The Righteous Sect's Discarded Fiancée novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Over the Wall
She fights her way across the courtyard with skills this body hid for ten years, cuts off her ex's topknot, finds her own killers waiting at the woodshed with a rope, and goes over the wall in the demon's arms, who tells her she'll enter his cult as his betrothed.
"I'm not anybody's," Yeon-hwa said.
He looked over her head at the courtyard.
"Argue later. There are forty of them, and I've had needles in my spine for nine days."
"Can you fight?"
"Badly. Can you?"
She opened her mouth to say no.
The first Azure Cloud disciple reached them before she could.
He came in low with his sword, aimed at her hip, and something in her body moved before she did.
Her right foot slid back.
Her wrist turned.
The short sword came up on its own and took his blade off line with a sound.
Yeon-hwa knew that footwork.
Her coach had drilled it into her at nine years old, in a Seoul gym that smelled of floor wax.
But the wrist turn wasn't kumdo.
That belonged to this body.
The disciple stumbled past her, and Mu-hyeon caught him by the collar and threw him into two others.
"Badly?" Yeon-hwa said.
"That was badly."
They came at the two of them all at once after that.
Yeon-hwa didn't think.
She couldn't have.
Her new hands knew things she had never been taught, cuts that flowed into each other.
Her old feet, the ones she had brought with her from Seoul, kept her out from under every blade.
She wasn't strong.
There was nothing behind the sword but the sword.
Every clash shook her arms to the shoulder.
But she was never where they swung.
Mu-hyeon fought beside her with his bare hands and a borrowed sword, half a step slow, grunting every time he twisted.
He kept shifting so his body was between her and the gate.
"Where did a sect wife learn that?" he said.
"In a woodshed, apparently."
The calluses on her palms burned.
She understood them now.
The girl who had owned this body had spent ten years of nights alone with a stick.
She had practised a family sword nobody was allowed to see.
That girl had never drawn the real sword in front of anyone.
Yeon-hwa was going to use every bit of what she had left behind.
A hand closed on her arm from behind and yanked.
She spun and looked straight up into Jin Seo-gang's handsome face.
"You stupid leech," he hissed. "Do you know what you've done to my father's name?"
"Let go of me."
"You're going back to your room, and in the morning..."
Yeon-hwa didn't let him finish.
She didn't want to hear what was going to happen to her in the morning.
She cut upward, past his ear.
His jade hairpin flew off across the courtyard.
His topknot dropped onto the stones at his feet.
For one second he stood there with his long hair falling around his face, staring at it.
Then he screamed for his sword.
Mu-hyeon laughed out loud.
He grabbed her wrist and ran.
Not for the front gate, where the guards were thickest.
He ran for the east wing.
"Not that way!" Yeon-hwa said.
"The wall is lowest by the woodshed. I watched them build that post for two days."
The woodshed.
Her stomach went cold.
They came round the corner of the east wing at a dead run.
Two men in Azure Cloud blue were standing at the woodshed door.
They weren't on guard.
They were waiting.
One of them had a coil of rope over his shoulder, already knotted into a loop.
The other was holding a lamp up to the beam over the door, as if checking that it would take the weight.
They turned and saw her.
Yeon-hwa saw them understand who she was.
"It's her," the one with the rope said. "She's early."
She stopped running.
Mu-hyeon stopped too, because he still had her wrist.
The book had said the jilted fiancée hanged herself in shame.
The book had lied, or the book hadn't known.
Two grown men had come out at midnight to hang a girl from a beam, and one of them was annoyed that she was early.
"Seol Yeon-hwa," Mu-hyeon said quietly.
She didn't answer him.
She walked up to the man with the rope.
He was so surprised that he let her.
She took the rope off his shoulder with her left hand.
Then she hit him across the face with the flat of her father's sword, hard enough to put him on the ground.
The other one dropped his lamp and ran.
She dropped the rope on top of the man who'd brought it.
"Tell your master I'm not dying of shame," she said. "Tell him I'm not dying at all."
Behind them, the courtyard was a roar of voices and running feet.
Mu-hyeon looked at the rope, then at her, and his laughing face had gone very still.
"Who sent them?"
"The kindest man in the Alliance," she said.
He put his arm around her waist.
She felt him gather himself, all the strength he had left in one breath.
Then the ground fell away under her feet.
They went up the wall and over it, and her stomach stayed behind in the courtyard.
They landed in wet grass.
He didn't let go of her.
He ran with her through the dark, down a slope, into trees, until the lanterns of the Alliance Hall were orange smudges behind them.
When he finally set her down, the sky was going grey.
He was bleeding from a cut on his ribs and from every needle hole in his back.
He sat against a pine and laughed at the sky until he coughed.
"What's funny?"
"You. Them. I was going to die at dawn."
"I know," Yeon-hwa said. "So was I."
Far behind them, bells began to ring from the Alliance Hall.
Slow, heavy bells, one after another.
"The hunt," he said. "They'll have riders on every road by noon. Your name will be on the bounty right under mine."
"Then I'll hide."
"Where? Jin owns the roads, the inns and half the magistrates between here and the sea. You can't go home."
"I don't have a home."
He tipped his head back against the pine and looked at her for a long moment.
"You can come to mine," he said. "The Red Moon kills Alliance women at the gate, on sight. No questions."
"That's not an invitation."
"It is if you're not an Alliance woman." He smiled, slow. "So you'll walk through it as my betrothed."
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