Chapter 6: Ra-on

Ra-on could have said Mu-seok.

The false name was ready on his tongue, as smooth as it had been at the kitchen table.

He lay in the hay with a blind man's hand against his wet cheek and found he could not say it.

"Ra-on," he said.

His voice cracked.

"My name is Ra-on."

Ryeo-won went still.

"Ra-on," he said slowly, as if tasting it.

He said it in his warm, rough voice, with the weight on the first sound, and it went through Ra-on.

Nobody had ever said it aloud to him.

Ra-on had given it to himself at twelve, in a lice-ridden dormitory.

That was the night the dormitory master broke his fingers for stealing a plum.

He had kept the name hidden in his mouth for twelve years.

"It's an old word, isn't it?" Ryeo-won said.

"My mother used it."

"It means joy."

"The kind that comes up unasked."

"It's what I wanted to be called," Ra-on said.

"I didn't have a mother to say it."

"Who gave you the other name?"

"The people I worked for."

"They liked having a bird to point at."

Ryeo-won was quiet for a long breath.

Then he said, "I'll use the one you chose."

"Ra-on."

Ra-on's eyes stung so badly that he put his face into Ryeo-won's shoulder.

Ryeo-won held him there with a hand on the back of his head and said nothing more.

The sun went down in the barn door, and the hay turned the color of honey.

That night Ra-on did not go back to the loft.

He went to the room with the open door.

Ryeo-won was waiting on the mat, and he held out his arms before Ra-on had said a word.

"Come here," said the Blind Swordmaster.

"Let me look at you."

Ra-on knelt in front of him, and Ryeo-won's hands came up.

They touched his hair first, tea-brown and cut ragged at the jaw.

"Short," Ryeo-won said.

"Rough."

"You cut it yourself, with a knife."

"How do you know?"

"The ends are straight and wrong."

His thumbs traced Ra-on's brows, and then slid down the sides of his nose, over a spray of freckles Ra-on had never known could be felt.

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