I remained on my knees, one arm folded around Eojin, the other brandishing a dagger, as though that might be enough to shield him. His head remained a still weight on my lap. He didn’t stir, and I was too afraid to look down.
“Leave him alone,” I cried, my desperate voice resounding in the empty forest. “Please, just go!”
“I would have left you both alone, if only you had not dug your way into my police bureau. You know the truth now. That is why you sought out Commander Chae.” She edged closer. “You shouldn’t have tried to stop me. Not even my brother tried to stop me when I gave him his wife’s ring, signifying her death. He knew, he knew, that it was my right to seek revenge. One cannot live with the killer of one’s parents under the same heaven.”
A quote Eojin had once mentioned. Li Chi’s Book of Rites.
“But we are nurses,” I countered, my voice hoarse with a surge of emotion. “Do you not remember reading the words of Sun Simiao, right on the first page of our medical encyclopedia? ‘Mankind is the most precious of all living things in the universe.’ How—How could you kill all those women?”
It was one thing to suspect Nurse Inyeong from what the commander had told us; it was quite another thing, I realized, to see her face-to-face—the last woman I had suspected, the one woman who had seemed trustworthy in a palace full of spies. “I don’t understand. How could you do this? Court Lady Ahnbi, Nurse Aram, Nurse Kyunghee—they were only witnesses. They couldn’t have saved your mother. Even if they’d tried to stand up to him, they would have all been killed, too—”
“You think yourself better than me?” Inyeong whispered, her voice chilly. “That you know what is right and what is wrong, and that I do not? Most of us believe that we are not capable of murder … until it happens to us. Until your mother”—her voice strained, a rock of pain lodged in her throat—“until your mother, the woman who birthed you, who raised you with the gentlest hand, is beheaded. Until you learn that three cruel women dragged her body out of the courtyard, stripped her naked so that nothing could be traced back to the palace, and then left her somewhere on Mount Bugak. To be forgotten there, to be eaten by wild animals.”
Ice expanded in my chest. Nurse Kyunghee never told me this. The night yawned open in my mind like a grave—I saw the silhouettes of three women dragging a headless corpse as they traversed deep into the mountain, leaving it in the isolated expanse.
“Then, and only then, can you know whether you are better than I.”
Inyeong’s voice wavered as she took another step forward, now only a few paces away from the stream between us. “I suppose Nurse Kyunghee did not reveal that part. Neither did Court Lady Ahnbi with my brother. She told him nothing of this, until I lured her out of the palace one night. I threatened her with a medical tool—just to scare her. I never meant to harm her. But then she told me the full truth. And I—I wanted her to know what that fear was like. I wanted her to feel what Mother had felt.”
“But the student nurses and their teacher,” I whispered, “they didn’t deserve to die.”
“They were in my way,” she retorted. “When Court Lady Ahnbi ran into the Hyeminseo, the teacher came out, and she saw my face. I had to kill her. Then all the students saw and started screaming. I had to silence them all. But I did feel guilt when they were all dead. I felt it pierce my bones, the horror of what I’d done. It made me despise the prince even more, the man who seems to feel no remorse for all he’s done.”
“So you posted anonymous handbills…” I said slowly, trying to buy myself time, “to cast suspicion on him and killed the other two witnesses for hiding your mother’s corpse—” My throat tightened, panic rising in my chest as Eojin’s warm blood oozed through my skirt. He was going to die if I didn’t get him out of here now. My gaze flicked around, desperate to find an escape. But everywhere I looked, every possible route of escape, I could only imagine ending in death. The dagger in my hand, no matter how strongly forged, was of little use against a woman who had spent nine years of her life mastering the art of the sword.
“I cannot even find her,” Inyeong rasped. She was too close now. Stream water trickled past the hem of her skirt. “I cannot even give her a proper burial. This life we live in, Nurse Hyeon, it is not worth living in, anyway.”
Gathering Eojin in my arms, I tried to push away from her shadow hovering over us. But escape would be impossible with his weight. I could only hold him tighter against my chest, my head ducked, wishing I could tuck him safely under my rib cage, protected under my bones and next to my heart, no matter what happened to me.
I promised to watch out for you—I squeezed my eyes shut against the burning of tears—but I don’t know how.
Then the wind blew. I smelled it again—that pungent, acidic odor I’d detected back at the widow’s house. I lifted my head, just a notch, as recognition stirred awake. It was indeed the smell of vomit.
“I will make it quick, for all of us,” Inyeong whispered. An eerie, metallic noise resounded as she unsheathed her sword, exposing a blade that gleamed in the moonlight. “Our time is ending.”
The odor continued to waft by me, now that Inyeong stood so close. My mind turned, the side of my mind that illuminated when I opened a medical text, or when I knelt before an ailing patient. Whenever I played the familiar game of inference.
My gaze slid up the length of Inyeong’s tall height. Her face looked a washed-out blue, but it was likely the fading twilight. Was I imagining it, or were her cheeks slightly swollen? I watched as she gripped the sword tighter, and my gaze ran along her bloody hand, up her sleeve—where I noticed nail-inflicted scratches and scattered pale spots along her throat and the sides of her face, a face usually layered with jibun powder. She had been hiding them since the day after the Hyeminseo massacre.
“Human perseverance often surprises me.” Inyeong settled the blade against the pulse throbbing at the side of my throat; I shuddered at the sensation of cold steel against my skin but urged my mind to flip faster, faster through the pages of all that I’d learned. “We rarely die in an instant. But if you stay very still, Nurse Hyeon, you will hardly feel the pain. A blink, and I promise, you will be gone.”
Spots. Like raindrops on a dusty road.
My mind stilled, a finger on a page.
Slowly, I craned my head back and stared up at Inyeong. I could be wrong. I likely was wrong. Yet the spots were unquestionably there. And as I thought back to all the signs and symptoms, the truth struck me.
“Wait…” I whispered. “You know what’s wrong with you, don’t you?”
Her grip on the sword hilt tightened, and the slightest fissure cracked the surface of her expression.
“We are both uinyeos; we have been trained to detect signs of death.” I dared to place a hand between my throat and the blade, and Inyeong did not budge. “You were poisoned, weren’t you?”
“I should kill you,” she snapped, with a surge of vitriol. Her sword angled away, threatening to slash through my fingers along with my throat. “I will, if you say another word.”
“Who was it?” I pressed. “Who poisoned you?”
The longest silence stretched, a silence so thick it blanketed the rocky ground. The final rays of sundown vanished, swallowing the forest in darkness, leaving only slivers of sight. Slivers of moonlit tree trunks. Slivers of Inyeong’s contorted face. A sliver of her sword, still raised and ready to strike.
“I lied.” Her voice cracked, and a trembling laugh escaped her. “My brother did try to stop me. Begged me after the first murder. Yet we are family, and he could not find it in himself to turn me in. So he poisoned me.”
Her words sliced through me: Physician Khun, her own brother, was her killer. He had loved Ahnbi too dearly, the girl who had become a silent witness.
“You only have a matter of days to live, if you are fortunate,” I said quietly. “You are using the last of your life to kill the only two people who can help give your mother justice. The last of your life to have an innocent nurse convicted, a scapegoat for the crown prince. You may be stronger than me now, but you will not be strong enough to scathe the prince. Not in your condition. Your fury is not enough.”
I waited, staring at her burning eyes. Then I added, “But it may be enough … to create a spark. You are not the only one who lost a loved one. Prince Jangheon killed Inspector Seo’s father.”
The blade wavered. “His father?”
Clenching my chattering teeth, I tried to sound firm. “The inspector’s father was a secret royal investigator, sent to Pyongan Province where Prince Jangheon carried your—your mother’s head to. The prince murdered his father, along with another villager there. The inspector told me that if the king will not listen to him, he will report all the prince’s misdeeds to the Old Doctrine faction. And if you wish to bring justice to your mother, you need to live long enough to testify.”
I held my breath, tensing against the violent shaking of my limbs. I ran my hand along Eojin’s face and placed my fingers against his throat, searching for a heartbeat. It was barely there. So faint, like a departing whisper. A hot surge of pain seared my chest.
“Make up your mind!” I snarled, no longer afraid. Anger seethed in my voice as I hissed, “If you want to see your mother in the afterlife without remorse, you need to let Inspector Seo live. If you do not, we will all be damned, and the prince will go on murdering, and then one day he will be king. Untouchable.”
Metal clattered onto rocks. Inyeong had dropped her sword. Her hand hung limp by her side. “I thought, maybe once they were all dead, the pain would ease a little … My mother was the only one who loved me. She always told me how she loved me since the very moment I was born. And I keep thinking about how no one else in the world loves me as she did.”
I was barely listening. Quickly, I removed the coil of rope from Eojin’s waist, the rope I knew officers used to arrest culprits. “Hold out your wrist,” I said, my breath a whoosh of anxiety. Every second that passed was a second in which Inyeong could change her mind. “If you want justice, you need to turn yourself in.”
“I will,” she said, then paused. “I will, but I have a request.”
“What is that?” I asked. I’ll do anything.
Inyeong’s silhouette moved, then a sound of crinkling paper reached my ear. “I have an old letter from my mother. I have carried it with me always, since entering the palace. Would you bury it with me?”
“I will.”
The moon above us was not bright, a chipped skull hanging in the sky, but bright enough to outline the folded piece of paper. As soon as I took it, I carefully moved Eojin aside and stood to wrap her wrists as best I could. Picking up her sword, I cautiously led her to a tree and tethered her to it.
“If I don’t live,” Inyeong said, her voice now calm as she watched me. “My brother will testify on my behalf. Tell him that his older sister has permitted him.”
I hid the sword and rushed over to Eojin, gathering him in my arms. I remembered the question he’d wanted to know since the beginning of the investigation. Glancing over my shoulder, I asked, “Why is Nurse Minji still alive? How did she escape the massacre?”
After a heavy pause, Inyeong replied, “She cried out ‘eomma.’ When I was about to kill her, that is what she said. Mother.”
I swore to myself I’d tell Eojin all of this. But I would make sure he lived first.
Carefully flipping him onto his front, I slid my arms under his shoulders and clenched my teeth as I heaved him onto his knees. I then leaned him onto my back, his faint heartbeat tapping against me. I hunched forward under his deadweight. My injured shoulder blazed with pain, and the bones of my legs felt like they were splintering under me as I rose to my feet.
With each step forward, I feared I might collapse, but I felt Inyeong’s haunted eyes boring into us.
I wanted to get as far away from her as possible.
Eojin’s arms hung on either side of me, his bloody hands swaying with my hobbling steps. Strands of his dark hair, loosened from his topknot, brushed against the sides of my face and the length of my throat. He was so still, it terrified me—a terror that pierced the dizzying haze of exhaustion as I staggered forward in small, painful steps. I desperately gazed up at the dark shape of the slope I’d walked earlier. I followed it from below until I arrived where my path and the rising slope met, and there was Eojin’s trail marker.
As I followed the path he’d left, I also searched every patch of moonlit earth for useful plants. The forest was always a storehouse of medicine, especially as spring had come early. At length, a sprawling bush caught my attention. I paused to inspect it with my foot, heaving for air as sweat seeped into my eyes and my arms trembled under Eojin’s weight. The moonlight fell upon yellow flowers and spiky red balls of baemddalgi.
“Hyeon-ah.”
At first, I thought it was the trick of the wind, but then I heard his voice again, thick and coarse. “Hyeon-ah.”
My heart leapt in a sharp, painful, delighted twist.
“Just leave me here,” he whispered.
“Do you not know me, nauri? I am Baek-hyeon.” I blinked the sweat from my eyes. With all my remaining strength, I heaved him higher on my back and continued on. I would have to return for the plant later. “Once I set my mind on a task, I will not stop until I complete it.”
My voice wavered, and at the thought of losing him, my voice cracked. “Please, just stay alive. Don’t let go of me.”
Seven years of studying ought to have prepared me for this moment.
Yet I had never saved anyone’s life before. I had assisted, but I had never been alone. As I used the last of my strength—a strength I didn’t even know I’d had—to lay Eojin down on the floor of the empty hut, I knew there was no time to search for a physician.
I closed my eyes against the tremors creeping up my limbs, and reminded myself what I always did at the Hyeminseo—when panicked orders flew around, nurses scrambling like headless chickens, as a patient hovered on the brink of death.
A calm and steady hand, Nurse Jeongsu would always remind me, and a calm and steady mind.
Her words steadied me now.
I bundled Eojin’s cold body with layer after layer of all the blankets I could find, then ran out and returned with the medicinal ingredients. The leaves from the baemddalgi bush and its yellow flowers I separated into two piles before me, to organize my thoughts.
The poultice. I’d make that first.
Taking a bowl from the kitchen, I used the bottom of it to crush the fresh leaves, then applied the soft, damp mass over Eojin’s wound, without removing the strip of my skirt already helping to clot the blood. I retrieved fresh rolls of bandage from my traveling sack and used a few to carefully bind his chest and stomach.
Next, I moved to his right arm, where the bone jutted out at an awkward angle. I snapped it back into place, wincing as his face contorted in pain. Then with the remaining roll of bandage, I slathered a thick layer of poultice over it and wrapped it around the arm. All the while, a haunting thought drifted through my mind: His right arm might never function the way it had before.
As I left the paste to seep into the wounds, I dashed into the kitchen again. I fit a small black pot into the hollow of the already-kindled stove, scooped water in, and tossed in the baemddalgi flowers. Once the concoction simmered down, I poured it into a bowl and managed to dribble it into Eojin’s mouth. This would hopefully trigger better blood circulation, speeding up his body’s natural healing process.
When all was done, when I had spent all my knowledge and I was dried up and trembling, I sunk to the ground before Eojin. It was just the two of us in a small hut, yet the memory of Nurse Inyeong remained heavy over me, like she was sitting right behind me in the shadows. Remember your promise, I could almost hear her calling out to me from the forest.
I was too tired to weep, or to think of all that awaited me. Later, I would have to ride to the police bureau to ask for assistance, and hope Nurse Inyeong was still tied to the tree, and had not escaped. Later, I would have to find a skilled physician to stitch up Eojin’s gaping wound. Later, I would have to think of what awaited us in the capital.
But for now, I tucked the letter away and curled up next to Eojin and laid my three fingers on his pulse, at the three crucial positions on his wrist. Chon, gwan, and cheok. I closed my eyes, too afraid to keep them open, and listened through the tips of my fingers, to the three beating threads, whispers that told one story:
Of our fragile existence, yet our determination to survive.
Of secret pains, and the yearning for love.
This was the story of all lives, and I felt its dearness so deeply, so painfully, as one faded beneath my touch. Fading, fading, like the pulse of the murdered victims, whose cold wrists I had read. Too many had died, their lives gone like a flash of lightning, consumed by another’s rage.
And I swore to myself—you must always remember them, Hyeon-ah. Never forget.
Squeezing my eyes tighter, I prayed Eojin’s pulse would not go silent on me.
I prayed he wouldn’t become one more person I would need to remember.