Chapter Text
When Yoon Jongwoo was a boy, his mother often scolded him for daydreaming. “There’s nothing wrong with a little fantasy,” she would say, “But it mustn’t take priority over the real world. You can’t afford to have your head in the clouds when there’s still work to do in the field.”
Jongwoo had taken his mother’s words to heart as deeply as he could; he couldn’t afford not to. When he was six years old, his village was attacked as part of a rebel army's pillaging journey to the capital. Jongwoo and his brother only survived because their widowed mother locked them in a rice chest and pleaded with them to stay quiet, no matter what happened. Then, in the act that truly saved their lives, she fed them milk mixed with enough alcohol to temper any childish, heroic impulses that might arise from her younger son and any involuntary noises that might emerge from the elder. It put both boys to sleep until the chaos was over.
When Jongwoo awoke, his mother was dead, along with anyone else in the village foolish enough to beg for their meager farm to be spared from paying tribute to the man who had already dubbed himself the next ruler of the country. In the face of this attempt at not even resistance, but a petition for leniency, the sanguinary soldiers set fire to fields and cottages at random, enough to send a message that would take a generation to fade from memory. Some peasants fled their blighted land, rejecting the laws that bound them and their families to it for generations, but most, either unwilling or unable to take those risks, pooled their remaining resources and huddled together for a winter that the local soothsayer predicted would be especially harsh.
Her prediction was right, but the elderly augur didn't live to see how much. As the marauding army's leader became king, ending years of civil warfare and ushering in a much-welcome era of peace, a plague spread through the village like a malicious rumor, and the soothsayer was one of the first to go. Jongwoo's brother was one of the last.
When the final snows thawed and the advent of spring made the world feel alive again, the local lord, recently returned from a journey to the capital to convince the new government to keep his family land in his family, took a tour of the squalid section of the countryside that was his (slightly reduced) domain. Between the war and the winter and the other hardships, he hadn't been able to collect all the taxes he was due, and he wanted to see with his own shrewd eyes how much he could expect to collect now that things had calmed down. What he saw cut through to the soft insides of his calloused heart. Even the beggars in the capital weren't as abject as the peasants working his land; the plague had passed the major cities entirely. This village's children looked as hale as they did, an aide told the lord, as they rode past children who didn't look hale at all, because some Buddhist monks from the next province over had managed to make it out on a mission to help the needy.
As he looked down on the children who had survived the winter, his gaze caught, like an overlong sleeve on a branch, on the black eyes of an especially small and emaciated boy. Jongwoo's black eyes stared into his lord's like he didn't have the sense to know who he was staring at. Or like he knew exactly who, the lord mused. The boy unsettled him, but he couldn't look away. He felt like he had heard a noise in the dark forest outside the walls of his estate, the snap of a twig or branch that could mean nothing, but could be the sign of something lurking just beyond the torchlight. Before he could find what he was looking for in Jongwoo's unnerving eyes, they abruptly rolled back, and the boy collapsed in the dirt.
An old man crouched over the unconscious boy, holding him tenderly, and the lord felt guilty for the first time in years. He inquired after the child's family and learned that he had none. The villagers planned to take him to the nearest temple when he was a bit healthier, and when they could spare a man.
The lord sat up taller on his horse, which had eaten better all winter than these wretched people likely had all their lives. "Bring more food to this village from our stores," he told his attendant party, "and to every village like it on my land. When this boy is well enough to travel, bring him and the other orphans to our manor, where they will join my family as servants."
The lord's kindness in that moment probably spared him from a peasant revolt down the line. And though his manor teemed with orphans for a season, most were eventually offloaded to temples or distant relatives. Jongwoo, however, remained in the manor and worked hard to prove his worth. Of the staring contest with his lord, he had no memory. But it remained in the Shin patriarch's thoughts, and he came to feel for the boy an affection akin to what he would feel for a charmingly frisky stray dog. As Jongwoo healed and grew, his natural intelligence became clear, and the lord allowed him to attend lessons with his son. The intention was to develop in Jongwoo the skills for him to become Shin Jaeho's right-hand man once Jaeho took over his father's duties.
If he still lived, Jaeho's father would have been discontented to see that as master of the estate, Jaeho kept Jongwoo at arm's length, though he retained him as a servant and didn't allow him to take the civil service exam. The more gossipy servants whispered, well out of both men’s hearing, that the schism wasn't simply the result of the boys growing into their roles in society's natural hierarchy, but was, like that of so many quarrels between men, over a woman. Shortly before he died, Jaeho's father had blessed Jongwoo's marriage to Jieun, a servant of Jaeho's mother. Jaeho had also fancied Jieun (everyone could see it), but they obviously would have been an inappropriate match. By the time Jongwoo and Jieun wed, Jaeho had already married a lovely woman from another fine family whose hands had never, and would never, till the soil, and she soon bore him an heir.
And so the years passed, with everyone and everything in its rightful place, and the era of peace continued. No one talked about the war and the plague if they could help it, but echoes of that time could still be heard. When one encountered a band of brigands, those unfortunate and vindictive souls once shaken from their land, now roaming in the mountains and along the highways, memories of that time were inevitably unearthed, no matter how deeply they'd been buried.
But brigands appeared less and less often, so on the night he met Seo Moonjo, Jongwoo had no qualms about completing the last leg of his trip to town, the path up the hill through the forest, so close to sunset, though he meant to return earlier. He had lingered too long listening to a poet, whose tale of romance and tragedy he hadn't heard before, when he was supposed to be on the road. As the sun sank, the artist's choicest verses repeated in Jongwoo's head, and he barely registered the path in front of him as he turned them over and over, engrossed in their beauty and the craftsmanship behind it.
Later, Jongwoo wondered whether better heeding his mother’s advice would have prevented his fortunes from taking the turn they did that day. But if anyone could view the young man's life on a grander scale, one beyond the scope of any human, they would see that by the time he met the mysterious stranger in the dark, he had been walking that uncommon path for a long time.