Chapter Text
It took Kim Soyong five days to realize that the king was avoiding her on purpose.
He had always been elusive — so much so that she had to sneak into the Inner Palace to even get a glimpse of his face. After she was selected to be his queen, however, Soyong had assumed that she would see more of him. But no matter how many times she tried to cross his path he kept slipping out of sight. At first Soyong chalked it up to his busy schedule, which she knew began in the early mornings with his royal tutors and ended late at night with all the petitions and letters he had to read and respond to. The few times she did manage to corner him in a courtyard her pulse quickened in the anticipation that he would stop and exchange a few words with her, no matter how briefly. But he never did.
In fact, he didn’t even look at her. He bowed his head in a silent greeting, but kept his eyes slightly to the side of her, as if the sight of her face offended him. That was her first clue that something was wrong.
The second clue was when she heard that he intended to make Jo Hwa-jin into a royal concubine the week of their wedding. It wasn’t strange for a king to take a concubine, but it was remarkable to do it during his union with a queen consort, which was a nationally significant ceremonial event. Especially when he was so busy that he could barely spare his legitimate bride a glance.
Soyong was not stupid. She knew what it meant. The king disapproved of her. Somehow she had offended him, or failed to live up to his expectations. It was a bitter pill to swallow, since Soyong had worked very hard to make herself appear pleasing and graceful, and she had always been on her best behavior around him — with the exception, of course, of their first meeting in the first snowfall of the year, when she acted so inappropriately that she blushed to think of it afterwards. It must be that memory which bothered His Majesty. He must think that she was too forward, too blunt, unfeminine and impolite.
She didn’t know him very well, except as a frightened boy in a well and a handsome stranger in the snow, and so losing his favor was no reason to languish away in self-pity, she sternly told herself. She had felt a connection that day, some kind of unspoken understanding — apparently that was all imagined, but she knew that she could make him fall for her if he would only give her the chance.
She had to. Because if she were to last as queen, she needed the king’s favor.
As usual, she turned to Eunuch Kim, bribing him for morsels of information.
“What sort of woman does His Majesty like?” she asked very quietly, barely moving her lips to speak. They stood huddled beneath a limestone archway with Hong Yeon, appearing to any passersby as if they were merely seeking shelter from the soft snowfall.
“Any woman,” the eunuch replied rudely, and cowed down when Soyong turned a sharp eye to him. “Forgive me, Your Highness, but it is true. His Majesty is widely known to be a ladies’ man. He even…” He lowered his voice dramatically, forcing her to lean closer to catch his hushed words. “He looks at indecent pictures all day instead of cultivating himself by reading. He hides them in The Great Learning! It is true! I have heard it from one of his chambermaids.”
Soyong curled her lip in disbelief. Could that mild and pleasant king who installed her as queen be such an uncultured lecher? The few times she had heard him speak with the dowagers His Majesty had admittedly made some blunders, mixing up quotes from Mencius with passages from Confucius, but she had learned not to judge men by that, for Soyong had yet to meet any man who knew the Classics as well as her.
“Then, what are his interests?” she asked, trying to withhold the frustration from her voice. “Besides looking at indecent pictures,” she added when Eunuch Kim made the same sly expression again.
“Well… he is not very good at calligraphy,” the servant began pensively, frowning at the mist-covered mountains beyond the palace walls as he pondered her question. “Nor at charioteering, nor archery, certainly not hunting… He is unusually weak at mathematics…”
Her heart sank like a stone. Perhaps His Majesty was as much of a fool as people said he was.
But fool or not, he was still the king and her husband-to-be, and Soyong had to regain his favor by any means.
“How about music?” she interrupted, a tad desperately. “Does he like music?”
“I do not think he plays any instrument,” Eunuch Kim said, shrugging sheepishly. “But I believe he is fond of it. He has brought gisaeng into the palace some nights to perform for him and the prince. But that might just be because he wants to… well… converse with them after.” He coughed discreetly.
“Very well.” Soyong shook her head in resignation.
Music, then. That she could do.
***
She asked Court Lady Choi to set up an audience, but the king kept postponing it. He had a headache, or he was tired after his meeting with the Minister of Taxes, or he was out hunting with his brother (that felt like the lamest excuse, considering what Eunuch Kim had said). Soyong had already been his queen-elect for two weeks when she gave in and turned to the Grand Queen Dowager for help. It was embarrassing to admit that the king was avoiding her, and it earned her a stern and lengthy lecture about wifely duties, but at least it was effective. The same afternoon His Majesty came in person to the detached palace, flanked by his full retinue.
“Your Majesty,” Soyong said, bowing deeply. Her cheeks burned red.
She felt acutely aware that he must have suffered the same kind of scolding as she had. She expected him to be annoyed to be strong-armed into visiting her, but when she met his gaze he was smiling.
It was not the same way that he had smiled at her that first day. That had been soft, curious, intrigued. This was a blank mask. It sent a chill down her spine.
“This foolish king must apologize,” Cheoljong said gently. “It seems I have been neglectful and made you feel lonely in your new home, Bi-ssi. I do hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me.”
Somehow the atmosphere in the chamber was cold, even though he sounded perfectly amicable. The king sat down with a swish of his robes on the bedding behind her folding screen, politely thanking Hong Yeon for pouring them tea, and turning the same placid smile to Soyong. And still she couldn’t help but feel like there was a horrible, black anger seething just below the surface.
“Not at all,” she replied warily. “Your Majesty is so devoted to serving our nation. I am grateful Your Majesty has found the opportunity to grant me a visit in such a busy schedule.”
The king inclined his head without answering. Soyong swallowed and turned her eyes to the screen behind him with its pattern of colorful butterflies soaring in haphazard, graceful chaos. She had liked it ever since she came here, because it made her think of a warm summer day and somehow, unconsciously, of freedom. Now they just seemed erratic, panicked, in flight. As if some large predator had crept into their meadow.
She gathered her courage, and said: “Perhaps I can help soothe Your Majesty’s many worries for a while. I have been preparing a composition, as I have heard that Your Majesty is especially fond of music.”
“Have you?” he said. “I see you are as knowledgeable as all Andong Kims.” He smiled wider, displaying his large, even front teeth. “It is remarkable how well you all know me. More than I do myself, sometimes.” He chuckled, sipping his tea. “An interest in music, yes, sure. It makes me sound very refined, does it not?”
Soyong realized that she was frowning and quickly smoothed out her forehead. She still couldn’t read him. The disconnect between his ironic words and his frank appearance made her deeply uncomfortable.
She signalled to Hong Yeon to bring out her large gayageum in paulownia wood. The handmaiden positioned it on the floor as Soyong crossed her legs, warming up her fingers. Meanwhile Cheoljong watched her avidly, without turning his eyes away for even a second, and Soyong felt more self-aware than she could ever remember feeling in her life. It was as if his gaze made her skin itch and sing everywhere it fell; as if it was a physical touch, piercing through her outward body into her very soul.
She did not believe for a second that he was a fool. When she hastily glanced up to meet his eyes again she saw the same intelligent, soulful man that she had encountered that day in the Inner Palace.
She decided to test him.
“I simply assumed that Your Majesty loves music, as any virtuous man must,” she said with a certain amount of cheek, “as it harmonizes heaven and earth.”
“Is that so?” Cheoljong said.
“Yes,” Soyong replied with the self-assured certainty which men always found so irritating in her, raising her chin to boldly meet his eyes. They stared at each other for a few heartbeats, unblinking. “Confucius tells us that if one wants to know whether a kingdom is well-governed, if it is moral or immoral, one need only look at the quality of its music.”
He responded at once: “Then, if I dislike your music, am I immoral and unfit to rule?”
His voice was still soft, but the answer was too sharp, too immediate to be that of a fool. Soyong felt her heart skip a beat.
He must have realized that he had slipped up, because he carefully ordered his face back into his foolish, complacent smile, but it was too late. He had let her see him.
It was Soyong’s turn to smile, a knowing smirk.
“Not at all. If Your Majesty dislikes my music it is surely a condemnation of my lacking skills rather than Your Majesty’s taste, which I am sure is irreproachable.”
She rested the head of the gayageum on her knee and began to play, gently plucking the strings with one hand, while the other raised the pitch higher and higher as the melody sharpened. It was the most difficult piece that she knew. Soyong knew that she was good — better than good. She was thirteen when she surpassed her teacher.
For a while her plan worked. The king watched her play with an almost rapt expression. Then, very abruptly, he rose to his feet. Soyong stopped mid-accord.
“Forgive me, Bi-ssi, for not taking such a risk,” he said stiffly. “It seems safer that I avoid that outcome by any means necessary. Please play your music to ears better equipped to appreciate it.”
Soyong didn’t know what made her call out. It was incredibly inappropriate to address the king when his back was turned. But for some reason she felt, now that she knew his secret, that there was a bond between them that ran beneath such trivial formalities.
And besides, it was rather rude of him too, to run off in the middle of her performance.
“Does Jo Hwa-jin enjoy music?”
She saw his shoulders tense, his fists tighten, before he smoothed them out. She felt another thrill. She could finally read him, finally decipher what was going on beneath that blank surface. More importantly, she knew just what to say to pierce through his armor and rile him up. It felt like she had been given a key to the most important secret in this palace.
The king didn’t even turn as he answered in a low voice: “You can ask her yourself, Bi-ssi, when she comes to the palace.”
Soyong stared after him with a strange mixture of outrage and elation.
The king was not a fool at all. But he was pretending to be, which was incredibly interesting. Soyong recognized it well, having to hide one’s cleverness behind a docile mask, but she couldn’t understand why he would do so, as a man — as a king. The only explanation she could think of was that he must be trying to hide his strength from his political enemies in court, to appear weak and unthreatening. But since his mask was always in place, those enemies must be everywhere. Everyone in the palace. His ministers, his advisors, his elders. Her clan.
Soyong knew that her family were responsible for executing his. She also knew that they had very nearly killed him too, for no other crime than being his brother’s brother and his father’s son, by trapping him in that well when he was only twelve years old, ignoring his pleas and screams, leaving him to starve to death in the damp and the dark.
Soyong’s father believed that the king had buried the memory of the well somewhere too deep in his mind to ever be retrieved. But perhaps he remembered it perfectly. And perhaps that, rather than any slight on her part, was the reason the king avoided her like the plague.