My Orders Changed on the Wedding Night novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Plum Shrine

A fig tree had pushed the stones of the Pavilion's east wall apart.

Ja-heon had known about the gap for three years and had never used it.

Tonight he went through it with his sleeves tied back, and ran down the mountain.

The old plum shrine stood a mile below the gate, in a grove nobody visited.

Its roof had fallen in.

A single lantern burned inside, shuttered down to a thread of light.

Ja-heon stopped at the door and heard a cough.

He knew that cough.

It had sat at the end of his bed through two winters of fever when he was seven.

"Come in, Ja-heon," said Pyo Hyeon-gi.

The old man sat on a broken stone bench with a blanket over his knees.

The Blood Lord was sixty-three years old and looked eighty.

He was gaunt and stooped, with a white cloud over his left eye and thin grey hair.

His red-trimmed robe hung on him.

He had come in person.

A cart stood behind the shrine with a mule and a driver Ja-heon didn't know.

"Lord," Ja-heon said, and went to his knees on the wet leaves.

"Get up.

"Let me look at you."

Ja-heon got up.

Pyo held his chin and turned his face toward the lantern.

"You're thinner."

"I'm eating."

"You're lying.

"You were always a bad liar, and I'm glad of it."

Pyo let go and sat back, coughing into his sleeve.

Ja-heon wanted to pick him up and carry him home, and knew he could not.

"You've done well," Pyo said.

"The Crane's own bed in two days.

"No one has ever come so close."

"Lord."

"The needle goes in at the base of the skull, on the wedding night.

"He will not wake.

"Take the little key from his sash and leave by the south gate.

"The cart will be waiting."

Ja-heon looked at the ground.

"Pavilion Master Yun has done nothing to us," he said.

"He has never raided a village.

"He sent grain to the marsh towns in the flood year."

Pyo's good eye closed.

For a moment he looked utterly exhausted.

"I know," he said quietly.

"Then why?"

"Because there are four hundred mouths in Red Plum Valley, and it is the order."

"Whose order?"

Pyo opened his eye and looked at him, and Ja-heon saw a fear so old and so tired that he stopped asking.

"Mine," Pyo said.

"It is mine, Ja-heon.

"Do not ask me again."

Ja-heon nodded.

He did what he had done his whole life, and obeyed the man who had pulled him out of the plague house and taught him his letters.

"Afterward you will come home," Pyo said.

"I will have a room ready.

"You can be a boy again.

"I would like that."

Ja-heon could not answer.

Pyo took a bundle of dried persimmon from his sleeve, as he had when Ja-heon was small, and Ja-heon put it in his coat.

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