The Dying King Asked for a Woman Physician novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: Not Tonight
She stops the dawn bloodletting with her licence, then orders the king to his knees at the edge of her bed.
The King moved faster than she had known a man could.
He snatched a rolled cloth from under his pillow and pressed it into the hollow of his upper arm.
He clamped his elbow down on it and went limp against the cushions.
Seo-wan put two fingers to his wrist while Ko slid the door open.
The pulse under them had gone thin and quick, a thread on a loom.
She almost dropped his hand.
"Don't stare," breathed the King through his teeth. "Get the door."
The Head Physician came in with a boy carrying a brass basin and a roll of needles.
He was a heavy, grey man of sixty in a high black hat.
He had the face of someone who had never been told no by a woman.
"Dawn bleeding," he said. "Eleven days since the last."
"Not today," said Seo-wan.
He turned and looked at her.
"The King's night physician has no authority over a bleeding."
"The King's night physician has the pulse in her hand, and you do not," she said.
"It is thread-thin and racing. A man with a pulse like this has no blood to spare."
"The Infirmary has bled His Majesty since the autumn before last."
"And the pulse has got worse every month. I have read your records."
She had read them the afternoon before, and now she used them.
"Another cup of blood and he may not wake tonight. If he dies in my watch I'll tell the Council exactly who lifted the needle."
The boy with the basin looked at his master.
The Head Physician's jaw worked.
"Then write it," said Seo-wan. "Write your name under mine: 'Bled at dawn against the night physician's objection.' I'll sign beside it."
She held out her brush.
Nobody moved.
The Head Physician looked at the brush, and at the King's grey, sunken face.
She watched him count what it would cost to be the man who killed the King by signed order.
"Nobody asked for your opinion, girl," he said.
But he turned on his heel, and the basin went out of the room behind him.
Ko Dal-su slid the door shut.
The King sat up, tossed the cloth aside and began to laugh helplessly into his hands.
"Girl," he said. "He called you girl."
"He can call me what he likes. He isn't touching you."
His laughter faded.
He looked at her over his fingers with an expression she had no name for.
"Nobody has ever stopped them," he said.
That night, the guard changed at the hour of the rat.
The Hall of Quiet Rest went dark and still, with one lamp burning and the sound of the pond frogs coming through the lattice.
Seo-wan had gone through the day on four hours of sleep and a bowl of cold rice, and her hands would not stop shaking.
She locked the inner door herself.
The King was sitting on the edge of the bed in his white robe, with his hair loose, watching her.
"You're furious," he said.
"I'm terrified."
"Come here."
"No," said Seo-wan. "You come here."
His eyebrows rose.
She sat on the edge of the bed beside him and looked him in the face.
"I've had one man in my life," she said. "A clerk at the Relief Office, when I was twenty-one."
"It took four minutes. Afterward he asked me not to mention it to his mother."
The King's mouth twitched.
"I felt nothing," she said. "I thought that was how it was."
"Then last night you put two fingers in me, and I bit your shoulder."
"I noticed the shoulder."
"I want to know what else there is."
She said it plainly.
The King went very still, and the color rose in his throat.
"Tell me what to do," he said.
"Kneel."
It came out of her mouth before she could stop it.
She watched it land.
His lips parted, and she saw the pulse jump in his neck.
For two years a whole court had told him to rise, and no one had ever once said it.
He slid off the bed and went down on the floor mat, in front of her, on his knees.
"Like this?"
"Like that."
She sat back and hitched her skirt up around her hips.
Her heart was going like a hammer.
She was bare under it, and the lamp was behind him, so that she could see his face as it saw her.
He looked at her thighs, and the dark hair between them, and he swallowed.
"Open me with your hands," she said. "Gently. Look at what you're doing."
He put his palms on her knees and pushed them wider.
His thumbs spread her, careful.
"You're so wet," he said, awed.
"That's you."
"Is it?"
"Put your mouth on me."
He lowered his head.
The first touch of his tongue was a hesitant lick, slow and flat, and she gasped and clapped her hand over her own mouth.
He lifted his eyes.
"More," she whispered. "Don't stop to ask. Just do what I say."
He licked her again, firmer.
She told him where to go.
"Up. There. That little hard place. Circle it with your tongue."
He found her clit and circled it, and her whole body arched.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, like that, slower, don't change it."
He kept the rhythm and did not change it.
His hands slid under her thighs and lifted her, and his tongue pressed harder, wet and patient.
The sounds were obscene in the quiet room.
She dug her fingers into his hair and held him to her.
"Good," she said. "You're so good at this. Look at you."
A groan against her pussy answered her, and she felt it in her teeth.
The heat came up from the base of her spine, quick and fierce.
"Two fingers," she managed. "In me, and keep the tongue where it is."
He did, curling them, and her hips lifted off the bed.
She came hard.
She bit the back of her own hand and rode his mouth, rocking and shuddering.
He did not stop until her thighs fell open and she tugged at his hair.
He sat back on his heels, with his lips wet and his eyes dark and dazed.
"Perfect," she said, before he could ask.
She was breathing like she had run the length of the palace wall.
He looked at his own hand, then at her, and then he said it very quietly.
"Everyone I've ever met has told me to rise," said the King. "You're the only person who has told me to kneel."
"Seo-wan, I would kneel for you in the middle of the Great Hall."
She felt something twist hard in her chest.
She pulled him up by the front of his robe and kissed him, and tasted herself on his mouth.
"Come here," she said, and drew him down onto the mat beside her, and put her head against his shoulder until her heart slowed.
She lay there and thought, I'm going to get myself killed over this man.
A scratch at the door brought her head up.
Ko Dal-su stood in the gap, as unmoved as a wall, though she'd have sworn he had heard everything.
"Physician Gu," he said. "The Chief Councillor requests you at the morning audience. He has something he wishes you to see."
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