The Righteous Sect's Discarded Fiancée novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Wedding

Yeon-hwa went down to the gate with half the gold still out of her hair.

Ye-rin came with her, carrying the pins and muttering.

Jin Seo-gang stood alone on the open ground below the black gate.

He had come on foot.

His robe was plain brown, the kind a servant wears, and his cropped hair had grown out ragged.

There was no sword at his hip.

His left sleeve was gone entirely, torn off at the shoulder, to prove there was nothing in it.

The pink scar under his eye had gone white.

He saw Yeon-hwa in the small door, in her red wedding underrobe with half her hair up, and for a moment he couldn't speak.

"You're getting married," he said.

"Today."

"To him."

"To him."

He nodded.

"The Alliance struck the Azure Cloud from the council," he said. "My father's under guard in his rooms. He can't hold a cup."

"And the veins?"

"In his chest now."

Yeon-hwa said nothing.

"The physicians say he has a year. Maybe less."

He looked at Ye-rin behind her.

Ye-rin looked back at him with no expression at all.

"You know the six forms," he said. "If somebody taught them to him, slowly, the foundation might hold. He might live."

"Who told you that?"

"I worked it out." His mouth twisted. "I'm not as stupid as you think."

"I never thought you were stupid," Yeon-hwa said. "I thought you were cruel."

He took that.

She watched it go in.

"Please," he said.

She had never heard him say that word.

Not once in the ten years of memories that came with this body.

"No," she said. "I won't teach him one form. Not slowly, not for money, not for you."

"I know."

"He chose that art over his own sect's. He can live with what it costs him."

Seo-gang's face crumpled.

He went down on his knees in the dirt below the dried heads.

"Then I'm sorry," he said. "That's all I came with."

He reached inside his brown robe and held something out to her on his open palm.

A jade hairpin, cracked across the middle.

"It was your mother's," he said. "It came with your dowry."

"I know whose it was."

"My father gave it to me. I wore it so everyone would know I owned you."

Yeon-hwa took it off his palm, and the wind blew dust across the ground between them.

She had thought, if this day ever came, that she would want to laugh at him.

She didn't.

She was only tired of him.

"I accept," she said. "Now go home. Feed your father with a spoon. That's yours to do."

He stayed there on his knees for a long moment.

Then he got up, without looking at either of them again, and walked away down the valley alone.

Ye-rin shook her head.

"I'd have poisoned him," she said.

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