Chapter Seven
Bukchon, then Jongno, then the Banpo Bridge underpass. February 24, 2026. 4:18 p.m.
He waited at the gate of the hanok for fourteen minutes after the Genesis turned the corner.
This was not the gate-waiting of a man trying to memorize a thing about to leave. It was the gate-waiting of an older Korean discipline: the form one stood for after a guest had been taken away to a place she had not invited him into, so that the air outside the gate could close evenly over the space the guest had occupied and the gate could decide, without his help, whether it would open for her again. Yi-jun had been taught this gate-waiting by his fox-mother in the winter of his ninety-third year. He had not used it in three centuries. He used it now. He stood at the dark pine gate with his hands at his sides and his breath moving softly through the small steady cold thing under his tongue, and at the fifteenth minute he bowed once toward the spot in the lane where the car had been, and he turned and went back inside.
He did not, on the way through the courtyard, look at the maple. The magpie was on the maple. The magpie did not, for the first time in years, return the bow he had not given it.
In the middle hanok he sat on the heated ondol of the side room. He did not, for a long minute, do anything. The body had — for the first time in four centuries — used itself. The right arm had caught a woman falling. The left hand had cradled a head. The chest had held a weight he had been preparing the chest for since 1623, and the chest had not failed, and the failure of the failure had left the chest, now, in a state of small surprised relief he did not yet have a vocabulary for. He sat with the relief. He let it have him.
Then he stood.
He went into the room where the shrine was. He kneeled. He did not, this afternoon either, open the lacquered box. He laid his palm on its lid, the way he had laid his palm on its lid yesterday morning, and the wood was — he noticed — warmer than it had been yesterday. Half a degree. The half-degree the lid of a wooden box on a heated floor is warmer at the end of a day than it is at the beginning of a day. It was, he understood, simply the heat of the ondol traveling. It was not Da-eun in the box waking up. He was not yet, after thirty hours, going to start lying to himself about what wood did and did not do.
He spoke aloud anyway.
"Ji-won-ssi has gone home," he said. He used jondaetmal. He used the precise formal register he had used in the hanok across the past sixteen hours, which had been the register Da-eun would have heard a scholar use to a court mudang on a Tuesday afternoon in the eighth month of the fifteenth year. "She is safe. She is in the company of her best friend by tomorrow. The doctor she will see in the morning has been chosen well — Dr. Lim Hye-kyong of Yongsan International Clinic is the daughter of a Yeongdong mudang and will not, on a Tuesday, fail to put the right word on a differential. Her grandmother in Daejeon will be on the line to her by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. The pieces are in place. I have not — " he paused; he was, he realized, listing for the box, the way a younger man lists to a mother, and he did not, this afternoon, have the patience for the small false comfort the listing was meant to give. "I have not lost her. I will keep her, this time. If she will let me keep her, I will keep her. If she will not, I will let her go."
The lacquered box did not answer.
He laid his forehead, briefly, against the lid. He sat back on his heels.
He stood. He went to the trunk by the door. He drew out, from under the folded dopo robe and the folded mulberry paper and the small flat lacquer envelope of cinnabar dust, a black leather portfolio that did not, in its appearance, betray that it had been in the trunk since 1971. The portfolio was monogrammed in a small gold S.Y.J. on the lower right. He had used the portfolio, over fifty-five years, twice. He used it now for the third time.
Inside the portfolio were the share certificates.
He carried the portfolio to the low table. He poured himself a small celadon cup of barley tea from the kettle on the brazier — the kettle was still warm from this morning; he did not, this afternoon, want a fresh kettle — and he drank the tea slowly and looked at the certificates.
He owned 31.4 percent of JL Entertainment.
He owned it through three holding companies, two of which were registered in Vaduz and one of which was registered in Pyeongchang-dong under a name that had been his maternal grandmother's in 1888. He had built this position over twelve years, beginning with a 4 percent stake in 2014 when JL was a mid-cap label with one viable girl group and a chairman, since dead, who had liked Yi-jun because Yi-jun had once, at a Cheongdam-dong restaurant in 2003, listened to him recite a Lee Yuk-sa poem from memory and corrected one syllable. Yi-jun had then bought 6 percent more in 2017, 8 percent more in 2019, and 13 percent over the slow rolling 2021-to-2024 accumulation that had made him, on paper, the controlling shareholder and, on the books, the chairman. The controlling shareholder. The controlling. The word, in Korean, was jibae. He had thought, last year, when his lawyer Mr. Bae had used the word, that jibae was a useful word for a man like him to own a thing under.
He had not, until last night, considered transferring any of it.
He laid out the certificates.
He took, from the inside pocket of his jacket, the small black phone he had used yesterday morning to call Halmoni at Gwangjang. He turned it on. He scrolled to the second number in the directory. The second number was Mr. Bae's. Mr. Bae was eighty-one, had been Yi-jun's lawyer since 1976, had been the son of Yi-jun's previous lawyer (1932 to 1973), and would, when he died, be replaced by his daughter, who had been told nothing about the foxness and would, when she found out, take three weeks to recover. Yi-jun was paying for the daughter's eventual three weeks of recovery the same way one buys a snowplow for a winter that has not yet arrived.
He dialed.
Mr. Bae picked up on the third ring.
"Sajangnim."
"Mr. Bae."
"You are well."
"I am as well as I have been recently."
A small pause. Mr. Bae, in eighty-one years of being Mr. Bae, had developed a complete fluency in the pauses Yi-jun used. He did not, this afternoon, fill in.
"Mr. Bae. I would like to set up an irrevocable trust. The principal of the trust will be a controlling block of JL Entertainment shares. The beneficiary of the trust will be a Han Ji-won, R.R.N. 991103-2****6, currently of an officetel in Itaewon. The trust will be irrevocable on my side. The beneficiary may dissolve it at any time on three days' notice and convert it to cash or hold the position. I would like the documents drafted by tomorrow morning. I would like the underlying transfer executed by Friday close-of-market. I would like a single signed copy of the trust deed in your office safe and a single one in mine. I do not, at any point, want Han Ji-won to be told."
Mr. Bae did not, in his life of being Mr. Bae, allow himself surprise on the phone. He took the dictation.
"Sajangnim. How much of the block."
"All of it."
"Sajangnim. The full 31.4 percent."
"The full 31.4 percent."
"That is, at Friday's close on KOSPI, approximately — "
"Eight hundred and twelve billion won. Yes."
"Yes."
"Yes."
Mr. Bae allowed himself, after a long pause, the smallest of his old-man chuckles. The chuckle was, Yi-jun had learned over decades, the closest Mr. Bae could allow himself to mockery of his employer's romantic life. "Sajangnim. May I ask one question."
"Ask."
"Is the woman aware of this gift."
"No."
"Is the woman aware of the relationship that motivates this gift."
"As of nine hours ago, partially."
"As of nine hours ago, partially."
"Yes."
Mr. Bae let himself, this time, sigh. It was a small old-Korean-lawyer sigh, of the kind that means Sajangnim, I have been your lawyer for fifty years and have watched you do many things and this, today, is one of the more spectacularly stupid ones, and I will draft the documents because that is my profession but I will, when I see you again at the New Year's banquet, look at you in the way I have not had the right to look at you since 1989.
"I will draft," Mr. Bae said. "Sajangnim."
"Yes."
"If the woman is, in three weeks, no longer in your life — "
"The trust remains."
"Sajangnim."
"It is not a chain on her. It is an apology. It is no good as an apology if it can be withdrawn. Mianhada — if I say mianhada and tomorrow I take it back, I have not said mianhada. I have said mianhada-eseo, a half-apology with an escape. I am too old, Mr. Bae, to give a half-apology."
"Yes, Sajangnim."
"Friday."
"Friday."
He hung up.
He stood at the low table and looked at the certificates and then folded them, deliberately and without ceremony, back into the black portfolio. He set the portfolio on the floor by the trunk. He would, he understood, drop it at Mr. Bae's office on the way to the next thing. The next thing was the Gwangjang stall.
He looked at the brass kettle on the brazier. He did not, this afternoon, drink more of the tea. He bowed once to the kettle, the small Joseon-coded bow he had been bowing to kettles since he was a hundred and four, and went to put on his coat.
The Gwangjang Market on a late-February afternoon was the market in its restored everyday weather: the steam off the tteokbokki vats, the cold smell of the brine vat in the kimchi alley, the dry old-paper-and-ginger smell of the herb stalls along the western wall, the small wet electric smell of the live-shellfish tanks at the back. He went in through the western entrance and crossed under the high blue tin roof at the slow walking pace of a man who had been a Bukchon resident with a Gwangjang errand for forty years and who did not, anymore, attempt to disguise this. The market women along the western aisle recognized him and gave the small Seoul nod of recognition — neither bow nor smile, the I have known you for years and I see you and I will not, today, embarrass either of us nod. He returned it. He went past the bindaetteok pancake row, past the yukhoe raw-beef row, past the jeon stalls where the matriarchs were already prepping the after-work crowd, and into the small unlit alley at the very back of the market where there was, behind a curtain of bottle-green plastic strips, the stall.
The stall had no sign. It had three stools and a low metal counter and a single fluorescent tube with a bad ballast that hummed at sixty hertz and a small refrigerated case along the back wall whose glass was, by the deliberate cultivation of three generations of grease, opaque from outside. Yi-jun pushed through the bottle-green curtain and ducked his head under the lintel — six-foot-one was tall, in a Joseon-built doorway — and stood in the small dim alcove and waited.
The boy came in through the back. The boy was nineteen, with the long-faced gentle look of his grandfather, who had been the man Yi-jun had taken delivery from from 1953 to 1996, and the more compact mouth of his mother, who Yi-jun had taken delivery from from 1996 to 2018. The boy was carrying a small white styrofoam cooler. The boy bowed.
"Sajangnim."
"Yong-suk-ah."
"Halmoni said three again."
"Three again. Did she pack them on ice."
"She packed them on ice. She also" — the boy ducked his head, embarrassed — "she sent up a small bottle of something for the lady. She did not say which lady. She said you would know. She said it was an old recipe."
He held out, beside the styrofoam cooler, a small ceramic bottle stoppered with cork and wrapped at the neck with a single red string. The bottle was the kind of bottle his grandmother had used in 1973 to send up a tonic to Yi-jun after he had told her, that summer, that he was tired in the wrong way for the season. It was an aengdu-eung-eum, a cherry-and-bitter-root preparation, the old mudang-coded restorative the women in this family had carried as a recipe across the war and the famine and the IMF.
Yi-jun took the cooler with his left hand. He took the small bottle in his right. He looked at the small red string at the bottle's neck. He bowed to the boy a fraction lower than he usually bowed.
"Yong-suk-ah."
"Yes."
"Tell your grandmother — " he paused. The mouth was, he realized, having one of its small old-Korean failures, where the tongue would not deliver the message his head had prepared for it because the message was not, on Joseon discipline, his to send. He revised. "Tell your grandmother I send my respects, and that I will visit her at the New Year. Tell her also that the recipe is welcome and that I will, on her instruction, see that it is given to the right person."
"Yes, Sajangnim."
"And Yong-suk-ah."
"Yes."
"Walk through Gwangjang the slow way back. Take the eastern alley. There is a friend of mine in the jeon row, the third stall from the corner, an old woman in a green head-cloth. Buy a pajeon from her. Eat it on the way home. Do not, on the way home, look at anything in the river or anywhere near the river. Look only at the ground in front of you. Go now."
The boy looked at him. The boy, at nineteen, did not yet have the full equipment of his family to receive instructions like this, but he had enough of it. He nodded once. He bowed. He went.
Yi-jun stood alone in the alcove a moment with the cooler in one hand and the small bottle in the other. The fluorescent tube hummed. The bottle was light against his palm. He set the cooler on the low metal counter. He held the bottle up to the bad light and looked at the red string and at the small wax-sealed cork and at the shape of his own hand around the glass.
He had not been sent a recipe by Halmoni since 1973.
He went out the back way.
The Han River at the Banpo Bridge underpass at five-fifty p.m. on a late-February Tuesday was the color of the inside of a galvanized-steel pipe — gray with a green undertone, the surface broken by the slow brown wake of a barge a half-kilometer west. The air smelled of cold mud and diesel and the faintly sweet rot of the willows on the southern bank that had not yet decided, this February, whether spring would happen for them or whether they would simply go on standing through another year of being willows.
He had not meant to come down here. He had taken the cab back from Gwangjang and had asked the driver to drop him at the Yongsan station instead of Bukchon, because the small black phone in his coat pocket had buzzed with an alert from the news app he kept for one reason — the Seoul Metropolitan Police press releases — and the alert had been the alert he had been expecting since November.
Body recovered. Han River, Banpo underpass. Male, mid-fifties. Liver removed. Major Crimes notified.
He walked from the station to the underpass. He went the long way, along the south side. He did not, on the walk, look up at the Banpo Bridge above him. The Banpo Bridge had been built in 1982 across the spot of a Joseon-period ferry crossing, and below the ferry crossing there had been, for at least four centuries, a small jeoseung saja waystation — a thin spot in the membrane where the black-coated grim reapers paused to read their lists before crossing the river with a soul. He had passed the spot perhaps eight thousand times in four hundred years. He did not, on principle, walk along the southern bank under the Banpo Bridge if he could help it. Today he had to help it.
The police were on the north bank. He could see them across the water — two crime-scene units, a small white tent, the small dark cluster of figures along the rail. The body had been pulled out forty minutes ago, the alert had said. The body was, at this moment, on a stainless-steel table on the north bank under the tent, being photographed.
He did not, this afternoon, want to see the body.
He wanted to see, instead, the place under the bridge where the body had been left.
He walked, along the south bank, until he was directly opposite the small white tent. The river between them was about three hundred meters wide here. The traffic on the bridge above him was the slow late-afternoon traffic of a Tuesday — the homebound office workers, the school buses with their flashing red-orange roofs, a single white panel truck. He stopped at the rail. He looked across.
He looked at the south side of the second concrete pillar of the bridge.
The marks were small. They were the size of a fingernail. They had been made — he could tell from the angle and from the spacing — by a small mammalian foot pressing wet against dry concrete in the half-hour before the body had been put in the water. The foot had pressed four times in a line. The fifth pressing had been smudged, intentionally, the way a person smudges a stamp before they regret stamping. The foot, even smudged, was unmistakable. It was a fox's foot. It was a young fox's foot. It was the foot of a fox of perhaps four hundred years.
Four tails. Twelve years past her marble. Ambitious. Hae-ri.
He stood at the rail a long minute and looked at the prints and let his face be still in the way he had let it be still in the JL elevator yesterday afternoon, which was the small overflow of stillness a man uses to keep something inside the body from leaving by way of the mouth.
He had thought, after thirty hours of being recognized in Bukchon by a woman with American hands, that the small bright cold thing under his tongue would have other questions for him this afternoon. The marble had, instead, opened both eyes. The marble was — and he understood this without needing to test it — fully awake. The marble had a question and the question was not Da-eun's.
The marble's question was about Hae-ri.
He set his hand on the rail. He took out the small black phone. He scrolled past Halmoni's number and past Mr. Bae's number to the third number, which was the number of his oldest friend.
He dialed.
A man's voice picked up on the first ring. The voice was old in the way mountains are old.
"Old fox."
"Old man."
"Are you at the Banpo."
"I am at the Banpo."
"I felt the membrane stretch. I had thought it was you remembering yourself yesterday."
"It was both."
"I see."
A pause.
"Old man," Yi-jun said. "Can you spare me a corner of the shrine on the new moon."
Inwangsan-sanshin made the small thinking noise gods make. It was a noise that had been in the world since before noises had been a thing the world routinely made. "I can spare you a corner of the shrine on any moon, foolish creature. You know this. Bring her. Bring the woman with you. I have wanted to look at her face since 1623, and you have kept me waiting, and I am old enough to be openly impatient."
"I will bring her."
"On the new moon."
"On the new moon."
"And the four-tail."
"The four-tail wants the marble."
"I knew this in November when she was sent down."
"You knew."
"Bukhansan told me himself. He wanted me to know. He wanted me to refuse to interfere. I have refused, formally, to interfere. I will, when you bring the woman, perhaps interfere informally."
"Old man."
"Yes."
"You are kinder than the law allows."
"I am older than the law allows. There is a difference. Bring her on the new moon."
"On the new moon."
He hung up.
He stood at the rail. He looked across the river at the small white tent. He let the marble ask its question fully, for the first time in four centuries, and the question was:
Are we hunting again, then. After all this time.
He considered the question. He considered the way a Joseon scholar consults a difficult passage — by going around it three times before committing.
He said, aloud, to the river and to the marble and to the late-afternoon air of the bridge underpass: "I would much prefer not to."
Then, after a moment, because the body required the answer and the body had been the body of a fox once and a man for nine hundred and forty-three years and the body, today, was the body of something in between:
"But I will. If she touches the woman with the American hands, I will. And I will not stop at four tails."
The river, behind him, made the small uncaring slap-noise of cold gray water against an old concrete embankment.
A magpie called, somewhere on the willow bank.
He turned to go.
He walked the long way home. He took the No. 4 bus from Yongsan up to Anguk, where he got off. He walked the slope up to Bukchon. He let himself in at the gate of the compound. He went into the middle hanok. He put the small white styrofoam cooler in the cold pantry and the small ceramic bottle from Halmoni on the upper shelf of the kitchen cabinet beside a bowl of pine nuts. He did not, this afternoon, open the bottle. He stood at the kitchen window and watched the courtyard go dark in the slow Joseon-era way courtyards go dark, the magpie on the maple lifting once, lifting twice, then settling for the night.
He sat down at the low table in the side room. He turned on the small television in the corner of the room — the small flat-screen he kept tuned to MBC News for the eight-thirty broadcast, the only screen he allowed himself indoors. He kept the volume at three. He watched the news the way he watched everything, with one ear and one half-eye, and he ate, from a small celadon bowl, the rice and white-kimchi he had laid out for his dinner.
The eight-thirty news led with the body.
Major Crimes Unit, Detective Park Yu-na speaking — second body recovered with the same surgical-precision liver removal, no defensive wounds, no robbery, no apparent motive, this is the second since November and we are now considering this a serial pattern.
The detective was a woman of about thirty-eight. Square-jawed. Tired. The kind of cop face that made suspects tell the truth without meaning to. He filed her.
The second item was the labor reform vote in the National Assembly.
The third item was the president's chief of staff, Yi Han-saem, addressing the press from the Cheong Wa Dae annex podium.
Yi-jun's spoon stopped halfway to his mouth.
He set the spoon down.
The man on the screen was forty-one. The man wore a dark suit and a navy tie. The man had the smooth gray-templed face of a Korean political operator who had spent his twenties in the legislative-assistant track and his thirties at SNU's policy school and the last decade making decisions on behalf of a center-left coalition. The man was speaking, with the polished careful cadence of a chief of staff, about the labor reform — about how the administration would, by the end of the week, present the package to the coalition partners and the press, about how the package balanced productivity gains with worker protections, about how the president had personally — and so forth.
Yi-jun was not listening to the words.
Yi-jun was looking at the man's mouth.
The mouth had the same downward turn at the corners even when the man was being agreeable. The mouth had not changed in four hundred and three years. The mouth was the mouth of the man who had stood in the antechamber doorway of the queen consort's pavilion on the third week of the eighth month of the fifteenth year of King Gwanghae's reign and had looked at Kim Gae-hwa the way a butcher reads a side of beef. The mouth was the mouth of the man who, six months later, on the new moon of the third month of King Injo's first year, had signed the order that walked Kim Gae-hwa across the Geunjeongjeon courtyard with the flat of an iron sword against her shoulder blade. The mouth was the mouth of the man who, the next week, had sent two thousand men into the eastern hills with a list of names that had Da-eun's name third from the top.
Yi Hwan.
Yi-jun set the bowl down very slowly. He stood. He walked to the television. He did not turn it off. He stood ten paces back from the screen and watched the man speak. He watched the man's hand at the lectern. He watched the man's left ring finger, on which there was no wedding ring, although Yi-jun knew from a newspaper photograph in 2024 that the man had been married for twelve years to the anchor of MBC News Desk Sunday, a woman named Choi Hyun-jung who had interviewed Yi-jun once in 2019 for a JL-related industry segment and who had — Yi-jun remembered with the small cold clarity of a man who had been keeping track of small cold clarities for four hundred years — been wearing, that day, in 2019, a small white pearl on a thin gold chain at her throat that had been her mother-in-law's wedding gift, and that had — he had filed this without meaning to — been the same shape and the same weight as the pearl Yi Hwan's mother had been said, in 1622, to be uncommonly fond of.
The man Yi Han-saem finished his statement. He took two questions. He stepped back from the podium with the small smooth Cheong-Wa-Dae bow of a man who knew where the cameras were. He left the screen. The MBC anchor returned to the weather.
Yi-jun, at his low table in his middle hanok in Bukchon, with the gray February evening coming down on the courtyard and the magpie settling on the maple and the marble under his tongue fully awake for the first time in four centuries, said, in the old archaic register he had learned in his second century, in a voice that was the voice he had used in the third month of King Injo's first year on the slope of Inwangsan after the snow had stopped falling and the men with the iron swords had gone:
"Yi Hwan-ah. Neoneun ajik salah-itneunya."
Yi Hwan. You are still alive.
The television, on its own small autonomous schedule, advanced to the weather. The weather woman, with great cheer, told the room that the temperature in Seoul would drop again tonight to minus four degrees, that the small late-winter snowstorm forecast for Wednesday evening would bring three to four centimeters to the Seoul metropolitan area, and that residents should expect the lunar new year holiday season to begin under a low-pressure system from the East Sea.
Yi-jun did not turn the television off. He left it on through the weather and through the small soft sports segment that followed and through the longer political analysis segment after that. He sat back down at the low table. He picked up his spoon. He ate the rest of the rice and white-kimchi at the small disciplined pace of a man eating before a journey. The food, he noticed without comment, tasted of nothing.
When the news cycle ended he turned the television off.
He went to the trunk by the door. He drew out, from under the folded mulberry paper and the folded dopo, a small bundle wrapped in oiled cloth. He laid the bundle on the low table. He unwrapped it. Inside the cloth were three things: a small iron knife in a black sheath, forged at the Geumgye daejanggan in 1622 by a smith named Min who had fasted three days; a small celadon vial of cinnabar powder, sealed with wax in 1953; and a single folded talisman paper that had been Da-eun's mother's, that he had taken from the cracked wood of an antechamber doorway four hundred years ago on the night of the eleventh month after he had finally allowed himself to go and look at the place where she had stood. The paper was, in the way of these papers, brittle. He did not unfold it. He did not need to.
He sat for a long time with the three things on the table.
Then he stood. He bowed once toward the shrine in the other room. He bowed once toward the lacquered box. He spoke aloud, into the empty hanok, in the voice he had not used since 1714, the voice he had used on the night an old friend had died at the mouth of the Naktong River.
"Da-eun-ah. Kkeut-i bo-i-neun-gu-na."
Da-eun. The end is in sight.
He rewrapped the bundle. He tucked the bundle into the inner pocket of the black wool overcoat, beside the small black phone, beside the folded mulberry paper he would, later this evening, replace with a fresh one. He did not, this evening, allow himself the bottle from Halmoni. He set the bottle on the cabinet for the morning. He went to the kitchen. He washed the celadon bowl and the spoon. He dried them with a cotton cloth. He laid the bowl and the spoon back in their places.
He went to the maru porch. He stood at the porch a long minute. The Tuesday-evening Bukchon air was very cold and very still. The magpie on the maple was asleep. The compound was quiet.
He went inside. He kneeled at the shrine. He laid his palm again on the lid of the lacquered box. He did not, again, open it.
He spoke once more, this time only to himself, in the small private voice a man uses in his own house at the end of a day on which he has decided a thing.
"I have waited four hundred years to be in motion again," he said. "I would prefer to have waited four hundred more. I will not have the choice."
He bowed his head.
He went to sleep on the heated floor of the side room at nine-eleven in the evening, on the bare ondol, in his shirt, with the bundle of three things in his inner pocket and the brass kettle warm on the brazier and the small white styrofoam cooler in the cold pantry with three white livers in it that he would, in the morning, prepare for himself in the slow Joseon way his fox-mother had taught him.
He slept four hours.
He dreamed of two things: of Han Ji-won eating tuna kimbap at a plastic-stool stall in Itaewon at half past noon on Tuesday and looking, for the first time in three days, like a woman whose stomach had remembered what stomachs were for; and of Yi Hwan, twenty-four years old, in a Joseon scholar's robe, in the antechamber of the queen consort's pavilion, looking at Kim Gae-hwa the way a butcher reads a side of beef.
He woke at one-fifteen in the morning with the marble fully alert under his tongue and a thin cold sweat on his temples and the small old certainty in his chest, for the first time in four hundred and three years, that he was no longer the only person in the city of Seoul who could lose her.
He got up. He made fresh tea. He sat at the low table with the kettle and the celadon cup and the small lacquer envelope of cinnabar dust. He took out a single sheet of mulberry paper from the trunk and laid it flat. He took up the brush. He ground the cinnabar.
He began to write the bujeok he had been preparing the materials for since 2019.
He wrote her name first. He wrote Han Ji-won in the modern hangul. Underneath he wrote Yun Da-eun in the Joseon-period hanja-and-hangul mix. He pressed the small dot of his thumbprint at the foot of the paper. He laid the brush down.
He looked at the paper a long minute.
He said, in the archaic register, in the voice of a Joseon scholar swearing an oath to a court he no longer believed in:
"Naega neoreul jikinda. Cheon beoneul jikyeotdaedo han beon-i neo-yeotda."
I will protect you. Even if I had protected a thousand, the one would still be you.
He folded the bujeok in thirds and then in sevens. He set it on the low table beside the brass kettle. He sat with his hands folded in his lap, in the formal posture of a man waiting to be called.
He did not, until dawn, sleep.
He did not, until dawn, move.
The magpie on the maple, at five forty-three in the morning, lifted its head once and looked at the dim shape of him through the side-room window and made the small soft prepare-call magpies make at the first hint of light.
He bowed to the magpie.
The magpie, this morning, bowed back.