ONCE I WAS ALONE IN the library of Mehwadang, I took off my overcoat, leaned the jukjangdo against the wall, and sat cross-legged before the table, the investigative record opened next to my journal. I compared notes. Everything that Gahee and Village Elder Moon had shared with me matched the subdistrict administrator’s report. Shaman Nokyung had been the last person to see Seohyun, and the witness had overheard Seohyun say, I am not Eunsuk anymore. Eunsuk died in the kingdom across the sea, where her dignity was taken.
Now I understood what she’d meant, and I shivered, trying not to imagine too much. I flipped through the pages, then paused. On the day Village Elder Moon had shared his memory of this report, he had told me something else. I held the page still in midair, slowly turned it over, turning the next page and the next, waiting for the memory to sink in.
What else had we talked about?
His daughter.
And witchcraft.
He had said that his wife had consulted shamans to help their daughter with her sleeplessness, though he himself didn’t believe in witchcraft. And yet … just a few moments ago, he had told me the opposite. Witchcraft, he’d told me, was the reason behind the preserved state of Father’s remains.
Inconsistencies and contradictions, I’d read in Father’s third journal, should always be questioned.
“Agasshi.” There was a silhouette outside the latticed door. “I have brought a warm drink for you.”
I told the servant to come in, and as the lanky girl set the tray down and laid out the bowl and pot for me, I continued to stare down at my journal. I pretended to be reading as I let my thoughts trail back in time, until my mind paused before another incident. Village Elder Moon had told me that Convict Baek couldn’t be the culprit, that he was too obvious for my father to have not figured out. I had stopped focusing on Baek for that very reason. Yet Convict Baek had been involved in finding Seohyun, and perhaps even killing her. The village elder had known this all along.
Once the servant left, I picked up the willow-green ceramic bowl, filled with a warm herbal drink. I took a sip and stared blankly ahead. Was Village Elder Moon trying to confuse me? Was he trying to lead me astray? Perhaps when Inspector Yu arrived, the village elder would finally tell me everything. I wanted to trust him.
I sank so deep into my thoughts I forgot the time, then surfaced again, wondering when Inspector Yu would arrive. Perhaps soon. I rose to my feet and returned the investigative record onto the shelf, which was stacked with more records. But the other bookcases were on other subjects: history, politics, medicine—I paused at this, and slipped out the medical book.
Father had been poisoned, most likely by kyeong-po buja. I was still convinced of this. Flipping through the chapters, I searched for information on this poison. There were detailed prescriptions for a variety of diseases, and even remedies for poisoning, but there was no mention of kyeong-po buja so far. I paused, turning pages back. I’d caught a glimpse of something. No, it was an illustration of a different herbal plant. I wiped my brow; it was getting hot in this library. The ondol floor beneath me burned my soles. I continued to flip. Stopped again before a page with a folded corner. I looked over the curious content, wondering why this page in particular had been marked as important—
The book dropped from my hand. Pain as sharp as a blade ruptured through my stomach and I shriveled to the floor. I remained as still as I could. It’s my monthly pain, I assured myself, it has to be. The next wave struck harder, now with the strength of a sword’s hilt smashing into my chest, fracturing my ribs. Mouth agape, an inarticulate sound escaped me. I wrapped my arms tight around me as I hunched forward. And before me was the medical book. My hands shook violently as I reached out and turned back to the page with the folded corner.
Symptoms of arsenic poisoning, it read. Stomach pain, chest pain, nausea, vomiting, irritation, occasional itchiness, and it went on. Most victims die in a day or less, though some unfortunate few stay alive for a fortnight.
I stumbled up to my feet and grabbed ahold of my overcoat and jukjangdo, and, while clutching my stomach, swayed toward the latticed door. I swayed instead into a table, knocking down a porcelain jar that shattered, and the shards dug into my feet as I made my way to the door. Throwing the overcoat over my arm, I tugged at the brass handle with my free hand, only to be plunged into a nightmare: The door wouldn’t budge. Sweat poured down my face in buckets; I was on fire. The entire library felt like a furnace.
Heat.
Understanding clicked. Political convicts were fed sayak, a mixture of arsenic and sulfur, in heated rooms, for heat expediated its deadly effect. My grip loosened, then my hand dropped to my side, hanging there.
Village Elder Moon, who’d felt like a reincarnation of Father, wanted me dead. I thought I would feel fear. Or rage. Instead, I felt deep sadness.
My knees buckled and I sank to the burning floor. My hanbok clung to my skin and my drenched strands of hair plastered onto my forehead. So this is how it feels to die.
I thought of Father, and I knew he must have been dying from the same poison. I felt less alone. I’d go to him soon. It wasn’t as scary as I thought, death. It was just leaving one place to go to another.
The floor scalded my cheek. I turned and found myself staring at my arm stretched out on the floor, surrounded by scattered porcelain shards. My palm lay open, fingers slightly curled in. It took a few moments before I noticed it. The small scab running down my thumb. The spot I’d sliced open to drip blood into Maewol’s mouth, along with the shiromi juice.
Father had left her behind once.
He had lost his life trying to turn back time.
Maewol, I couldn’t leave her behind.
Not again.
I slowly looked around, my thoughts sluggish in the heat. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t escape through a locked door. It was a dead end.
Dead ends only exist in your mind. I could almost hear my sister’s voice, paired with the shrug of a delicate shoulder. There is always another way out.
It occurred to me then that my other hand was clinging to my necklace—and the wooden whistle hanging from it. With all my remaining strength, I forced it to my lips and blew.
Its shrill noise pierced the silence at the same time nausea punched me hard, and I coiled into a ball. I swallowed down the urge to puke. I blew on the whistle again. Pierce the night, I begged of it. Reach someone’s ear. If I was going to die, I would at least make sure that everyone would remember the noise coming from Village Elder Moon’s hut.
Footsteps creaked, and this time, terror thrummed in my chest. I didn’t want to die anymore. I rose onto my elbow, trying to rise to my feet, but at the sudden movement, nausea swelled and I heaved, though nothing came out.
“Take the whistle from her,” came a woman’s bored voice outside.
Lady Moon. The shock was enough to strike me like a splash of cold water. Enough to drag me up onto my feet, to jolt a wave of alertness through the thick haze in my mind.
“B-but, mistress.” It was the servant girl who’d served the tea. “She might hurt me.”
“It’s been an hour. And with the heat, she’s as good as dead now. Hurry, before someone hears.”
I heard the sound of jangling metal—a key in a lock. Almost instinctively, I grabbed the nearest shard of porcelain and quickly surveyed the room. Nearest to the door was the area most swamped in darkness—I’d moved the lamp close to the desk at the far end of the library. I staggered across, nearly crumpling to the ground in agony, but I used Father’s cane to keep me on my feet. I finally managed to hide in between two tall bookcases, the stacks of books casting deeper shadows onto me.
At last, the latticed door slid open. The lanky girl walked in, slowly, her steps full of caution. I hated what I was about to do, but I couldn’t let the Moons get away with Father’s death. I gripped the jukjangdo with one hand, and with the other, I held the porcelain fragment so hard that I could feel my own skin burst and bleed.
When the servant girl was right in front of me, looking in the other direction, I swung out. A scream burst from her as I placed the shard against her throat, and I pinned her against me. In three quick strides, I was out the door, pushing her forward like a shield. All the while, I feared I’d already cut the girl, that blood was streaming down her throat, for she was frantically sobbing.
“P-p-p-please!” the girl begged. “P-p-please don’t h-hurt me. Oh, p-please!”
Lady Moon stood before us, her calmness such an eerie contrast to the servant. She had her hands gathered inside her sleeves. Her face was as expressionless as the eyes of the dead, staring and blank.
“Move.” I tried to sound as threatening as possible. “Or I’ll kill her—”
“Talk any louder,” Lady Moon said, “and they will hear. The house is full of servants.”
She stepped to the side, revealing before me the opened entrance door, not too far away. She was letting me go? Or was this a trap?
One, two, three.
I shoved the servant aside and ran, bursting out of the hut. Cold air exploded onto my face. I didn’t know where that speed and energy had come from, for as soon as I ran onto the road, I felt the pain—in my stomach, in my chest, on the shard-embedded soles of my bloody feet. I hobbled forward, using the cane-sword to steady me as I threw glances over my shoulder. No one was following. Yet.
Lady Moon was likely searching for her father to tell him of my escape.
Nausea seized me again, worse than the first time. I held my stomach, hurrying my steps through the village; if I vomited now, I’d be on my knees, retching so loud that I would be caught by whoever the Moons sent to silence me.
They would likely send the man in the white mask.
Almost there, I kept reminding myself. I’d left my pony tethered to the tree near Convict Baek’s house. If I could reach the creature, I’d be able to ride to safety. But as I passed the convict’s hut, my steps slowed until I was dragging my feet, sheer agony ripping me apart, bone by bone. Unable to go any farther, I crumpled to the ground and coiled tight, clutching at my stomach.
“Mistress Min?” A familiar voice came from above. Gahee. She was holding a wood-and-hanji lamp while staring down at me with a look of curiosity and concern. “I’d thought you’d left.”
“Not yet,” I whispered.
She remained still, then looked around. “You shouldn’t be here. My father might return at any moment.”
I struggled to mouth the words. “Help me to that tree.”
It was then that a flicker of concern crossed her face. She crouched next to me and pulled my arm around her shoulder. Leaning my weight into her, I rose slowly to my feet, and step by step we made our way to the shadows, speckled with starlight.
“What’s … what’s wrong with you?”
“Poison.” I untangled myself from Gahee, whose muscles tensed with shock, and I staggered over to my pony, clutching the reins. “Just leave me here. I’ll ride back to—” I doubled over as another wave of pain slammed into my stomach. A moan escaped me as I sank to the ground.
“Should … should I get your sister? I saw her earlier.”
“Wh-where?”
“She came to ask me questions, and I told her you’d come as well to ask. She saw your horse here and told me if I saw you, to tell you she’d wait for you at the inn.”
Village Elder Moon had tried to kill me. Or perhaps he had killed me. I’d come too close to the truth, which meant Maewol was in danger as well.
“I have to find my sister.” Hands pressed into my stomach, I tried rising back to my feet. “If I don’t, the Moons will find her first.”
Gahee set her lamp down and touched my sleeve. “I don’t think that is a good idea. You look too ill; you’ll likely faint off your pony and crack your head—”
The thundering of horse hooves broke the nighttime silence. My hand flew to the handle of Father’s jukjangdo, afraid that I’d see a white-masked man. But relief swooped in in the form of my sister, leaping off her horse and dashing to my side, her eyes frantic.
“A villager just told me they saw you heading this way—” She knelt before me, half shadow, half lamplight. “What’s wrong with you? You’re trembling.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but the poison clutched me with a merciless grip, making it impossible to form words.
Gahee replied for me, “She was poisoned.”
Maewol’s eyes widened as emotions converged in her gaze—shock, fear, outrage, and the spark of a quickly turning mind. “I’m not going to let you die,” she said, then called out over her shoulder to Gahee. “Prepare three scoops of warm water and a fistful of salt dissolved into it.”
Gahee nodded and ran off.
“Why”—I squeezed the word past the twisting of pain—“why water and salt?”
“When I saw Shaman Nokyung using kyeong-po buja for her pains, I was afraid she might take too much by accident, so I once asked a medical woman what I could do if someone got poisoned. She told me the best thing I could do was to help induce vomiting.”
Gahee soon arrived with a bowl of salt water. Maewol tried to pour the contents down my throat, but with the wave of pain that violently shook me, she only managed to get half down. Agony distorted my face as I swallowed, and immediately afterward, I puked onto the grass and felt even more ill than before.
Gahee wrung her hands as she watched. “I hope this was a good idea.”
“It is,” Maewol snapped, her face stricken with fear. With more hesitance, she said, “It has to work…”
“I’ll get more.”
Once Gahee was gone, I struggled to sit back up, leaning against the trunk. I tilted my head up and stared at the starry sky through the canopy. I slowed my breathing, trying to conserve as much of my strength as possible; I needed to tell Maewol everything. “If this doesn’t work, we won’t have much time then—”
“Don’t say that!”
“Listen to me.”
Maewol fell silent, her face ashen, and she grew even paler as I described what had happened in Mehwadang. I told her about Village Elder Moon’s contradictions, the herbal drink, and Lady Moon. “She sent her servant in to collect my whistle, then ended up letting me go.”
Maewol’s brows knotted. “But why would she do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe … maybe that was her plan. She sent the servant in to unlock the door for you, without seeming like she’d disobeyed her father.”
At first, protest rose in me, but then as the thought settled, it didn’t seem impossible. Perhaps Chaewon was as frightened of her father as Gahee was of hers—both girls exhausted by the weight of their fathers’ sins.
“The real question is,” Maewol continued, “why would the village elder want you killed?”
“He must somehow be connected to the missing girls.”
“Do you know what kind of poison he used?”
“I don’t know, but in the medical book I was reading at Mehwadang—” I paused, letting the surge of pain rip through me. My voice was weaker now. “I noticed a page folded. It was about arsenic. And all my symptoms matched it.”
“Arsenic!” Maewol reached out and held my sleeve. “That’s the same poison used to kill Father.”
I turned a questioning look at her.
“I always go to the inn when I have questions,” Maewol explained. “There is such an assortment of people, an assortment of knowledge. And I realized that the answer to his strange condition was no great mystery.”
“What … do you mean?”
Maewol waved her hand around. “This is the island of political convicts, and you know how convicts are executed here.”
“Sayak. There is arsenic in it.”
“Yes. And the people at the inn told me of a few cases of poisoned bodies exhumed a few years later, only for the corpses to be found in a remarkable state of preservation. It seems there is something in arsenic that resists decay.”
I fell silent as the information sank in. “So that might explain the state of Father’s remains…”
Maewol nodded. “Precisely.”
“Sometimes arsenic takes a fortnight to kill a man…,” I whispered. “That’s why Father made it all the way to Boksun’s hut and back.”
“And who knows,” Maewol added darkly. “The Moons might have even tried poisoning Father to death on the first few days of his investigation. If he’d died then, everyone might have thought he’d died from a natural illness.”
“But he lived on…”
“They must have realized the poison wasn’t working fast enough, so they sent someone to end Father’s life.”
“Because Father must have found the truth,” I pieced together under my breath. “The Moons must somehow be connected to the missing girls. But how?” I paused, squeezing my eyes shut as I willed the nausea to subside, but it wouldn’t. “Hyunok was … found dead in the forest.” Sweat dripped down my brows as I desperately gripped onto composure. “And the other twelve missing girls … were seen near the forest … before their disappearance.”
Maewol leaned forward, wiping the dampness from my face. “The hut we found in the woodland must have been a temporary shelter, before the masked man meant to take the girls somewhere else.” She placed a hand over mine. “Older Sister, you need to rest.”
But my mind continued to race.
Seohyun, too, had been found in the same forest. She’d known something. That’s why, upon looking at the paper stolen from the masked man, she’d immediately recognized the nine circles. Dusk and fog, Seohyun had whispered.
What did that mean?
I looked at Maewol, remembering the familiarity that had sparked in her eyes at those two words. “After the Forest Incident,” I whispered through my clenched teeth, “you said I’d mentioned two words: dusk and fog. Do you remember anything else?”
Maewol shook her head. “We told Village Elder Moon what you’d said, and when he questioned you, you replied you couldn’t even remember why you’d said those words.”
“How did the village elder look when … when he was questioning me?”
“He looked…” Maewol remained still, staring fixedly at the grass. A look of intense concertation burned in her eyes. “Eager … and a little scared. I had thought he’d appeared that way because he was bent on finding the truth. But now I wonder … maybe the words dusk and fog are evidence that points to him, somehow?”
“We need to find out.” I grunted as I leaned forward, grabbing the jukjangdo.
“What are you doing?”
“Writing the words down.” There was a patch of lamp- lit soil. Brushing aside the leaves and twigs, I used Father’s cane-sword to write dusk out in the only alphabet we had in Joseon: Hanja, classical Chinese. “You don’t have any other evidence to work with, Maewol-ah. You need to find out how the Moons are connected to these words—”
“Stop that.” Maewol’s eyes gleamed. “Stop speaking like I’ll be investigating on my own. You’ll be here.”
“But I might not. You’re the only family I have, Maewol-ah, the only human being in this kingdom I care about. I need you to—” My voice wavered. “I need you to survive. You’ll be in danger otherwise.”
Maewol sniffled.
I blinked the burning out of my eyes. Tears were useless right now.
We sat like this for a while, the silence wrapping around the stabbing agony that had spread to every corner of my body. I pulled the necklace up over my head, the wooden whistle dangling from it. “Here, this belonged to Father. It has helped me out of difficult situations.”
Maewol took it, and after a hesitant moment, she hung it around her neck. “We’re going to solve this case together.” There was a stubbornness to her voice, a stubbornness that dared me to challenge her. But the look suddenly wavered, replaced by a different expression—one of a surprised alertness. She took the jukjangdo and wrote the Hanja character for fog next to the character I’d written.
Staring at us from the earth were the two words Seohyun had whispered to Boksun, and must have whispered to me as well. Yeon, for dusk. And ha, for fog.
“Yeonha,” Maewol said. “Yeonha…”
Our gazes locked. “Yeonhadang,” we both said, our voices quiet and tense.
The second home of the Moon family. The one Village Elder Moon had built for his daughter.