Chapter Text
Even now, I don’t know if I can really describe with any accuracy what happened then.
The year before our Yung Jun was born, a series of strange occurrences transpired with such swiftness I questioned more than once if I had, in fact, gone completely mad.
I was certainly well on my way there without any external help, as it had been the year of the White Metal Pig—the beginning of the third year of my so-called rule under the regency of the then Grand Queen Dowager. At my wit’s end with allowing the Andong Kims to have their way with our country, every day in court pretending I was a simpleton who didn’t know the difference between a capon and a cockerel felt like I had slipped a noose around my neck of my own volition and cheerfully handed the other end to the ministers.
Instead of fastening the tail somewhere high and putting a stop to my misery, it was as if they passed the rope amongst themselves as I was led from scheme to scheme; having my head separated from my neck by blade would’ve at least been instantaneous. Though with my luck—I’d likely be granted an executioner who misses the mark on his first few strikes.
But I digress—and it’s thanks to those ministers and their schemes, I suppose, that either my son and daughter exist at all, and that their mother—the Queen—still stands by my side today.
The Queen—my queen, as I’ve come to think of her—Kim So Yong, formerly of the Andong Kim clan (now with no allegiance to anyone but herself and our children), still pleasantly surprises me each day. I suppose I’ve come to expect it, being met with her strange shenanigans, so perhaps surprised isn’t quite the right word for it.
What’s truly odd is how easy it is for us to understand each other these days, without even needing to speak.
It seemed as if there was a time when no amount of words exchanged helped our comprehension of each other—in fact, it often made it worse. That isn’t to say that we no longer disagree; we’re both still as stubborn as ever—but it rarely dissolves into anything past a few terse words before one of us offers an apology.
I’ve not had to dodge a flying binyeo in about eight years, an activity I sometimes find myself experiencing inappropriate nostalgia for—which is perhaps the strangest feeling of all.
——
My queen has always been… peculiar, even before coming to the palace.
Charmingly capricious and cocksure, I should’ve made the connection earlier that the girl who blithely agreed to die with me in the well then just as easily changed her mind and climbed her way back up into the wretched world was the same woman that impudently demanded my affections only to later spurn my sincere devotion with what appeared at times to be abject revulsion.
The only thing truly consistent about her is her inconsistency—though I suppose that this quality isn’t unique to my queen as much as it is an authentic assessment of human nature. We like to think that we are as unchanging as a mountain peak, our personalities an everlasting fixture of our inner landscape by which we navigate our lives, when in reality what we think of as our “selves” are much more like the wisps of cloud that dance along the summit—here one moment, and gone the next, and upon its return having taken a different shape altogether.
Still, there are some behaviours that can’t be fully explained by a reasonable range of mercurial temperament—some shapes so bizarre that it leads one to think that they may not have been entirely of this world.
I want to clarify that I’m not overly superstitious, nor am I exactly a skeptic; I believe there is an underlying order, and that the proof is in our remarkable existence. As for the details—the how, the why—I try not to question too much.
The who—or maybe the what—I wonder about that from time to time.
And I don’t mean who or what is in charge of the eternally nameless—though I suppose I do have some… choice words (and by that I mean a fist to the thing that might serve as a face) for that being should I ever happen upon them, should that being actually exist.
I mean whoever or whatever emerged from the water to live as Kim So Yong for the duration of the day before our wedding to the day before the beginning of my direct rule; a time so brief that when I recall it now it seems as if it scarcely happened at all in the grand scheme of things.
And yet—a mayfly should only be so lucky to soar in the sky for half as long as she did.
I can’t quite bring myself to call her an imposter—as that would have implied that she was anything less than genuine. To this day I don’t think I’ve met anyone else as unapologetically… well, unapologetic about her existence as that person that came unbidden from the lake.
The thing is, I don’t know if I can say with certainty that she wasn’t Kim So Yong. I can, however, say with certainty that before then, I didn’t know the woman that became the wife I love dearly now at all; I made sure in the beginning to erase even the smallest inkling of curiosity for her from my mind.
What I do know is that the person I had initially married and the person I am wed to today are essentially two different people.
Perhaps I did indeed lose my mind that year, and have never quite found it again. Or perhaps this is what others refer to as marital bliss; a union of souls so complete that we have both become better versions of ourselves, a whole unrecognizable from the Yin and Yang that was once split tragically in twain.
If I am not making any sense—well, that’s because it hardly makes sense to me, either.
——
It all started with the damned marriage selection—well, to be properly accurate, it probably all started with the well, but more on that later—for the purposes of this part of the story: it started with the proclamation from the Andong Kim majority ministers that I make their most eligible daughter my Queen.
I suppose one could call it Fate. One could call it Destiny.
One could call it a contrived setup seen only in the most melodramatic of novellas I’ve recently discovered through my elder brother that his now wife, my former deposed Consort, Jo Hwa Jin apparently makes quite a living under a pseudonym writing—speaking of melodrama.
I met Kim So Yong, unbeknownst to me then, for the second time a day before she became Her Destined Highness.
Knowing nothing of her but her kind manner and her strangely familiar countenance, still I vowed to identify who the woman who had so thoughtfully lent me her hair ribbon was. After all, I was the King. A mere puppet king then, but still, a king nonetheless.
Surely all the King’s men could find one single woman.
I woke the morning of the investiture ceremony in a dour mood, to the point where my brother—the same one whom most others would generally consider the dour one—commented on it when he greeted me as I exited my chambers.
All I wanted to do that day was investigate the identity of the lady I’d met under the awning with haste; instead I was to announce that a woman whom I had no intention of ever allowing to be anything but my enemy would be sharing my bed with me on a regular basis as a matter of national interest.
To say I was distracted that day would be an understatement, as it took me a full five minutes before I realized that the woman of my dreams and the woman of my nightmares was one and the same: all the King’s men, had in fact, found her and placed her right in front of me without me ever needing to ask.
For a brief moment, I suspected that they had planted her in the palace the day before to entrap me—and the thought of it sent a sudden spike of rage up my spine so sharp I caught myself clenching my jaw unconsciously.
Thankfully, the entire room had their heads and eyes lowered so as to not offend my royal sensibilities—I quickly collected myself and adjourned the ceremony. The look of surprise on So Yong’s face upon her recognition of who I was was too open to be anything but authentic; that should have been the first clue that she had no designs to go along with the machinations of her clan.
But that day, and indeed, many days after, I wanted nothing to do with reason: I was focused, nay—fixated only on revenge.
The date of the Royal Wedding set only a mere three weeks away, as the Andong Kims had no doubt wanted me further ensnared in their clutches as soon as possible, I spent most of those twenty-one days daydreaming of the future Queen’s demise, along with that of her family.
In those weeks Hwa Jin was my respite; or perhaps I should say that my perception of her was my respite.
Thinking back on it now, my anticipation of being able to rendezvous with her in secret was often more thrilling than our actual meeting. The impending wedding was only tolerable because I knew I would be able to select Hwa Jin as my Consort shortly after—at that time I believed that her affection would always cure what ailed me.
That was one of my many mistakes—one that So Yong had later admitted to making in regards to me—we were both falsely convinced that the love of another was required to set us free from the shackles of our own making.
There are of course, the threads of Fate, the bonds imposed by society, by our roles and obligations of which we have very little say in, but none as stringent as the expectations we place on ourselves.
Over two years into my tenure as King, after all my lofty resolutions to reform Joseon, I’d made what seemed like no progress on the country; in fact it was worse than when I started. Corruption was more rampant than ever, dissension amongst the people at an all time high—and who could blame them, when an idiotic, ineffectual king like me sat upon the throne.
I also don’t blame So Yong in the least for what she did then, when I had so viciously let my prejudices tarnish the truth that was in front of me: that she too, was another victim helplessly entangled in the Destiny that her damned clan had so meticulously planned for us.
Kim So Yong had come to me with nothing but the best of intentions, despite what I can only imagine was immense pressure; she had offered her allegiance to me at what must have been an incredible risk to herself, only to be met with unmitigated and unprecipitated scorn. She knew nothing of me and yet so readily gave me everything—when then I had honestly deserved nothing.
To be completely forthright, I understand now that I thought then only of myself.
I told myself that the end justified the means, that taking advantage of Du Il’s seemingly inexhaustible kindness, that forcing my elder brother to serve a country that had already taken everything from him once was excusable as I was righting a wrong. That no matter how ruthless or craven the method, no matter how far I debased myself in order to obstruct the enemy, it would all be worth it for a better Joseon.
I fancied myself the most pious man in the country; the only one who thought single-mindedly of its salvation, whose sacrifice would lift the nation from its suffering.
If I’d been a woman married to the madman I was then—I too would have thrown a tremendous fit and jumped into a lake to escape me.
Had So Yong died then, had she had her fill of my tedious tyranny and instead swallowed enough water into her lungs to sink into the mud never to return—forget being a sorry excuse for a monarch—I would’ve been nothing more than a murderer.
——
Thankfully for my conscience, my brother and Du Il rescued my future queen just in time—much to my then dismay.
If I had been the one to have happened upon her at the time of that sorry splash, it’s likely that I would’ve allowed her to drown out of spite. After all, I just about pushed her in myself scarcely an hour earlier for daring to imply that I should even consider having anything but contempt for her.
The thought did cross my mind more than once during our confrontation, and if that wasn’t horrid enough in itself—I then spent the following day while she was in a state between life and death wishing vehemently for the latter; her only sin was existing and for that she earned not only my unwarranted hostility but later the ire of her clan for refusing to treat me as I treated her.
I believed then that her death would have been serendipitous: the head of one less serpent for me to sever.
For all my talk of saving the people, I was more than ready to let one innocent person so cruelly cease to be because of my own twisted convictions.
I can’t stress enough how remorseful I am for how I acted then—I would still be spending most of my routine today apologizing had I not been forbidden from doing so.
Though I suppose had that version of So Yong not leapt into the pond to get away from her poor excuse of a soon-to-be-husband, I would’ve never met the Lady of the Lake, nor would I ever have had the pleasure of getting to know the version of So Yong who is the light of my life today.
The Lady of the Lake was—well, I’m not entirely sure I know who the Lady of the Lake was.
However, the following is all true: she was just as astounded as we were to find that a person as… unique as herself suddenly lived amongst us; while she looked exactly like Kim So Yong, she insisted over and over that she in fact wasn’t—furthermore, more than once she maintained that she was a man—and as absurd as that idea was I think I may have in certain moments of confusion agreed; even more unbelievable was that she claimed to hail from the distant future—and indeed, the wisdom she possessed couldn’t have been, as she stated many a time, amassed by any person from Joseon; and lastly, most laughable of all—
I was, by the end, undeniably, indubitably, incredibly, hopelessly in love with her.