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The sun was a few fingers over the horizon when Seo-bi returned to the house, dirt under her nails and the early-morning dew just beginning to evaporate from her boots and the hem of her skirt. The string bag slung over her shoulder was stuffed with newly-pulled plants, soil still clinging to their roots. She let herself in at the gate and settled on the pyeongsang in front of the house, emptying the string bag out beside her.
Behind her, a door opened.
Seo-bi jumped, but it was just Yeong-shin, exiting the prince’s room. He froze, caught between guilt and defiance. They stared at each other for a moment before he relaxed.
Yeong-shin slid the door carefully closed. Seo-bi turned back to her plants, feeling Yeong-shin’s eyes on her. She waited, and after a moment heard him settling down behind her on the pyeongsang.
She continued sorting her stock into piles, the wet green smell of broken stems and the dusty earth rising and filling her nose. Aster for wounds, sweet wormwood for fever, wind flower for pain in the abdomen…
“The sun is warm already,” Yeong-shin said.
When she looked behind her, he was stretched out on the pyeongsang, balanced on one elbow. His tone was light, but his eyes, leveled straight at her, were the sharp eyes of a hunter.
The clump of sparrow flower hit him in the chest. His look of challenge changed to one of confusion.
“Macerated, it will help your bruise,” Seo-bi told him.
“Bruise…” he repeated, looking blank, before his hand shot up to cover the dark stain on his neck, barely hidden by the collar of his shirt.
Seo-bi snorted. Yeong-shin had the good sense to look mildly chastened.
She thought he might go back to the prince’s room, but instead Yeong-shin moved up to sit beside her. He studied the large pile of plants for a moment, then began sorting through it himself, picking out the stalks of like kind and adding them to Seo-bi’s divisions.
“I won’t hurt him,” Yeong-shin said after a while.
Seo-bi paused. “I know,” she finally said. “Lay out those cloths in the sun there.”
Between them they made short work of the task, only a few swift corrections needed on Seo-bi’s part.
“What next?” Yeong-shin asked when they were done.
In answer, Seo-bi swished a handful of aster through the bucket of water that sat at her feet, briskly rising off the dirt. The water was cold, plucking and stinging the nerves in her forearms, even though she had set it out before she left to let it warm a little.
She snatched her hands out as soon as she could and handed the aster to Yeong-shin, who spread it to dry on the ready cloths. The water seemed colder when she dipped the next bunch; her bones creaked as cold squeezed her fingers. This was always her least favorite part of building her apothecary, but it had to be done.
She passed the plants to Yeong-shin. He took them without comment, then glanced again and grabbed her hand.
“Seo-bi-yah,” he said, eyes flicking between her hand and her face. “It’s like ice.”
She tugged a little, but Yeong-shin didn’t let go. “Let me see,” she said, although she knew what she would find: the bloodless fingers, stiff like a corpse; the red-and-white mottled palm. Her other hand was its twin. This was a bad attack, but nothing she hadn’t seen before.
“I have a tincture in my room-” she began, but stopped as Yeong-shin pulled her hand back and pressed it between his own.
Warmth. Golden, flowing, like dripping honey, melting wax. The relief was almost instant, although she knew that thawing her hands fully would take more time.
“It’s caused by a fault in the circulation of the blood,” Seo-bi said. “Cold water causes attacks for me, but in others the condition is aggravated by repetitive motion or even mild drops in temperature.”
“There was a man I knew in the army,” Yeong-shin said quietly. “His fingers turned white like this even in the summer.”
He beckoned and she placed her other hand in his; he folded them together and covered them with his own. Yeong-shin’s hands were calloused, rough, alive with latent strength. Warmth was spreading up her arms now, and her fingers tingled as the blood began, sluggishly, to flow.
Her thoughts flowed also: Yeong-shin’s soldier friend, his blue-white hands clutched between Yeong-shin’s own, and Yeong-shin, who always saw what needed doing and, quietly, helped.
“Yeong-ju used to do this for me,” she said. “Ah, you don’t know. Yeong-ju was the other female physician at Jiyulheon. She…”
Yeong-ju, her eyes white-blind and her chin streaked with gore, gibbering and shrieking as she lurched towards Seo-bi, as she turned on their patients, as she died and rose and died again.
Yeong-shin’s hands flexed on hers; she met his eyes, and they were tight with sorrow. That haze of days following the initial outbreak, when she and Yeong-shin had barely slept, barely ate, Yeong-shin in the woods cutting bamboo to make spikes and Seo-bi fortifying the walls of Jiyulheon, blocking every crack. Those early days when they had thought that the disease could be contained, that the afflicted could be cured.
When she had thought that her friends might be saved.
“I remember her a little, I think,” Yeong-shin said. “She was nice to me. Not like you.”
He smiled, teasing, and chafed her hands a little. The friction brought her awareness back to the pain in her fingers, the sting of returning blood, and she winced.
Winced also to think of Yeong-ju, the salve and the wound in one.
“She could be very kind,” Seo-bi said. “But also…”
How to say it? How to explain the flaw in her heart? The way she, young daughter of a government nobi, had looked at the women around her, looked at her options. The thought of marrying made her recoil; the life of a kisaeng was unthinkable. Both felt like giving up herself. The rigor of physicianship training had been safety, the endless labor and isolated community of Jiyulheon had been relief.
“Do you know what the court ladies do together?” she asked. Her stomach dropped at even making the allusion, and her hands trembled within Yeong-shin’s. She trusted Yeong-shin with her life, with the life of Lee Chang, but she shied away from this. “Because they are allowed no contact with men.”
Yeong-shin’s eyes flickered back towards the house, and Seo-bi shook herself. Of course Yeong-shin would understand. Inasmuch as men and women could be the same, something in him echoed something in her.
“Did Yeong-ju want that?” Yeong-shin asked.
“Sex?” Seo-bi asked, and laughed when Yeong-shin jumped. “ Listen. Among the court ladies, there are women who are that way because there are no men around, and there are women who would be that way no matter what.”
“And which are you, Seo-bi-yah?” Yeong-shin asked, matching her tone.
“Neither, I think,” Seo-bi said, sobering. “Yeong-ju would have liked me to be one or the other, and when I wasn’t, she…but I think I loved her. Not the way you love my lord, but…”
Yeong-ju asleep next to her on the mat, deep in the night, her body radiating warmth and her sighing breath soft in Seo-bi’s ears; Yeong-ju’s laughter, bright and teasing, as they rolled bandages, brewed tinctures, dug roots; “Eonni, your hands!” as Yeong-ju’s hands closed around Seo-bi’s own.
Yeong-shin squeezed her hands, bringing her back to herself. His friend in the army, she remembered. They sat for a moment, mourning together, until the closing door and soft footsteps alerted them that Lee Chang was awake.
“Yeong-shin-ah,” he said in greeting. Their eyes met like a touch, and Lee Chang’s face softened the slightest amount.
Seo-bi looked away. There was no privacy she could give them, no escape for herself. She tried to draw back her hands.
Yeong-shin kept hold. “They’re not warm yet,” he said. “My lord,” he continued. “Seo-bi’s hands are injured. She was washing herbs for us.”
He opened his hand to show Seo-bi’s fingers, which were still blanched white at the last joints.
“Seo-bi-yah,” Lee Chang said, his voice deep with concern. He knelt, the better to examine her hand.
“It’s nothing, my lord,” Seo-bi said. “It will pass shortly.”
“An injury to you is not nothing,” Lee Chang said. He sat back on his heels, careless of his dopo pooling around him in the dust. “What caused this?”
“The blood circulates poorly,” Seo-bi explained again. “Cold water causes attacks. It’s happened all my life. I have a tincture that helps, or manual stimulation to help the blood flow-” she nodded at Yeong-shin, who grinned at her “-but I have never heard of a cure, only treatment of the symptoms.”
Lee Chang’s brow furrowed. “So you cannot wash your herbs,” he gestured to the plants scattered on the pyeongsang and the bucket at her feet, “without suffering an attack?”
“That is correct, my lord,” Seo-bi said. “But it isn’t dangerous, only uncomfortable, and-”
“Then the solution seems simple,” Lee Chang said. “Yeong-shin and I will wash your herbs for you.”
“No!” she cried. The idea was impossible. “My lord, no, you are-”
“A man, with hands,” Lee Chang interrupted. “Does it require special skill?”
Head tilted, eyebrow quirked, he looked at her.
At her, and into her, and she remembered: all the power he could have had, the almost unfathomable authority of the Joseon throne in the palm of his hand, and he had given it up to save a child. Given it up for danger, uncertainty—
—a nameless tiger-hunting soldier from a leper’s village who handled a rifle like it was part of his arm.
And perhaps her. Yeong-shin, and her, and the cause they had taken up together.
“My lord can’t be any worse at herb washing than he was at fishing,” Yeong-shin said lazily.
“You!” Seo-bi snapped at Yeong-shin, who seemed to be enjoying her distress. He laughed at her. “No, no special skill, but-”
“Your hands are warm now,” Yeong-shin said. Next to her, Lee Chang settled on the pyeongsang in a murmur of silk and picked up a bundle of plants. Yeong-shin released her hands, which were indeed thawed all the way through. “Tell us what to do.”
Warmth, laughter, care. Seo-bi gave in.