Chapter 10: Visiting Day

Captain Kang moved.

Soyul got both hands around his arm and hung on.

"No," she breathed.

"He just said he'll kill you."

"And who heard it? A traitor's girl and a guard, behind a pine tree, at midnight."

She pulled him lower. "He'd smile and say we made it up to cover what we were doing out here."

His arm shook under her hands.

The lantern came out of the shrine.

Councillor Jo went past them so close she could smell the incense on his sleeves.

Then he was gone through a door in the palace wall.

Yeonseo came out after him with her maid.

She stopped on the shrine step and looked up at the moon for a long moment.

Then she pulled her hood up and went back toward the north gate.

Captain Kang didn't speak until they were inside the Detached Palace again.

"From tonight," he said, "I sleep at your door."

The sixth day was visiting day.

The families came at noon and sat on straw mats in the front courtyard, in the thin autumn sun.

The court ladies watched from the veranda.

Soyul's father came with a basket of persimmons and his loud laugh.

"You're thin," he announced to the whole courtyard. "They're starving you. Dalrae, are they starving her?"

"I'm eating everything she doesn't, Minister."

"Good girl."

Dalrae showed him the jade cicada.

He turned it over in his big soldier's hand and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes.

"I heard," he said. "The whole city heard. The king and the mud."

Then he lowered his voice and patted his own chest, where his coat was thicker than it should be.

"Every one," he said. "Day and night. I sleep in them."

"Don't let anyone hug you."

"Only you."

The youngest finalist's mother had brought honey cakes, and the youngest finalist was eating them very fast with her back to the wall.

Yeonseo's father had come too, a narrow, nervous man in a blue robe who kept looking at the gate.

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