Chapter 28 – The Prince of Lanterns #2
Servants remained respectfully distant.
Far enough not to hear.
Close enough to intervene.
The perfect balance.
The prince sipped his tea.
Then smiled.
“You dislike confinement.”
It wasn’t a question.
Seolhyun sighed.
“Is it still that obvious?”
“It has become more obvious.”
“Wonderful.”
The prince laughed.
Then leaned back comfortably.
“What was it like?”
She blinked.
“What?”
“Your home.”
The question surprised her.
Not because he asked.
Because he seemed genuinely interested.
For a moment she thought of Cradle Lake.
The mountains.
The water.
The freedom.
“We were outside.”
The answer came softly.
“Most days we worked. We swam. We climbed. We gathered things.”
A small smile appeared.
“We argued.”
“We laughed.”
“We lived.”
The prince listened carefully.
No interruption.
No judgment.
Only curiosity.
“No servants?”
She laughed.
“We were the servants.”
“No court?”
“No court.”
“No robes?”
“We wore them for ceremonies.”
She gestured toward her current attire.
“This much silk would have caused an avalanche.”
The prince nearly choked on his tea.
For several minutes they simply talked.
Not as prince and priestess.
Not as political pieces.
Just two people from very different worlds.
Then came the real question.
The one hidden beneath all the others.
“What do you think of marriage?”
There it was.
Seolhyun almost smiled.
At least he was becoming predictable.
“What specifically?”
The prince considered carefully.
“Dynastic marriages.”
“Political marriages.”
“Marriages for convenience.”
“Marriages for alliance.”
His expression remained perfectly neutral.
“Marriages where affection exists elsewhere.”
The audacity nearly made her laugh.
Somewhere above them, hidden behind carved lattice screens, Jaeho nearly fell out of his observation position.
Taejin had to physically grab his sleeve.
“Did he just—”
“Yes.”
“Did he really—”
“Yes.”
The older soldier looked delighted.
The younger looked murderous.
Back in the pavilion, the prince calmly sipped his tea as though he had not just started an entirely different war.
Seolhyun studied the prince carefully.
For the first time, she understood something.
The prince was not simply charming.
He was not simply flirting.
He was not even entirely interested in her.
He was negotiating.
Always negotiating.
Every conversation.
Every smile.
Every question.
A prince raised inside politics could not help himself.
The prince smiled again.
“My sister has her marriage.”
The words arrived quietly.
“The kingdom has its alliance.”
His gaze settled briefly upon the pond.
“And everyone seems determined to decide everyone else’s future.”
Something appeared behind the humour then.
A shadow.
Gone almost immediately.
Yet Seolhyun noticed it.
For the first time, she wondered if the prince felt trapped too.
Then he ruined the moment completely.
“You should still consider marrying into the court.”
She laughed out loud immediately.
The prince looked offended.
“I am serious.”
“That makes it worse.”
The resulting conversation became so ridiculous that even the servants struggled not to smile.
Yet beneath the laughter, beneath the tea, beneath the flowers and lanterns and garden paths, Seolhyun understood something important.
The prince knew less than Jaeho feared.
But more than anyone had hoped.
And somewhere within his growing collection of theories, suspicions, and observations, she had become something dangerous.
Not a woman.
Not a priestess.
Not even a future bride.
A piece.
A very important piece.
Placed squarely at the center of a board becoming more crowded every day.
And the prince, like every other player in the kingdom, had begun quietly deciding where he wished that piece to move next.
Later that evening, Seolhyun found herself explaining the problem to Jaeho and the others.
“The prince plays stones.”
Jaeho frowned.
“Stones?”
“The game.”
She picked up several pebbles from the garden path and arranged them on the table.
“The Tang call it many things. The scholars call it strategy. The generals call it territory.”
Taejin immediately sat down.
“Now this sounds interesting.”
Seolhyun moved one stone.
“The object isn’t always to capture.”
Another stone.
“Sometimes it’s to limit movement.”
Another.
“Sometimes it’s to make someone choose where they can go.”
Another.
“And sometimes…”
She looked up.
“The best move is simply refusing to be cornered.”
The room fell quiet.
Jaeho understood first.
“The prince.”
Seolhyun nodded.
“He likes his freedom.”
Hanul looked thoughtful.
“The king certainly does not.”
“Exactly.”
For a moment, everyone sat considering that.
The prince.
The younger son.
No crown.
No certainty.
A man forever living inside someone else’s plans.
Perhaps they had more in common than anyone wished to admit.
Overall, Seolhyun finally announced,
“I think he’s playing for his own freedom.”
Taejin immediately pointed at Jaeho.
“You see? Not everything is about you.”
Jaeho ignored him.
Mostly.
Then, quite suddenly, there was no word from the prince.
No invitations.
No garden walks.
No requests for tea.
No curious questions.
No smiling attempts at courtship.
Nothing.
One day passed.
Then two.
Then three.
By the fourth day, even the servants had noticed.
The absence lingered strangely around the palace.
Finally, during breakfast, Seolhyun looked up from her tea and announced confidently,
“He’s playing hard to get.”
The room became completely silent.
Every woman stopped moving.
Hanul lowered his cup.
Bokjin nearly choked.
Taejin stared.
Jaeho looked genuinely alarmed.
“What?”
Seolhyun blinked.
The silence somehow became worse.
Then Mirae slowly put down her chopsticks.
“You think the prince disappeared…”
A pause.
“…to make you miss him?”
Seolhyun considered.
“Possibly.”
The entire table erupted.
Even Hanul laughed.
Jaeho covered his face with both hands.
Taejin looked as though he might never recover.
For several minutes nobody could speak.
And for the first time in many weeks, the residence quarters felt almost normal again.
The older eunuch looked offended.
“The palace has existed for a very long time.”
He folded his arms.
“So have men.”
That ended the discussion briefly.
Yet the prince’s absence continued turning over inside Hanul’s mind.
He had not been summoned by the king.
No new orders had arrived.
No new instructions.
No explanations.
Which meant something was moving somewhere beyond his sight.
Hanul disliked not knowing things.
Age had taught him that silence inside a palace was rarely empty.
It was usually crowded with decisions.
The prince’s sudden interest in Seolhyun troubled him.
Not because of affection.
Affection was easy.
Politics disguised as affection was considerably more dangerous.
The older eunuch had begun wondering whether exile truly waited for all of them.
The southern island.
A beautiful cage surrounded by ocean.
The sort of place where inconvenient people quietly disappeared from history.
And perhaps the prince understood that too.
Perhaps he had no desire to become another piece moved around the board.
The younger prince possessed no throne.
No guaranteed future.
No certainty.
Only usefulness.
A spare wheel on a cart.
Necessary until it wasn’t.
Hanul sighed quietly.
Perhaps the prince was not pursuing Seolhyun at all.
Perhaps he was searching for a doorway out.
The same as everyone else.
That thought lingered.
The older eunuch had always considered himself practical.
Becoming a eunuch had freed him from many burdens expected of men in this society.
No family politics.
No marriage negotiations.
No inheritance disputes.
No endless competition.
Freedom carried a price, but so did everything else.
And lately he had begun noticing something unsettling.
The women.
Mirae.
Seolhyun.
Even the absent Nari.
They all seemed to understand pieces of the game before anyone else.
Old souls, Hanul thought.
The phrase returned often now.
He had always felt old himself.
Older than his years.
Older than the palace.
Older than the role he played.
Perhaps that was why he understood them.
Or perhaps he simply spent too much time listening.
Taejin, however, found the entire situation hilarious.
When Hanul explained his growing theory about the prince, the king, exile, and disappearing from the board entirely, Taejin laughed so hard he nearly inhaled his tea.
Jaeho looked only slightly more sympathetic.
Which was not very sympathetic at all.
Meanwhile, the palace attempted to improve Seolhyun.
No one had asked her opinion.
Naturally.
A prince showed interest.
The palace immediately decided education was required.
Teachers arrived.
Music masters.
Poetry instructors.
Court etiquette tutors.
Calligraphy scholars.
Gayageum musicians.
Flute masters.
Go instructors.
Apparently, if a prince looked in your direction long enough, half the kingdom appeared carrying lesson plans.
The irony amused Seolhyun endlessly.
She already knew much of it.
Some from memory.
Some from instinct.
Some because music never truly changed.
Only instruments did.
One music teacher spent an entire week preparing a lesson.
Seolhyun mastered it before lunch.
Another attempted poetry.
She accidentally quoted something from another century and spent twenty minutes pretending it was an ancient mountain proverb.
The instructor wrote it down immediately.
By the end of the week, several scholars had begun quietly debating whether she was divinely inspired, extraordinarily gifted, or simply impossible.
Jaeho knew the truth.
None of them had seen the real version.
They never saw the woman who rolled bedding aside each evening.
The woman who transformed empty floors into training spaces.
Who practiced balance drills.
Breathing exercises.
Movement patterns.
Stretching routines.
Endurance exercises.
Forms no one in the palace recognized.
The women joined her regularly.
Especially during quiet evenings.
The palace believed they were praying.
Which technically was not entirely incorrect.
Breathing mattered.
Rhythm mattered.
Discipline mattered.
The strange counting chants puzzled everyone.
“Five.”
“Six.”
“Seven.”
“Eight.”
The women moved together.