The Crown Princess Faked Her Death and Married the Mercenary King novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cup
The Crown Princess is made to pour wine for her husband's favorite, then sends her own carriage into the gorge and cuts her hair; a stranger pulls her out of the river and asks whose carriage burned on his pass.
Seo Ha-rin poured wine for her husband's concubine in front of three hundred people.
She did it with her own hands, standing, in her gold crown-princess robes.
The Noble Consort sat in the seat that had been hers for six years.
It was the Crown Prince's birthday banquet in the Eastern Palace, and every lord of Daeyeon was in the hall.
"Your Highness," said an old minister near the dais, "the border memorial you wrote last spring has saved us a fortune."
Yi Jun-seok smiled and lifted his cup.
"I read a great deal," he said.
Ha-rin kept her face still.
She had written that memorial at her own desk, over eleven nights, with ink on her sleeves.
She had written every one for six years.
He had signed them all.
"My wife is no use at a banquet," Jun-seok said, loud enough for the near tables.
"She has no heir, and no conversation. At least she can serve."
He nodded at the wine jar.
The Noble Consort smiled behind her fan.
A few lords laughed, then stopped when nobody joined them.
Ha-rin was twenty-six years old, and she had been married to this man since she was twenty.
He had touched her a handful of times in the first year.
Not once since.
She lifted the jar and poured, and the wine did not shake.
"May Your Highness live long," she said, and she handed the cup to the woman in her chair.
Jun-seok did not look at her again.
"You leave for the Gwandan temple tomorrow, don't you?" he said to his plate. "Take your time coming back."
"Yes, Your Highness," said Ha-rin.
It was the answer she had been waiting a year to give.
The Dowager Queen sent her to pray at the mountain temple on the border every autumn.
It was ten days of cold rooms and bad rice, and everyone in the palace was glad to be rid of her.
This year the Prince cut her escort to a single driver.
"Why waste soldiers on a woman nobody wants?" he had said.
At noon the next day the driver stopped the carriage at the top of the Gwandan Gorge road.
Below them the Hae River ran brown and loud, swollen by a week of autumn rain.
"I'll check the harness, Your Highness," said the driver.
Ha-rin got down and put a heavy cloth bag in his hand.
"A year of wages," she said. "And a letter to your wife's village. Tell them the horse bolted and you jumped."
He stared at the bag.
"Go home, and don't go back to the capital."
He ran.
He did not look behind him, and she did not blame him for it.
Her maid Bong-sun climbed out of the carriage, twenty-four years old, short and red in the face, with a bundle on her back.
"Are we really doing it?" Bong-sun said.
"We are."
They unhitched the horse together.
Ha-rin slapped it hard on the flank, and it bolted back down the road toward the capital, trailing its harness.
They put stones under the carriage wheels and took the brake off.
Ha-rin laid her blue cloak across the seat and set her jade hairpin on the floor.
She cut her palm with a kitchen knife and let four drops fall on the cushion.
Then she took the knife to her hair.
It came to her waist, black and straight and heavy as rope, and she had never cut it in her life.
She sawed through it at her jaw in three strokes and dropped it on the seat.
The air felt cold on her neck.
"Your Highness," said Bong-sun, and her voice cracked. "Your hair."
"I'm nobody now," said Ha-rin. "Push."
They put their shoulders to the back of the carriage and pushed.
It rolled once, tipped over the cliff edge, and crashed through the trees.
A long second later it hit the river, and the sound came up the gorge.
Ha-rin stood at the edge with her ruined hair blowing against her face.
She did not cry.
She felt light.
They crossed the pass road on foot before dark.
The only way over the border without a guard post was the old rope ford below the fortress of Cheolgwan.
There the river ran shallow and fast between two boulders.
Bong-sun went first, gripping the rope.
Ha-rin went second.
Halfway across, her boot slid on a wet rock and the rope burned out of her hands.
The river took her feet and dragged her down.
Cold closed over her head, and the thought came, very clearly, that it would be a stupid way to die.
Then a hand closed on the back of her collar and another caught her around the waist.
She was lifted out of the water.
She landed against a chest.
A man was holding her, up to his thighs in the river, with the rain running off the fur collar of his coat.
His arm was iron around her waist.
His other hand held the front of her wet coat, and the heel of it rested against her throat, just under her jaw, where her pulse was running wild.
He was huge.
A scar cut through his left eyebrow, and his black hair was tied in a rough knot, and he looked down at her with eyes so dark she could not find the pupils.
Behind him on the bank stood a dozen riders with torches.
They wore black coats with a white heron stitched on the chest.
Her heart slammed against his hand.
Nobody had held her like that in six years, and her whole body knew it.
"You're breathing," he said, in a low, level voice.
"Yes."
"Good." His thumb moved once against her pulse, and she felt it in her knees.
Then he lifted his chin toward the gorge upstream, where far above them a wrecked carriage was caught in the rocks, and the torches showed a scrap of blue cloth.
"That carriage is on my pass," he said. "Tell me whose it was."
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