Sent to Seduce the General Who Conquered My Clan novel · Chapter 9 of 24
Chapter 9: The Brush
The General went to the Inspector's residence alone, in full armor, and came back after dark with his helmet in his hands.
"Three days," he said.
Ji-hwan stood in the writing room with the lantern, and he did not breathe.
"Seong has moved the hearing up.
"I'm to write the memorial in front of the whole Council.
"If I do it, Hae-jun walks out of prison.
"If I don't, the Inspector will try him for forging the hand of a general of the realm."
"Can he?"
"He has the papers," the General said.
"Six years of them."
He sat down at the desk and set the helmet beside the inkstone.
He looked at the brush rack.
It was a long, quiet look.
Ji-hwan put the lantern on the desk.
"General," he said carefully.
"Can you write?"
The General's shoulders went tight under the armor.
"A little."
"How little?"
"Numbers."
He said it to the inkstone.
"Rice and arrows.
"I know the signs for those."
"And your name?"
"It's on a seal."
He turned his head away.
"I never went to a village teacher.
"I learned to hold a spear.
"I told myself I would learn the rest later.
"Then I was made a general, and a general isn't allowed to ask."
It was the most he had ever said at one time.
The skin of his neck had gone red above the armor.
Ji-hwan understood that this was the real wound, bigger than the whip and bigger than the arrow.
It was shame.
He thought of Hae-jun with ink on his cuffs, reading the morning accounts through a paper screen.
The General had never had to turn a page.
"Take off the armor," Ji-hwan said.
"What?"
"I can't teach a man to write while he's wearing a pot."
The General took it off, piece by piece, and Ji-hwan knelt behind him on the floor.
A primer sat on the shelf, a thin child's book with big square characters and pictures of oxen and rice stalks.
It had been there for six years.
Ji-hwan put it on the desk and took a brush from the rack.
He ground the ink.
He put the brush in the General's right hand and wrapped his own hand around it.
His arm lay along the General's arm, and his chest pressed to the General's back.
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