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The prince was fired up again.
It was obvious even if you weren’t looking at him. When the prince was in this mood, the palace felt tiny. Maids jumped backwards into rooms they’d finished cleaning; pages scurried like mice. The royal guards stood so straight they may as well have had poles for spines. At times like these, it didn’t feel like Joseon was over and done. It felt like hell had just enthroned a new king.
Trudging along, trying to guess how long the prince was going to throw this tantrum, Choi Hyeon swallowed a sigh. It was probably his fault.
He hadn’t been permitted into the dowager’s chamber to serve alongside the rest of her staff. If he was being honest—it wasn’t so much that the other staff had been permitted and he hadn’t. It was that they’d crowded in and shut the door. He’d rocked back and forth on his toes thinking about whether to earn himself a nasty look from both the dowager and the prince by barging in, or maybe just a smirk from the dowager and nothing from the prince.
Rather than face either, because there was only so much a man could stomach at the crack of dawn, he took the hint and settled in to wait until the dowager and the prince finished eating their mandatory, monthly breakfast together.
It was the twenty first century. She wasn’t going to kill him, even if she probably did think he was the reincarnation of Grand Prince Suyang.
Following in the prince’s wake as he stalked the halls after breakfast was done and all the blood had been spilled on the imaginary battlefield, Choi Hyeon wondered why he’d let his aunt convince him that working in the palace was a good career choice. He could’ve stayed on another year in the history department and gotten a phd. He could’ve written a book by now. Ten books. He made a face at the prince’s back and thought he could probably still do that. He might even, if he caught the prince on a good day, get him to personally sign a few copies. If he was willing to be black-listed by the palace afterward anyway.
The prince stopped then, and Choi Hyeon glanced up and saw a sight he would never have believed possible until a few weeks ago.
His phone in his hand, the prince was smiling down at the screen, a rosy blush dusting both cheeks.
It wasn’t worth his life to ask who had sent the message or what it had said. In any case there was no one else who could work the sort of miracle Choi Hyeon was witnessing. He pulled out his phone and made a note to buy shares in Castle Beauty. If she could manage her business half as well as she could manage the prince, he was going to die a millionaire.
“We’re both too stressed, that’s why we should go on a date. I said that while we were still at the residence! And the public needs to see us, too.” In the rear seat of the car, Seong Huiju was haranguing the prince while they drove to the city.
“Axe throwing is not going enamor us with the people,” the grand prince drawled the words with disdain and Choi Hyeon managed, but barely, to keep his eyes on the road and his mouth shut against the snicker that tried to escape.
“Yeah,” Seong Huiju beamed a smirk at the prince, “but sometimes you just need to hit something.”
Silence ruled in the car for a long moment, and unbidden a highlight reel of bloody moments in the Yi dynasty scrolled through Choi Hyeon’s mind.
Choi Hyeon checked the mirror and saw the blush return to the prince’s face and then watched with a shudder as the prince began to smile. “Hoobae-nim, have you ever learned the art of the hunt?”
“Your highness...”
Here in the warmth of spring, with this woman beside him, and the one friend he had managed to make and keep in his life somewhere behind, watching his back, Yi An decided he was happy. It had been a long time. But the sages taught that happiness was fleeting. He thought he might write a poem later and commemorate the moment.
“Your highness,” she spoke again, insistent in his ear. “Am I going to get arrested?”
“Why?”
“This is royal land,” was the rather disgruntled reply. He was tempted to laugh, but he glanced over and saw from the tightness of her eyes that she was possibly truly concerned.
“All are allowed to hunt if accompanied by licensed hunters or if they are licensed themselves. For you, there is me. Do not worry.”
“One guess for who’s allowed to get a license,” she murmured, sourly. “I don’t think this is one of the gentlemanly talents your highness.” Her eyes, radiant even when flustered, gazed at him with a hint of censure.
Taken with this idea, Yi An eased himself back from the lip of the hunting blind and set aside his rifle. “The six gentlemanly arts, as you well know, included the art of the bow, hoobae-nim. Further, one could argue that the meaning of the word gentleman has rather changed in its implications over the centuries.”
“No. Do not. I’m not having a philosophical discussion about freaking etymology while we’re trying to hunt deer.” She shifted to sit beside him and crossed her arms until she looked rather like a pouting child.
“Why? It passes the time until the deer feel safe to emerge. They have a keen sense of smell. You and I have the scent of predators.”
The look craned up at him was barbed, and Yi An hurriedly closed his mouth.
“Don’t take this the wrong way. I know it’s how you were raised. But after you meet with her, it’s like you come back a different person.”
Her eyes surveyed him, as if cataloguing the changes to his face, his posture, his soul. It was one of the reasons he had been unable to forget her—her eyes told the truth, always.
He did not answer. What could he answer? The truth would make him sound insane. If he were to say, I am whatever I have been needed to be, whenever the king my father decreed me to be so. If he were to say that his brother’s wife with all her venom and all the cruel might of her family had shown him who he truly was inside, it might end this game before it was truly begun.
“You said it yourself,” Yi An said at last, consciously trying to match her tone. By the twitch of her mouth she had noticed. “It’s how I was raised.”
“Nurture not nature?” She raised her hands and tucked her hair behind her ears but he caught the glimmer of a smile before she smothered it.
“By nature,” Yi An took the olive branch she was offering and settled in to a different sort of debate with another flash of uncomplicated joy. “Aren’t we all made the same?”
A undignified snort answered him. Then, “Your highness, I don’t even have you saved in my phone by name.”
“Nor I, you.” The words spilled out, the brushstroke dried near as soon as it was made, impossible to take back.
With her, even so little of a clue would be enough. Not yet, perhaps. But soon.
In the moment, she shrugged his words aside, and nodded her chin at his rifle. “If we’re all the same by nature, why do so many idiots want to pin that to foreheads?”
“Their foreheads,” he scoffed, “they want to engrave it on their souls.” Shrugging a little as she tsked in irritation, Yi An traced the flower etched into the rifle’s stock.
“Maybe my family was the first, best marketing firm. Maybe even you, the Executive Director of Castle Beauty, have something to learn from us.”
He met her eyes as he spoke and was caught by the look she was giving him. She was, as always when challenged, aflame.
Yi An basked in it a moment, then added a handful more crumbs. How was she to hunt him successfully without a proper trail to follow, after all. “Maybe we have much to change, together, about the nature of my country.”