Two Disguised Heirs, One Heated Floor novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Room Seven
Tae-gang climbs 900 steps under a forged name and is paired in the placement bout with a bespectacled scholar who is holding back as hard as he is; assigned Room Seven with one heated floor, they hide their bandaged marks, and in the cold dark Ju-an slides under his quilt.
Hyeon Tae-gang climbed nine hundred stone steps with a forged name in his sleeve.
The name was Park Dae-sik, a farm boy from a village dojang, and it was written on a paper that smelled of fresh ink.
His father had put the paper in his hand at the foot of the mountain.
"Lose to nobody," Hyeon Gwang-ho had said. "Especially not to a Crane."
Then the Master of the Black Tiger Hall had put a small gray pill in his other hand.
It was a Veiling Pill, and it hid a man's qi for seven days.
Tae-gang had swallowed the first one at dawn.
Now he felt as empty as a dry well, and he hated it.
At the top, a gate stood open under a banner that read Cheongun Martial Academy.
A clerk checked the paper, looked at his shoulders, and waved him through without a second glance.
Tae-gang was six foot three and built like a barn door, and nobody ever doubted a farm boy that size.
Under his gray robe a cloth band was wound tight around his chest.
It covered a black tiger the size of a hand, inked there on his eighteenth birthday, which no Tiger heir was ever without.
Academy rules barred the heirs of the Great Clans.
So the band stayed on, and the story was a broken rib.
The first test was a placement bout in the open yard.
Each new student fought one other with wooden staves while three instructors watched.
"Park Dae-sik," an instructor called. "Against Mun Ju-an."
The boy who stepped out was thin and pale, with a long black ponytail and round spectacles that caught the sun.
He looked like he had never held anything heavier than a book.
Tae-gang felt bad for him.
He raised his stave very carefully.
Mun Ju-an looked at that stave, and one corner of his mouth went up.
Then he struck.
It was fast, light and clean, and it stopped a finger from Tae-gang's ribs.
Tae-gang's body moved before his mind did.
His stave knocked Ju-an's aside and hooked it away, and the clack rang across the whole yard.
They both froze.
It had been a real parry, and they both knew it.
Ju-an's eyes narrowed behind the glass.
"You're a farm boy?" he said softly.
"You're a scholar?" Tae-gang said.
"Fight or leave!" the instructor barked. "I don't have all day!"
So they fought badly on purpose.
Tae-gang stumbled over nothing, and Ju-an wobbled and flailed a stave that had just moved.
The crowd of freshmen groaned.
It went on for a minute, two fighters pretending to be clumsy, and Tae-gang realized the scholar was doing exactly what he was doing.
Holding back as hard as he could.
At last Ju-an tripped over Tae-gang's boot, and the two of them went down in a heap.
Tae-gang landed on his back, and Ju-an landed on top of him.
A thin knee sat between his legs.
A wet palm, sticky with sweat, had landed flat on his bare stomach where his robe had ridden up.
Tae-gang stopped breathing.
Ju-an's face hung six inches above his, and his spectacles had slid down his nose.
His eyes behind them were very dark, and very awake.
"Sorry," Ju-an murmured, and did not move his hand.
"It's fine," said Tae-gang, whose stomach had just turned into a stove.
"Both of you, off the ground," the instructor sighed. "Room Seven, east dormitory. Next pair!"
Room Seven was small and plain, with a sliding paper door and one narrow window.
The floor was a single sheet of oiled paper over warm stone.
In the corner, a little iron door let the heat in from the kitchen fire under the dorm.
It was an ondol, and it was the only warm thing in the room.
Only the half near the corner was warm.
The far half was as cold as the yard.
Two thin quilts lay folded by the wall.
"One room," Tae-gang said. "One floor."
"Two quilts," said Ju-an.
He pushed up his spectacles and began unpacking a bag of books, with his back turned.
When he bent for a book, his robe slid up, and a thick white bandage showed on his left hip, wrapped down onto his thigh.
Ju-an saw him looking, and his shoulders went stiff.
"An old burn," he said flatly.
"I broke a rib," said Tae-gang, touching his chest band. "Years ago."
They looked at each other.
Neither of them believed the other for one second, and neither of them said it.
"Rule one," Ju-an said. "Nobody asks about the wrapping."
"Rule one," Tae-gang agreed, relieved.
Ju-an almost smiled.
By midnight, the dorm's kitchen fire had burned low.
The warm half of the floor had shrunk to a patch the size of a door.
Tae-gang lay on it under his quilt, gazing at the ceiling.
Across the room, at the cold edge, Ju-an lay curled up and perfectly silent.
His teeth were chattering.
He was trying to hide it.
Tae-gang lasted three minutes.
"Ju-an."
"Go to sleep."
"You're freezing."
"I'm fine."
"Your teeth are talking."
A pause.
Tae-gang lifted the edge of his quilt.
"Get over here, scholar."
"Dae-sik, I'm warning you," Ju-an said, very stiffly, "I'm not a nice person."
"I didn't ask you to be nice. I asked you to get over here."
There was a long, dark silence.
Then the floor creaked, and a cold body slid under the quilt, shaking.
Ju-an's nose pressed into his neck, as cold as a river stone.
One thin leg tangled with his.
Tae-gang's whole body went tight and hot.
And pressed against his hip, hard and unmistakable, was Ju-an.
Ju-an went completely still.
"That is the cold," he said, in a voice like a snapped twig. "It's only the cold."
Tae-gang swallowed.
"Mine too," he said.
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