I did not find Eojin on the shores of Han River, but while crossing to the other side of the waterway, I caught a flash of blue silk past the crowd of boats and fishermen. I saw him standing with his hands held behind his back, a posture of intense concentration as he listened to a merchant with boxes loaded onto his back. This merchant held a folded fan, which he pointed at different directions in the distance, then undulated in the air as though he were tracing out mountains.
Once I was in hearing distance, the merchant asked in a thick southwestern dialect, “Are you certain you can memorize all the directions, nauri?”
“Once I am informed,” Eojin replied, low-voiced, “I rarely forget.”
Of course, I thought, as I watched him drop a coin into the merchant’s hand. Eojin had passed the civil service exam at such a young age, which spoke of his great capacity to memorize and to understand. Most languished in their ambition to pass the gwageo exam, many studying from when they were five and still failing it at thirty, and even eighty.
I understood that desperate ambition to pass, to rise from anonymity.
Anonymity that I’d never escape now.
My heart ached around the empty hole Father had left behind. He’d taken my dream, my everything.
Shoving my grief down, I sucked in a deep breath of fresh air, then locked my focus on Eojin. He was now heading down the wide, dusty road that seemed to disappear into the pale blue distance. I followed, always keeping several paces behind him, far enough that he wouldn’t hear my footsteps. I tilted the brim of my straw hat lower.
After a while, certain he wouldn’t discover me, I eased my alertness. My stomach rumbled with hunger. I slipped open the small traveling sack Servant Mokgeum had prepared for me before I left, filled with a string of coins, fresh bandages, and dried squid. I pulled out a tentacle and, while chewing on it, looked around.
Nature whispered to me its age-old promise, as it had at the Segeomjeong Pavilion. I might have lost my position—I might still lose more—but everything would be well in the end. Look, the trees whispered, look how we sway, how we sing and dance.
I took another bite, my eyes watering.
A part of me feared this promise was meant for everyone but me.
I sniffled and wiped the tears away with my sleeve.
Just then, my feet tripped over something solid, a rock jutting from the ground, and a short cry escaped me. I at once steadied myself, hands clamped over my mouth. Had he heard? When I looked up, my gaze slammed into the sight of Eojin, who’d turned back at the noise. He was too far for me to see his expression. He drew closer, closer, and his oblique brows and aquiline nose came into view, a stormy look clouding his face. His hand fell away from the sword at his side.
“What—” He seemed at a loss for words, his stare boring into me. Then he ran a hand over his haggard face. “Your mother told you, didn’t she.”
“By accident.”
He shot a glance past my shoulder, and I knew what he would not see—neither the shadow of the capital nor a glimmer of the Han River. We were too far now to justify turning back.
“Come.” He stalked past me anyway. “I am taking you home.”
I stood anchored. “We’ve been walking for at least two hours. It’ll take another two to escort me back, then another two for you to return to this very spot. The day will nearly be over, and you will have gotten nowhere.” Then, solemnly, I added, “We have less than four days left until the verdict drops for Nurse Jeongsu. There will only be two days left when you reach Damyang County. And you will have barely any time to return to convince Commander Song. You have no time to spare.”
Eojin fell still, and remained with his back to me, facing the direction that would lead us to the Han River. A stubborn edge cut along his stiff shoulders. “We will have to travel through a dozen villages,” he warned, “through rivers and mountains. The journey will only aggravate your wound.”
“It doesn’t matter; I am an uinyeo, I know how to take care of myself.”
He did not budge.
“I chose this path,” I said, my voice rising a notch. “This is the only path I can take now, and you must let me walk it.”
The tension in his shoulders eased, and turning on his heel, he walked past me without a glance. “You are most irritating,” he said when I caught up with him.
“Irritating because I am right, nauri?” I asked, sliding in a note of politeness.
“Yes.” A reluctant half smile. “You are right, Nurse Hyeon. You are always right.”
We walked quietly, and I kept the brim of my hat lowered to hide the smile that tugged at my lips. With Eojin, the mountains rose high and the fields of swaying grass enclosed us in a small world of our own where it was easy to forget—even for the briefest moment—the direness of our circumstance and the sadness still lurking under my ribs.
“So, you found that Minji is in Damyang,” I said after a time. “How did Damo Sulbi and Nurse Oksun discover this?”
“I suppose your mother told you this, too.”
“Not in detail.”
“Nurse Oksun learned of Minji’s father’s recent travels through another physician. Apparently, the father was injured on his brief journey to and from Damyang. I thought it odd that he would leave the capital for Damyang so soon after the Hyeminseo massacre, and discovered that he has a relative there, a distant family member. When I approached Minji’s father about this yesterday, he turned pale and begged me to keep her out of the investigation, saying that they did not wish to see her arrested and tortured like Nurse Jeongsu. This was enough to confirm my suspicion.”
A tingle coursed through me, down to the tips of my fingers. I clasped my hands tightly together. “We’ll finally find the truth of what happened that night,” I whispered. “And considering how the Hyeminseo victims fought back, surely if the killer was wearing a veil or mask around their face, it would have been torn off.”
“That is my hope, too,” Eojin replied. “That Minji caught a glimpse of the culprit’s face.”
“And if not?”
“Then we can ask if she heard the culprit speak. Was the killer a man or a woman? And if not even that, then we will find out something I’ve wondered since the very start: How did Student Nurse Minji manage to escape the massacre?”
His question lingered in my mind as a light drizzle fell, sunlit rain carried on the wind from the dark clouds gathering overhead. We were on the edge of a storm. As we passed into the woodlands that covered the mountain base and followed a winding trail that many had walked before, worry pinched at me. The path seemed endless, and it seemed an eternity stretched between us and Damyang.
“There’s a storm coming, nauri,” I said. “When we find a town, we should borrow horses, or else this journey will take far too long.” I loosened my traveling sack and pulled out a string of coins, sunlight gleaming off the jangling loop. “I brought enough for that.”
“That won’t be necessary. Over the mountain is a town with a police bureau,” he said. “I intend to requisition horses there.” He paused. “Do you know how to ride?”
“I do.”
“We’ll have a long trip ahead on horseback. If your shoulder hurts, you will be sure to tell me?”
“I will,” I lied.
“And you will need something to protect yourself with. There are many bandits and wild animals roaming these parts.”
“I have something. A dagger. My mother gifted it to me.”
“Do you? Let me see it.” He reached out and took the silver case, and when he pulled off the sheath, a look of surprise glinted on his face as he examined the steel. “This blade is from the military region of Byeongyeong, where the greatest types of jangdo knives were forged. For a mother whom you claim cares nothing for you, she went far out of her way to purchase this.”
I sighed. “She’s not entirely who I thought her to be.” A pause beat through me as the memory of her words surfaced. “Mother told me the story of why she gave me my name.”
“Indeed?” Eojin said. “I am curious to know why anyone would name their daughter Baek-hyeon. ‘Virtuous Elder Brother.’”
Again, like before, an uneasy sensation shifted under my skin as my muscles tensed. A feeling that there was something I should know. I massaged my temple and murmured, “It was from a dream—”
I realized when I had felt this way before: It was the feeling of heightened frustration, my mind splintering along the edges, as I found myself so close yet so far from deducing the real illness of a patient. The frustration sharpened from the hours spent weighing the significance of various symptoms. But now the signs were lined up before me:
Mother’s story about my name.
Nurse Hyo-ok’s letter, which coincidentally began with a name.
Names held significance in our kingdom.
I had thought that Mother had named me out of spite, to name me the boy she wished she had birthed, but no, she had named me based on a dream. And my little brother’s name, she’d based on the last syllable of my name. Hyeon. Our shared syllable to indicate the generation.
“There is something bothering me about Physician Khun’s name. Khun Muyeong … All names are given with meaning,” I mused.
“I saw the Hanja characters of his name,” Eojin replied. “His name consists of the characters that mean mu, for ‘bearer of arms,’ and yeong, for ‘hero.’”
“Yeong…” I tilted my head to the side, frowning as the image of Khun’s wounded forehead came to mind, along with the muddy marks of a man who had prostrated on the ground. “When you spoke with Khun, did he ever tell you…” I paused, trying to piece my thoughts together. “Is there anyone Khun doesn’t get along particularly well with? Anyone that seems to greatly distress him?”
“There is Madam Mun.”
“Anyone else? Perhaps a family member?”
“Both his parents are deceased. He has three step-siblings, though, and he seemed quite distressed when I asked about them. I tried to look them up, but there is no official family record. My guess is that his parents didn’t report the remarriage.”
“Physician Khun Muyeong … Nurse Inyeong…” I muttered their names, the only two I could think of who could have carried around a pichim. “The medical tool must belong to one of them. But Inyeong was only ever a witness to us—”
Then it clicked. My mind stepped out of itself, stunned by the possible revelation of the moment. Silence pooled into my head, muting even the sound of birds chirping on the bare branches, flickering under the light drizzle. When my thoughts slipped back into my shell, I felt Eojin’s waiting stare on me.
“What are the Hanja characters for Inyeong’s name?”
“In, for ‘benevolence,’ and—” He froze. “Yeong, for ‘hero.’”
“Dollimja,” I whispered, still suspended in disbelief. “The very common practice of circulating letters, naming one’s children by either the same first or last syllable. It may be a coincidence, but our two suspects share the same last syllable. Physician Khun Muyeong and Nurse Inyeong. What if they are half-siblings?”
“I see what you mean, but…” he hesitated. “As you mentioned, it could be a coincidence.”
“Do you not think there are too many coincidences?” I said. “She happened to be at the Hyeminseo on the night of the massacre. She was in a straw cloak, perhaps hiding the blood and scratches underneath. She could have hidden somewhere to smooth out her disheveled hair. And a little while after the beheading of Nurse Hyo-ok, Nurse Inyeong entered the palace, leaving behind her position at the police bureau.”
I decided that it was time to move on when another tragedy struck life, Inyeong had said, the memory returning to me as I spoke. My mother died, and her dream had always been that I become a palace nurse.
I continued. “Before that, she was a police damo. She told me she’d chosen not to enter the palace because she was preoccupied with solving a murder. Imagine all she must have learned—wait. How long does it take to be trained into a skilled swordswoman?”
“It would have taken her at least seven years to master the art.”
“She was there for nine years, and the inspector was her mentor…”
A deep silence fell over us. “Nurse Inyeong completely slipped my attention. I only considered her as a witness.”
“Perhaps it is just a coincidence.” I retracted my theory, unable to imagine Inyeong as the gentleman who had held a blade over my neck. “She has an alibi, after all.”
A look of discomfort darkened his expression. “A drunk father who couldn’t even remember what year it was, along with a den full of greedy gamblers. She could have paid them to lie to me. And her father is divorced. He could have once been married to Nurse Hyo-ok—” Eojin pressed his fingers into his eyes, frustration hardening his face. “Damnation. I should have questioned them all more.”
“It’s not your fault,” I rushed to say. “You had to deal with an entire investigation on your own, without the commander’s help. Besides, Inyeong was the first witness that ran to the police.” I wavered, shaking my head. “What killer reports the crime?”
“Maybe that is precisely what Nurse Inyeong thought,” he said, his voice dropping into a chilly note. “It could still be a coincidence, yet as you mentioned, there seems to be one too many. The fifth victim, Nurse Aram, had tea set up for whoever had come to visit her in the early morning—the killer. It would seem unusual that she’d create such an intimate space for Physician Khun, but Nurse Inyeong…”
“I used to think Physician Khun was the killer until a few days ago,” I added, more thoughts rising to the surface, “the day after Nurse Aram’s murder. He told me something strange, that he wished he’d died instead of Ahnbi, blaming himself for her death. When I asked him what he meant, he asked me whether I did not think it an odd coincidence, that he had fallen in love with one of the three witnesses of his mother’s death.”
A frown deepened over Eojin’s brows. I could see his mind racing.
“And there were three marks on him,” I added. “Blood on his forehead, mud on his hands and knees. He had bowed to someone…”
“If we are to go with your theory,” Eojin murmured, “Maybe Nurse Inyeong entered the palace to find out how her mother disappeared. Maybe there were whispers of who had seen her last.”
“Perhaps,” I added, breathless with a rush of thrill, “perhaps while serving Madam Mun, she discovered that the madam and Court Lady Ahnbi might know something about her mother, so she encouraged her brother to pursue Ahnbi.”
“He fell in love with her,” Eojin followed along, “but also obeyed Nurse Inyeong’s order to retrieve information. On the day he finally does, the Hyeminseo massacre occurs. And Nurse Inyeong hunts down the other two names Ahnbi mentioned: Nurses Kyunghee and Aram.”
“And on the morning after,” I said. “Maybe he was bowing to her … to his older sister. To beg her to stop!”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Eojin said. “Once we collect the horses, we will go to Gwangju.”
I blinked. “What is in Gwangju?”
“The police bureau Nurse Inyeong once served at; it will end up causing a longer detour, but I think we must. We were so focused on the prince and Physician Khun that we hardly looked into her past.”
“Perhaps we both didn’t think it possible,” I said, “that a woman could be so cruel. Perhaps when she was born, her mother dreamt of dragons, too.”