The Thirty-Fifth Stanza - 관습도감 (Royal Stanza)
Read from the beginning.
NOTE: AN ENGLISH-KOREAN GLOSSARY HAS BEEN PROVIDED FOR REFERENCE AT THE END OF THE ENTRY, AS WELL AS ADDITIONAL READING.
-THE THIRTY-FIFTH STANZA-
Morning.
A little after dawn, to be precise. For some reason, Yonghwa had always been fond of this time of day. For some reason, it felt…cleaner. As if the day started off like a blank slate, and gradually filled up with tic tacs throughout the day that cluttered the fresh, bright whiteness.
He saw Sooyoung in the pond, a little ways off. She was playing with a turtle she had found in the muddy banks. He chuckled to himself.
And as for Hyun…
Yonghwa looked around one hundred and eighty degrees. Nothing.
He called out to Sooyoung. “Hey, Lizzy!”
She looked up, laughing. The smile froze on her face as she saw his worried face. “What is it?”
“Have you seen Hyun?”
Sooyoung dusted off her jeogori. “Uh, I think she went into the woods somewhere. I think.” She frowned. “Come to think of it, I don’t really know. She mentioned something about finding some yakcho earlier, but…”
It was Yonghwa’s turn to frown. “Yakcho?” He pondered why, exactly, Hyun would be looking for medicinal plants. “Which way did she go?”
Sooyoung waved a hand vaguely in a leftward direction. “That way, I think.”
---
Hyun grit her teeth. “Come on.”
She mashed together some of the plants, adding a bit of the mineral water she had cupped from the spring.
Wincing, she hitched up her jeogori and applied the paste to her inner thigh. “Oww.” She whimpered slightly, then relaxed as the cool, slightly minty feeling washed through her legs.
Someone coughed behind her; she flinched and turned around to find herself face-to-face with Yonghwa.
“What are you doing?” She asked guardedly.
He shrugged. “I was just wondering where you were.”
“Were you worried?”
“You could say that.”
Hyun sneakily attempted to hide her injured leg behind her good one. Yonghwa was too quick for her, however. “How’s your leg?”
“It’s fine.”
He sighed. “I can see the marks on your palms from grinding up the plants. You wouldn’t have done that if it was ‘fine’, would you?”
She tried to push him aside. “I said, I’m - ” Her good leg caught on a slightly raised tree root, and she collapsed to the ground.
Despite trying to control it, Yonghwa couldn’t help but let a slightly panicky tone escape from his mouth. “Are you all right?”
Hyun grit her teeth again, wondering why, exactly, she turned into a bumbling fool every time she stepped in front of Jung Yonghwa.
Apparently, he was thinking the same; he grasped her under her forearm and slowly led her away, back towards their camp, in silence.
---
Meanwhile, Sooyoung had finished hitching the horse. “We’re ready to - ” The words caught in her throat as she saw Yonghwa and Hyun emerge from the bush, talking quietly.
She immediately felt a slight embarrassment, as if she had intruded on a private conversation between two lovers on accident. She debated for a few seconds whether to just ignore them, but finally decided that it would be too…
Too what?
For the first time she could remember, her brain failed to come up with a proper answer, solution, anything. She didn’t know whether to be afraid of this fact, or just accept it as part of her unusual circumstances at the moment.
Thankfully - or not - they didn’t seem to have caught on to the brewing torrent inside her as Yonghwa carefully set Hyun down on the grass.
She watched as Hyun let him hitch up her jeogori - and was surprised at her own sudden sharp intake of breath. Was it her jeogori that was being hitched up? She didn’t think so, but she felt as though if it had been her own.
---
Yonghwa finished applying the paste, properly this time. “You have to let it set for a while.” He explained, lowering the dress down to its proper location.
Hyun responded by punching him in the stomach, not exactly hard, but hard enough to hurt. “Don’t you even think of asking before doing something like that?”
“What?” Yonghwa said, after getting his breath back.
“If you think my legs are that good, then the least you can do is - ”
“What?”
Hyun stood up slightly awkwardly. “Come on. I’m starving.” She leaned against the tree trunk and stuck out her arm.
Yonghwa sighed and hooked his arm under hers. “Let’s go.”
He noticed Sooyoung standing by the horse. “Hey!”
She seemed to wake from some sort of inner trance. “Oh, hello.” She said, her eyes on Hyun. “How is she?”
“Better, I think. She’s really - ”
“Good. Can we go?”
Yonghwa looked at her curiously. “Something wrong?”
Sooyoung swung herself on top of the horse. “No. Nothing’s wrong.”
He helped Hyun up to sit in the middle, then pushed himself up behind her. “If we start now, we should be able to get back before mid-afternoon.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds, until: “Lizzy?” Yonghwa called out worriedly from the back.
Sooyoung fumbled with the reins. “Okay, here we go.”
Hyun shivered as Yonghwa placed his hands on her shoulder.
The horse cantered towards home.
---
“He’s actually not here right now.” Shinhye said apologetically to Minhyuk and Taeyeon, who were peeking around curiously.
“We’ll wait.” Taeyeon told her.
Shinhye frowned curiously at the pair. “Haven’t I seen you two before?”
Minhyuk admired the gold lacquer on the door. “What?”
She peeked closer, then clapped her hands together. “I’ve seen you before! You’re Yonghwa’s friend!”
This piqued his interest. “You know Yonghwa?”
Shinhye nodded. “He taught me how to play - this.” She opened her closet and drew out the gayageum. “It’s a little…beat-up.”
Minhyuk sat down cross-legged on the ground. “What the instrument looks like doesn’t matter, it’s who’s playing it that counts.” He received the instrument carefully, and was impressed at what she had done to make it come alive again.
“Yonghwa would like this.” Minhyuk said enthusiastically as he ran a hand over Shinhye’s reconstituted gayageum.
“I’m planning on showing it to him when he gets back.” Shinhye said proudly, running a hand over the strings. “What do you think?”
Minhyuk experimentally ran through a chord progression. “Doesn’t sound too bad.”
Taeyeon cleared her throat from the corner, where she had been watching with her arms folded across her chest. “When is he coming back?”
Shinhye looked up. “Oh, any minute now. He’s having tea with friends.”
Taeyeon lapsed back into her previous dignified silence. For a reason she couldn’t really quite place, she was starting to become slightly uncomfortable - being the “third wheel”, so to speak.
She really ought to learn how to play an instrument.
The sound of a door opening made her jump.
“Oh, he’s here.” Shinhye hurriedly stood up to run outside.
Minhyuk and Taeyeon exchanged looks as they heard unintelligible whispers from the hall.
About a minute later, Shinhye peeked inside at the two of them. “He says he’ll see you now.”
Feeling a distinct sense of entering into an unknown copse of forest without a lantern, the two of them cleared their throats and nodded to each other, before following Shinhye to the office of the Administrator.
---
Glossary
Gayageum: a traditional Korean stringed instrument and a member of the zither family. It was usually crafted out of wood and had 12 strings, although modern variants can have up to 25.
Jeogori: a traditional blouse worn by Korean women, as a part of hanbok.
Yakcho: an umbrella term that refers to several different varieties of medicinal plants.
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Related Reading
Korean traditional medicine