Chapter 57: Interest

The first gold pin hit the floor.

It rolled across the boards and stopped against the leg of my three-legged stool with a little tink.

So-yeon didn’t look at it. She was looking at me.

"One," she said.

Her hair was half down now. One side still pinned up. The other side falling over her shoulder in a long black rope. It made her look crooked. Lopsided. Like a painting someone had only half finished.

She reached up for the second pin.

Then stopped.

"Before I pay," she said. "I need to say something. As your aunt."

"You said you weren’t my aunt. You said you married my uncle, not me."

"For this," said So-yeon, "I’m your aunt."

She sat down on the edge of my bed. Folded her hands in her lap. Looked at me with her serious face. The one she uses in the pig yard right before she says Dead.

"The capital girl," she said.

I went still.

"Your mother told me about her. Yun Seo-ah. The Ministry daughter." So-yeon tilted her head. "The one whose ribbon you keep in your sleeve. I saw it fall out on the training ground three times this week. You picked it up every time like it was made of glass."

I didn’t say anything.

"She’s twenty," said So-yeon. "You’re nineteen. She’s the only one in your whole... collection... who’s your own age." Her eyes were very steady. "And I’m worried, Mu-jin. Because a boy who spends every night with women ten and twenty years older than him might forget how to love a girl his own age. Properly. The way she deserves."

"...That’s a weird thing to say right before you take your clothes off."

"I know." Her lips twitched. "I’m your aunt. Aunts say weird things."

She reached over. Pulled the blue ribbon out of my sleeve. Held it up between us.

"Promise me something," she said. "Whatever happens with the rest of us — the widow, the swordswoman, the bookkeeper, me — when that girl comes back, you give her your whole heart. Not a piece. Not the leftovers. The whole thing."

I looked at the ribbon.

"...I promise."

"Good." She tucked it back into my sleeve. Very gently. Like she was putting something precious away. "Then I can pay you with a clear conscience."

She pulled the second gold pin out of her hair.

All of it came down. Long, heavy, black. All the way to her waist.

The pin hit the floor next to the first one.

Tink.

"Two," said Yoon So-yeon.

She stood up.

She untied the silver-threaded sash of her good green robe. Slowly. The way she does everything with a sword. No wasted movement.

The robe fell open.

Under it was the thin green under-robe. The one from the pig yard. The one she’d slid off one shoulder when I landed my third hit.

She hooked one finger in the shoulder of it. The same shoulder.

"And a half," she said.

She slid it down. Off her shoulder. Down her arm. Off her hand.

Then the other shoulder.

The whole thing slid to the floor in a pool of green silk.

That was the half.

And then the interest.

I don’t know what I expected. A woman who’d spent twenty years in the far wing of a clan estate, training every night with a crippled husband. Pale. Thin. Tired.

She wasn’t any of those things.

Twenty years of sword forms every single night had built her like a blade. Long. Lean. Strong all the way through. Shoulders that could swing a sword for an hour without shaking. A stomach like a washboard. Long, hard thighs from twenty years of the Baek footwork. And curves that the training robes had been hiding very, very carefully.

She stood there in the lantern light and let me look.

She didn’t blush.

She didn’t look away.

"Twenty years," she said quietly. "Jung-ho taught me to fight with every piece of this body. Every muscle. Every step." She took a breath. "Nobody’s ever looked at it like it was for anything else."

"I’m looking."

"I can see that." Her eyes dropped. Down to my robe. To what was very obviously happening underneath it. Her lips curved. "You’re looking very hard, nephew."

I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

She smiled.

And then she walked across my tiny room and pushed me back onto my bed with one hand flat on my chest. The way she puts me on the ground in the pig yard. Clean. Effortless.

"Interest," said So-yeon, climbing over me, "compounds."

[Target: Yoon So-yeon.]

[Desire +25.]

[Desire — MAXIMUM.]

She fought like water.

She made love the same way.

Curving. Flowing. Never where I expected her to be. Every time I reached for her she’d already moved, already shifted, already stepped inside my guard. She pinned my wrists. Let them go. Pinned them again. Laughed when I tried to flip her and she stepped around it like a Pine Root.

"Too early," she whispered in my ear. "You went too early, nephew. Again."

"This isn’t sword training!"

"Everything is sword training."

So I waited.

I let her lead. I let the braid in my belly go quiet and listen, the way she taught me. And I felt it. Her weight shifting. Her breath catching. Her body committing.

And then I stepped in.

She gasped. Her eyes flew open. Her whole body arched off my bed.

"...Climbing the Pine," she breathed.

"Climbing the Pine."

She laughed. Then she stopped laughing. And she didn’t fight like water after that. She just held on.

My cheap bed held up. Seo-rin would be pleased.

The interest compounded. Several times.

[Harmony formation: locked. 5 days remaining.]

Five days.

The lock was almost gone.

She left before dawn. Pinned her hair back up with both gold pins. Tied her green robe. Picked up her sword.

At the door she stopped.

"Debt paid," she said.

"Paid in full."

"With interest."

"So much interest."

She smiled. Then she looked at me for a long moment. Serious again.

"Your uncle will be glad," she said. "He said old swordsmen should walk into a duel with nothing holding them back." She tapped her sword against her palm. Twice. Tap tap. "Now nothing’s holding you back, nephew."

She slid the door open.

"Except the girl in the capital," she added. "But she’s not holding you back. She’s holding you up. That’s different."

Then she was gone.

The Gwak family barge was waiting at the river steps at dawn.

It wasn’t a barge. Not really. It was a floating house. Long and low and lacquered black, with a roof of red tiles and paper windows and a little deck at the front with cushions. Six boatmen with long poles. A flag with the Gwak crest snapping at the stern.

"Discreet," I said.

"It’s the smallest one we own," said Ji-yeon.

They came down the steps one by one.

Ayla, with a sword on her hip and a wine jug on her shoulder. Seo-rin, with her abacus and three ledgers and a basket of food she’d already counted. Cha, in her practice uniform, carrying two wooden swords and a scowl. So-yeon, with her hair perfectly pinned and absolutely no expression on her face. Jin, in plain clothes, eyes scanning the riverbank for Gu spies. Mi-rae, with a basket of fish and a jar of her island pickles. Seol, in a plain blue dress with a wide straw hat pulled low over her face.

And Yeon-hee. Last. Running down the steps with her medicine bag bouncing, out of breath.

"I told Dong-min," she gasped, "that the Gwak family needs a physician at their villa for three days. For Madam Gwak’s... back."

"My back is fine," said Ji-yeon.

"He doesn’t know that."

On the top of the river steps, a lone figure waved at us. Tae-man. Holding up a piece of cardboard with something painted on it in big uneven letters.

BRING FISH.

I waved back.

The boatmen pushed off.

Two hours upriver.

It was the most peaceful two hours I’d had since I woke up in this body.

The river was wide and green and slow. Willows hung over the banks. Herons stood in the shallows. The boatmen sang some old song about a fisherman’s wife, and Mi-rae sang along in her island accent and got all the words wrong on purpose.

Ayla and So-yeon sat on the front deck sharpening their swords and arguing about footwork. Cha sat between them and told both of them they were wrong. Seo-rin and Ji-yeon went through the villa’s supply ledgers together, heads bent close, clacking and nodding like two old merchants. Jin stood at the stern with her arms folded, watching the riverbank for anything that moved.

Seol sat under her straw hat at the very edge of the boat, trailing her fingers in the water.

"First time on a river," she said, when I sat down next to her. "In twenty-one years. He never let me."

"How is it?"

She watched the water slide through her fingers.

"It’s very wet," she said. And smiled.

Yeon-hee fell asleep against my shoulder halfway there. Curled up. Snoring softly. Her medicine bag in her lap.

I looked around the barge. At all of them. Sharpening swords. Counting supplies. Singing. Sleeping.

In my last life, I died alone.

In this one, I was on a river with eight women who’d come to keep me alive.

I didn’t deserve it.

I was going to try.

The villa came around a bend in the river like something out of a painting.

White walls. Gray tile roofs. A whole hillside of pine trees and plum orchards. Steam rising from somewhere behind the wall — the hot spring. A private dock with a little pavilion at the end of it, built out over the water.

The barge drifted in. The boatmen threw ropes.

And there was someone on the dock.

Not a servant. Not a boatman.

A woman.

Tall. Mid-forties. Standing very straight at the end of the pavilion in a pale gray riding robe with silver embroidery at the cuffs. Black hair streaked with a little gray, pinned up in the severe style of the capital. A long, thin, very old sword on her hip.

And a face.

I knew that face.

Not hers. But the eyes. Big. Serious. Dark.

Seo-ah’s eyes.

[Target Detected.]

The woman looked at the barge. At the women stepping off it. At Ji-yeon. At Hwang’s salve-smelling bundle. At me.

Her gaze stopped on me. Stayed there.

"You must be Baek Mu-jin," she said. Her voice was low and crisp. A capital accent. Exactly like Seo-ah’s.

Ji-yeon stepped forward, frowning. "I’m sorry, madam. This is a private Gwak family property—"

"I know. I own the villa across the stream." The woman didn’t take her eyes off me. "I’ve been staying here for the summer. Away from the capital. Away from my brother."

She walked down the dock toward me. Slowly. Her old sword swinging at her hip.

She stopped right in front of me.

Looked me up and down. The same way Seo-ah did, that first day on the headmistress’s stairs.

"Yun Hye-ran," she said. "Seo-ah’s aunt. Her father’s older sister."

She reached into her sleeve.

And pulled out a letter.

Thick paper. Neat capital handwriting. Tied with a strip of blue silk.

"My niece," said Yun Hye-ran, "writes me about you. Every single day."