Chapter 52: Over the Wall

I picked the letter up out of the street.

I don’t remember doing it. I just remember that my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t retie the blue ribbon, so I stuffed the whole thing in my sleeve and ran.

By noon, everyone knew.

By the second bell, everyone was in Seo-rin’s office.

Not the wine shop this time. No wine. No jokes. Seo-rin had cleared her desk and laid out a sheet of rice paper, and on it, in fast neat brushstrokes, Gi-chul was drawing a map.

The Gu estate.

From memory. Every courtyard. Every hall. Every gate.

"I was in his study for nine hours," Gi-chul said, not looking up. "I counted the doors on the way in. And on the way out." He drew a small square at the east edge of the estate. "Here. The east wing. The women’s quarters. Her old room."

I looked at the square.

At the line beside it. The wall.

The wall between the Gu estate and the Baek estate.

"That’s where it happened," I said quietly. "Three months ago. That’s her room. That’s where he slid the door open."

"And that," said Gi-chul, tapping the wall with his brush, "is where you climbed out."

Nobody said anything.

"He’s put her back in that room," said Jin. She was leaning on the door, arms folded, already in her red uniform. "With a lock on the outside. Like before."

"How do you know?"

"Because that’s what he does." Her jaw was tight. "Men like him don’t change their habits. They just add more guards."

"How many guards?" asked So-yeon.

Gi-chul drew little circles. One. Two. Four. Six. "Twenty in the estate. Six at the main gate. Four in the main courtyard. Two outside his study at night. He sleeps light. His knee keeps him up." He paused. Drew one more circle, right outside the square. "And probably one outside her door."

"One," said Ayla. She smiled. It was not a nice smile. "One I can do."

"You can’t kill him," said Yeon-hee.

"I don’t kill. I knock on the head. Like the laundry women."

"And if we get her out," said Seo-rin, "Gu says she went home willingly. His word against the dock district’s. In front of the magistrate who loses to him at go." Clack. "We need witnesses. Real ones."

The old laundry woman with three missing teeth was sitting on a crate in the corner. She’d come with us. Nobody had invited her. Nobody had the courage to tell her to leave.

"The Gu estate," she said, "sends its laundry out every fifth day. To the canal. Never tips." She spat on Seo-rin’s clean floor. Seo-rin didn’t even flinch anymore. "Tomorrow’s the fifth day. We bring the clean sheets back in the morning. Twelve of us. Through the servants’ gate." She grinned. "Nobody looks at laundry women."

"In the morning," I said. "Not tonight?"

"In the morning, you get her out," said the old woman. "Tonight, you go see her. So she knows you’re coming." She pointed a bony finger at the line on the map. At the wall. "You know that wall better than anybody, Baek boy. Climb it."

The only way to get to that wall without going through the Gu estate was through the Baek estate.

My father’s house.

The house I was thrown out of. Where I knelt on the floor of the main hall and my father said Until I say otherwise.

So-yeon took me.

Through the back alleys of the clan district at the third bell. Through a tiny side gate in the wall of the Baek estate, in the far wing, where my uncle lives. Jung-ho was waiting at the gate with a lantern in his good hand.

He didn’t say anything. He just nodded and held the gate open.

Then I was inside. In the Baek estate. For the first time in a month.

It smelled the same. Pine trees. Old wood. The fishpond in the middle courtyard. Somebody’s incense. My mother’s chrysanthemums.

It felt like walking through a dream I’d had a long time ago.

So-yeon led me through the dark gardens. Past the training yard where the old Mu-jin practiced every single day. Past the kitchen where I used to steal rice cakes. Past the main hall, dark and silent.

There was a light in my father’s study.

We both stopped. Looked at it.

Someone was in there. A shadow on the paper window. Sitting very still. Not moving.

"He doesn’t sleep," So-yeon whispered. "Your mother told you."

I stared at the shadow.

Then I kept walking.

The east courtyard. The garden wall.

I’d gone over it at a dead run in the middle of the afternoon with my pants around my knees and one shoe. I’d never really looked at it.

It was taller than I remembered. Old gray stone. Moss on top. A plum tree on our side, with one branch hanging over.

So-yeon put her hand on my shoulder.

"One guard outside her door," she whispered. "Maybe more in the corridor. In and out. Tell her the morning plan. Don’t try to take her tonight. If he catches you in there—"

"He’ll kill me."

"He’ll kill you, and then he’ll say you were a thief, and the magistrate will thank him." Her grip tightened. "In and out, nephew."

I climbed the plum tree.

The branch held. I got to the top of the wall. Lay flat on the mossy stones. Looked down into the Gu side.

A small garden. A stone lantern. A covered walkway.

And a row of sliding doors. Dark. All except one.

One door with a faint light behind the paper. And a heavy iron bolt across the outside. Shot through two brackets.

And a guard. Sitting on the walkway next to it. Leaning against the post. Spear across his knees.

Asleep.

Snoring.

I almost laughed. Then I almost cried.

I dropped down off the wall into the Gu garden.

Same spot I’d jumped up from. Three months ago. Running the other way.

I crept along the walkway. Past the snoring guard. Slow. Weight forward. Ball of the foot. Every board on this walkway creaked, and I knew it, because I’d run across them once while a First-rate swordsman shouted behind me.

The bolt was cold. Heavy. I slid it back one finger’s width at a time.

The guard snorted.

I froze.

He smacked his lips. Shifted. Went back to snoring.

I slid the door open one hand’s width and slipped through.

The room was exactly the same.

That’s what got me. Exactly the same. The silk screens. The low bed. The little lacquered table with a vase of dead flowers. The window where her husband’s guards walked past that afternoon.

One candle burning on the table.

And Seol, sitting on the edge of the bed in a white sleeping robe, with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them.

She looked up.

Saw me.

She didn’t scream. She didn’t gasp. She just stared at me for a long, long moment, like she thought I was a ghost.

Then she was across the room.

She hit me so hard I went back against the door. Her arms around my neck. Her face in my shoulder. Shaking. Not crying. Shaking.

"You idiot," she whispered. "You stupid, stupid boy. He’s going to kill you."

"I know."

"He’s RIGHT DOWN THE HALL."

"I know."

"Why are you here?"

"To tell you we’re coming in the morning." I held her. She was so thin. Even thinner than the night she climbed out of the country estate. "The laundry women. Twelve of them. Through the servants’ gate. You’ll walk out with a basket on your hip, like before."

She pulled back. Looked at me. Her eyes were huge and wet and furious.

"You climbed the wall," she said. "Into his house. In the middle of the night. To tell me that."

"I didn’t want you to think nobody was coming."

Her face did something terrible.

"Twenty-one years," she whispered. "Twenty-one years in this room. Waiting for somebody to come. Nobody came. Not once." She grabbed the front of my robe. "And you climbed the wall."

She kissed me.

Hard. Desperate. Teeth. Her whole body slammed against mine against the inside of that door, and the candle flickered, and her hands were in my hair, and she was kissing me like she was trying to climb out of this room through my mouth.

"Seol—" I gasped. "The guard—"

"Is asleep." She bit my lip. "He’s always asleep. Twenty-one years, they’ve never once stayed awake." Her hands went to the tie of my robe. "Do you know how many nights I lay in that bed and thought about this? About you? About the wall?"

"So-yeon said in and out—"

"So-yeon isn’t the one who’s been locked in a room for three days with a sack over her head." She pulled my robe open. Pressed her palms flat on my chest. "In his house. In this room. In the bed where he never once touched me like he meant it." Her eyes were blazing. "I want this, Mu-jin. One time. In his house. While he’s down the hall. Before I walk out of here forever."

I looked at her.

At this wild, furious, starving woman who’d spent twenty-one years waiting for somebody to climb a wall.

The candle flickered.

Outside, the guard snored.

[Target: Seol Hwa-ryeon.] [Desire — MAXIMUM.]

I don’t know how long we had.

Not long. Maybe a quarter hour. Maybe less.

It was the most silent quarter hour of my life. She pulled me down onto that low bed with the silk screens and the dead flowers and she didn’t make a single sound. Not one. She bit her own wrist. She bit my shoulder. She dug her nails into my back so hard I knew I’d have marks for a week. And she looked at me the whole time, wide awake, eyes burning, like she was memorizing every second so she could take it out of this room with her.

Round four.

Finally.

In the room where round three got interrupted.

When it was over, she lay there with her chest heaving, staring up at the ceiling of the room she’d been locked in for twenty-one years. And she smiled.

The widest, wildest smile I’ve ever seen.

"There," she whispered. "Now this room has one good memory."

I slid the bolt back across. One finger’s width at a time. The guard was still snoring.

I crept back along the walkway. Past the stone lantern. To the wall.

Climbed it. Lay flat on the mossy stones at the top. Looked back once.

Her door. Dark now. She’d blown out the candle. She’d be standing right behind the paper, I knew. Watching me go.

I dropped down on the Baek side.

Onto the soft grass under my mother’s plum tree.

And straight into the light of a lantern.

I froze.

So-yeon wasn’t there. My uncle wasn’t there.

Standing three steps away, in a plain dark sleeping robe, gray-haired, stern-faced, holding the lantern in one hand and nothing in the other, was a man I’d last seen sitting on a raised platform in our main hall, saying Until I say otherwise without raising his voice.

Patriarch Baek Jung-hyeon.

My father.

He looked at me for a long, long moment.

At my open robe. My scratched shoulders. The moss on my knees.

Then up. At the top of the wall. At the dark garden on the other side. At the door with the iron bolt.

His face didn’t change at all.

"Mu-jin," he said quietly.

I couldn’t speak.

My father turned around and started walking toward the dark main hall with his lantern.

He didn’t look back.

"Come inside," said Baek Jung-hyeon. "We need to talk about Gu Seung-hwan."