This Time, I Stood Up in the Selection Hall novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: This Time
Soyul picked up the spoon.
It was warm.
"What's that?" her father asked. "A spoon? The man sends my daughter a spoon?"
"It's the only thing he owns that he's never shown anyone," she said.
He looked at her face.
Then he went quietly out of the room and left her alone with it.
They were married on the thirtieth day, in the Baek courtyard, under a sky like a polished blue bowl.
Mujin came up the lane on a borrowed white horse, in a green official's robe and the black hat.
He had a wooden goose in his arms.
He carried it through the gate as carefully as if it were alive.
He knelt in front of Soyul's father on the straw mat and set the goose on the little table between them.
"Minister," he said. "I said I'd come with a goose."
Her father looked at the goose.
He looked at Mujin.
"You took your time," he said gruffly, and his eyes were wet.
Soyul watched from behind the screen in her wedding robes, which weighed as much as a suit of armor.
Red silk embroidered with peonies and cranes and waves, long sleeves striped in five colors, a little black crown on her head strung with jewels.
Dalrae had painted a red circle on each of her cheeks and one between her brows, and stood back and burst into tears.
"You look like a queen," she sobbed.
"I'm very glad I'm not."
"I know, I know." Dalrae blew her nose. "Hold still. There's somebody here."
A court lady in a plain blue jacket and a deep hood slipped in behind her, and pushed the hood back.
Yeonseo.
The queen-elect.
She had left the palace through the north gate in a court lady's clothes, with two of the king's guards dressed as porters.
She didn't look sorry at all.
"He knows," she said, before Soyul could ask. "He sent the porters."
She came close and looked at Soyul's hair.
The braid was gone.
Dalrae had wound it up that morning into a married woman's knot at the back of her neck.
Soyul's mother's silver pin had gone black on the first snow and never come clean.
Yeonseo took a pin out of her own hair.
Silver, heavy, carved at the end with a plum blossom.
She slid it into Soyul's knot herself.
"There," she said. "Now you're properly armed."
Soyul couldn't speak.
She took Yeonseo's hand.
Yeonseo let her, and then, awkwardly, she put her arms around her.
"Don't drink anything," she whispered.
"I'm going to drink everything."
Yeonseo laughed into her shoulder.
The ceremony was in the courtyard, at a table heaped with chestnuts and dates and a pair of live chickens in a basket, squawking.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of This Time, I Stood Up in the Selection Hall are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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