Chapter 19
The sky was vast and the weight of the heavens felt light as Shin Haewon walked alongside him, escorting their charges.
Glimpses of her profile peeked out from under the veil—the arch of her nose, the soft curve of her cheeks—and when she looked ahead, sunlight pooled in her eyes, illuminating the light brown into a vivid shade of gold.
He found it impossible to look away. For so long he had wondered who Magpie might be, the scribe whose letters he’d waited for as eagerly as he did for spring in the midst of winter, and here she stood, in the flesh.
“Nauri, watch your step,” she said.
Seojun jerked his attention back and barely avoided the muddy patch of earth. “Thank you,” he said, casting another glance her way, only to find her studying him.
“May I…” She hesitated, then continued, “May I speak plainly?”
His chest tightened at the familiar request. “I think you know no other way of speaking, Mistress Haewon.”
The slightest of frowns crinkled her brows, then she fixed her gaze ahead once more as she asked, “Why did you come, nauri? Your friend does not require a chaperone.”
“Byeongho ordered that I accompany him here, and to ask him no questions. He spoke with such unusual gravity that I thought it was an urgent matter,” he said honestly. “I am as confounded by the situation as you.”
“Hmm.” She stared ahead again, her brows drawn, looking dissatisfied with his answer. “So there is no other reason as to why you joined … And you had no idea that I would be here?”
“None whatsoever.”
She still looked dissatisfied, and it occurred to him that perhaps she believed he had come for her. He had held her hand that night in the garden, and perhaps she expected some form of an explanation …
But he didn’t even know how or where to begin.
He could begin with the letters they had shared. And, indeed, it was what he desired above all else. He wanted Haewon to know him, to know him the way Magpie knew Black Lotus.
But he hesitated at this.
It was the same hesitation that had made him crumple every letter inviting Magpie to drink and converse with him in person.
To meet the one to whom he had bared his soul, safely hidden behind anonymity, was a vulnerability he shied from.
To be seen was to risk the very thing he feared most—to be truly known, only to disappoint.
“Mistress Jade,” Byeongho’s boisterous voice boomed, momentarily drawing Seojun out of his own conflicted thoughts, “would you like to visit the Seogeomjeong Pavilion up ahead? Or shall we stroll together for a little while longer?”
“I would like to walk,” Mistress Jade replied quickly.
“I would, too. I think it would help calm my nerves. Indeed, I couldn’t sleep all last night thinking of today. Of m-meeting you.”
“Neither could I,” Mistress Jade replied, and her voice remained so stiff and terse, it was hard to imagine that Jade had lost sleep over Byeongho at all.
As the pair strolled farther ahead, Haewon and Seojun fell farther behind. Her pace had slowed and he realized her attention was fixed upon a dot of white flowing downstream.
“What is that?” she asked, more to herself.
He didn’t need to look closer to know. “Recycled paper.”
“Recycled paper?”
“Past that grove of trees, you will see government workers there. This is where they come to recycle paper, as paper is too precious to destroy.”
“I wish for only a quick look.” She glanced over at her sister, hesitated for the barest moment before hurrying down the nearby slope and onto the riverbank. Seojun joined her as she crouched and waited, then at last caught a stray page, drenched but sturdy enough not to tear in her grasp.
As he had surmised, upstream a short distance away, workers were dipping the pages into the water, washing away the ink before spreading them on the rocks to dry. They appeared as snow resting on mountain peaks. Soon, the dried pages would be gathered and reused.
Haewon flipped the page around, drops of water dribbling down her wrist, disappearing into her wide sleeve.
He looked away. “The writing has already been washed away.”
“Remnants of ink always remain on recycled paper.”
“You seem to take a great deal of interest in paper, Mistress Haewon.”
“I am around paper often,” she said, and a quiet smile tugged at her lips. “I often wonder at how something as simple as paper can carry one’s heart and mind in the form of a letter or a story, across land and water, right into the hands of the receiver. If the person is literate, that is.”
He crouched next to her and examined the page she held, only to find himself distracted by the scent of her. She smelled of fresh wildflowers. And as her veil slipped back a little, he watched the loose strand of her hair brushing the side of her cheek. She is Magpie, he was reminded once more.
Shin Haewon was the scribe who had become as one in mind with his, the scribe he’d mistaken to be a gentleman friend.
He’d only ever had gentlemen friends, the only friends he was permitted to know.
As boys, he and Byeongho would study together, wrestling when their tutors weren’t watching, freely butting heads like wild deer.
But Magpie was a woman, and this reality formed a wide gulf between them, a valley he had no idea how to navigate.
“Did you know that before the Imjin War”—Haewon’s voice startled him back to her, to the page in her hand—“we had some of the finest quality paper? There was a thriving industry in dochim.”
He recomposed himself quickly. “Dochim?”
“Do, meaning ‘to pound,’ and chim, meaning ‘hammering block.’ Dochim.” She laid the page on the ground, straightening its corners.
“It’s a process done after the paper is made.
Workers stack alternating wet and dry sheets until they have a stack of a hundred pages.
Then they place a special board atop it, press it down with a rock, and after a day, they pound it—two to three hundred times—until dry.
Then they repeat the process, alternating the pages, pressing, pounding again.
After three or four rounds, the result is a glossy, smooth finish. ”
She sighed. “But after the war, many tools were destroyed. It caused irreparable damage to the dochim practice.” Tracing the drenched page, she whispered, “Look at this. You can still see the handwriting. It is very faint, though.”
?? ? ??? ??? ???
“Scribes often mark the first page of forbidden books they transcribe with phrases like Do not mock my handwriting,” she went on. “Scribes are often criticized for their script. I wonder how such a page ended up here?”
Seojun watched as a shadow crossed her features. She was one who valued knowledge, and he felt compelled to share what he’d overheard from his father. “I believe these are the books confiscated by the officers from the other bookshop a few days ago.”
Her attention darted to him. “Do you think so? Did the king order this?”
“No, indeed, I do not think the king was involved. His Majesty is not this aggressive in his approaches.”
“Then who could have ordered the raid?”
“Some high official, I suppose, who is either afraid of knowledge or sees the destruction of it as an opportunity to gain something.” Seojun stared upstream at the recycled pages, each as pale as a soul scrubbed of all its thoughts and feelings.
You oughtn’t to feel so downcast. The memory of his father whispered. Fiction is more dangerous than wild beasts, for when a wild beast appears, people run. But when a lewd novel falls into someone’s hands, they clutch it tightly.
That was his writing, a cheap and vulgar scandal.
Seojun dipped his hand into the cold water, wishing the current could take with it the haunting, the ghost that refused to release him, the stories that beckoned him, humming in his blood.
He wished he had never known this desire.
This need to write. To write was to wrestle with despair and inadequacy.
How many times had he tried to make his writing upright and respectable, only to witness—in utter horror and twisted fascination—as words escaped from his brush like darting fish, free and impossible to contain, impossible to guide.
Writing had unveiled his most honest self, and his father—as well as the king, heaven’s representative on Earth—had condemned such writings as a source of corruption.
Seojun was convinced his writing was a reflection of his moral deficiency.
So better for it to be washed away. For it to not exist at all.
“This storm of sensational novels,” Seojun muttered, “does little to inspire a moral society.” He rose to his feet, stared down at the abandoned page before turning. “Writing serves as a mirror, and when the writing of the people grows hurried, shallow, and chaotic, it shows a lack of any depth.”
“I must say, Lord Yu, you are too harsh,” she declared as they ascended the slope and reached level ground.
“Perhaps fiction writing has become such, because the times are growing hurried and chaotic, and there are cracks in our beliefs, and Joseon people are searching for a world in novels to take them away from it all.”
Resuming their roles as chaperones, they made their way over to the two lovebirds flirting in the pavilion. Haewon settled on a nearby rock shaded beneath a tree clouded with white blossoms. As for Seojun, he stationed himself right next to her, nervous and tense.
“Novels are honest,” she continued. “And I believe, Lord Yu, that honesty—the story of the era and of the people as it is—is by far more valuable than the rigidness of old customs and rules.”
Seojun gathered his hands behind his back, trying to hold on to his composure.
Every word Haewon uttered was shocking, wildly improper, and very Magpie-esque.
If he’d had any doubts that she was Magpie, the scribe who possessed intelligence and outlandish opinions that always left him enthralled, they were entirely gone now.