite intensity, because there was something else underneath, a kind of searching. It was the way a person looks into a crowd when they think they have seen a familiar coat.

He was looking for somebody in her hands.

She did not know who. She did not ask. But when she signed *morning* for the third time, slowly, with the little flick at the end that her mother always added, she saw his throat move, and she saw him look away, and for a long moment, something old and heavy crossed his face and was put away again.

She finished the sign. She let her hands fall.

Neither of them spoke, because neither of them could.

---

It was past midnight when she woke.

She did not know what had woken her. The lamp had burned out. The clinic was dark and cold, the brazier a dull red eye in the corner. Somewhere beyond the screen the old tree creaked, and the roof settled with a small sigh, and she lay on her back with the quilt to her chin and listened to the quiet.

Then she heard the footsteps.

They were soft, bare, hesitant. They came along the narrow passage behind the dispensary, from the direction of the sleeping room where the physician slept, and she knew them, as she knew everything about him by now. The weight of the heel. The pause before the toe came down.

They stopped.

She lay very still. The passage ran along the back of the house, past the storage jars and the sacks of barley, to the little pine door she had noticed once, on her second day, without ever wondering what lay behind it. It was a rough door, set low in the wall, with a latch worn smooth by a single hand.

He was standing in front of it.

She could not see him. She could not hear anything but the faint, uneven sound of his breathing in the dark. He stood there for a long time. A minute. Five. Ten. She counted the beats of her own heart, and she thought of the burn mark behind the painted screen, and the empty bowl that Mokryeon had told her was never to be touched, and the way he had looked at her hands that evening as though she were a letter written in a hand he used to know.

The latch did not lift.

After what felt like an hour, the footsteps turned. They went back the way they had come, slow and quiet and heavy, and the sleeping room door slid shut with the softest of clicks.

Sori lay awake for a long time afterward with her eyes open in the dark.

*Fifty paces,* she thought. *Fifty paces to the old woman's hut. And on this side of it, a man who stands in the night outside a door he cannot open, and a girl who is pretending she cannot hear.*

It was the first night of thirty. She did not think she was going to be very good at being sick.