Spring came back to Haesong. The ice along the stream had thinned to glass and then surrendered in quiet shards; the wheel at the mill stopped groaning like an old man and began to sound merely middle-aged again. Snow retreated to the shadiest corners, sulking under eaves and stone walls, and the wind lost the knife-edge it had carried all winter.
Inside the mill, however, the air was as it always was: damp, warm, and smelling of fibre, smoke, and work.
Jin-Ho stood at the vat, paddle deep in the clouded water. The motion had settled into his bones over the years. Push, lift, cut, circle. The slurry turned and folded under his hands, the fibres rising and sinking like a school of patient fish.
“Not so hard,” Hye-Won said behind him. “You’ll frighten it into clumping.”
He adjusted his grip without argument. “It’s only pulp, Eomma,” he said. “It doesn’t know fear.”
“Everything knows something,” she replied. “Pulp knows when it’s being bullied. So does paper. So do people.”
He kept his eyes on the vat. “I wasn’t bullying,” he said, but his lips twitched.
The ugly sheet from winter hung nailed near the hooks, where his eyes caught it whenever he looked up by habit. The warped fibres and uneven surface were a permanent, honest wince in the corner of his vision. Beneath the worst of the quirks, his own handwriting stared back at him:
Another mistake.16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbI6LNDEexN
Not final one.
He had stopped bristling at the sight a month ago. Now it just felt like another tool, like the paddle in his hands or the hook on the wall. Something that belonged.
“Enough,” Hye-Won said at last. “Let it rest for a little. You, too.”
He set the paddle aside, flexing his fingers. His shoulders ached, but it was the familiar ache of a day well used, not the deep, bitter throb of those weeks when he had tried to outrun time itself.
When he turned, he caught the way his mother moved her back—carefully, with the kind of slowness that meant the cold had bitten more deeply than she wanted to admit.
“Your face is making that line again,” he said.
“What line?” she asked, reaching for a bundle of felts.
“The one that says, ‘I am fine and I will bite anyone who suggests otherwise’.”
She huffed, not quite a laugh. “Impertinent child.”
“Apprentice,” he corrected, straightening a little.
She gave him a look that was half appraisal, half affection. “Mm. Apprentice, then. All the more reason to use you, where your arms can be tired instead of my spine.”
She wiped her hands on her apron. “Go to the shed,” she said. “Your father is chewing on wood alone again. Better you take his chisel away from him before he starts carving the workbench out of boredom.”
“I just finished here,” Jin-Ho protested, but lightly. The mill had its own gravity; he was used to orbiting it all day.
“The vat will not sulk if you leave it,” she replied. “The bark knows its business. Go learn another.”
He hesitated, but the truth was his arms wanted a different kind of tired. “Ne, Eomma,” he said finally. He hung the paddle on its hook, wiped his wet hands on his trousers, and stepped out into the sharp, bright air.
The path to the shed hugged the side of the mill, where scraps of bark and offcuts of board lay stacked in reasonably obedient piles. The stream’s voice ran just beyond, swollen with meltwater. The shed itself was not much to look at from the outside: a lean-to of boards and tiles, one small window, one door slightly skewed in its frame. But when Jin-Ho slid the door open, the air changed.
The damp, warm smell of pulp and steam gave way to the dry sweetness of shaved wood, oil, and dust. Light slanted through the high window, catching the curl of shavings on the floor and turning them into pale ribbons. Tools hung in neat rows along one wall: planes, chisels, saws, their metal edges winking.
Eun-Jae stood at the workbench with his sleeves rolled, a board braced against the stop. He was pushing a plane along the grain in long, even strokes, the tool’s blade whispering its way down the length. Each pass sent another curl of wood spiralling away to join the drifts on the floor.
He was humming without realising it. The tune caught on the rafters—a fragment of the storm-song from years ago, softened and worn like a favourite coat.
“Appa,” Jin-Ho said.
“Mm,” Eun-Jae replied, finishing the stroke before looking up. “You survived the vat?”
“It tried,” Jin-Ho said. “Eomma told me to come here before it finished me.”
“Wise woman,” Eun-Jae said.
He set the plane down and wiped a strand of hair from his forehead with his wrist. “Come. These boards don’t argue with me quite enough. They need fresh arrogance.”
He gestured to the stack of planks leaning against the wall. “We owe Ah-Rin straight edges,” he said. “If her paper lurches off the board, she’ll accuse us of sabotaging learning itself.”
Jin-Ho smiled. “I don’t want to fight Ah-Rin-imo,” he said. “She knows where we live.”
“Exactly,” Eun-Jae said. He picked up the plane again, flipped the board so the light fell better, and held it out. “First, you ask the wood which way it’s prepared to be cut.”
“Ask it,” Jin-Ho echoed dubiously.
“Wood already knows what it wants to be,” his father said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “We’re just asking politely.”
He ran his palm along the board, fingers following the faint stripes in the grain, then nodded. “Here,” he said, placing Jin-Ho’s hands where his had been. “Feel that? That’s the grain agreeing.”
Jin-Ho concentrated. The surface looked smooth, but under his fingers it wasn’t all the same. There was a direction to it, like hair lying flat one way and bristling the other.
“I think so,” he said.
“Good. Now make the plane listen too.”
He passed the tool over. Jin-Ho took it, hefting the weight. It wasn’t so different from a mould frame, at least in size, but the balance sat differently in his grip. He set the blade down near the edge of the board and pushed.
The plane chattered, bit, and skipped, leaving behind a ragged strip instead of a neat curl. The sound scraped along his nerves.
“Stop,” Eun-Jae said gently. “You’re pushing as if it were pulp. Bark can be bullied. Grain—” He tilted the plane to adjust the angle, his hand briefly covering Jin-Ho’s. “Grain you negotiate with.”
He stepped back. “Try again, but listen this time. To the sound. To how the resistance changes.”
“Listen to wood,” Jin-Ho muttered. “Listen to pulp. Listen to customers. I spend my life listening. When do I get to tell anything what to do?”
“When you know enough to ask useful questions,” Eun-Jae said. “Push.”
This time, Jin-Ho adjusted his stance, feet a little wider. He set the blade down more shallowly and pushed with less brute force, more steady persuasion.
The plane moved. Not perfectly, but better. A long, pale shaving curled up and away, thin and even. It fell on the floor beside its brothers with a soft, papery sound.
Jin-Ho grinned despite himself. “There,” he said.
“There,” Eun-Jae agreed. He ran his fingers along the new edge, sighted down the length towards the light, then nodded once. “Now,” he said, “we only need ten more.”
Jin-Ho groaned, but it felt good in his chest. “Of course we do,” he said, setting the plane again.
The wheel turned outside; the stream muttered to itself. In the shed, another rhythm joined them: the whisper of metal over wood, the sigh of shavings as they fell, the quiet murmur of a father and son learning to read the same grain.
16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡh3ndHnLdSz
By late summer, the shed had begun to look like a place where things were made on purpose, not just mended.
Shelves had collected along the wall, some straight, some persuaded into it. On them sat the evidence of slow, careful years: a few small boxes for storing brushes and ink-stones, a set of plain but well-balanced straight-edges, a pair of narrow chests for rolled documents. None of it was grand. All of it fitted under the hand with the easy rightness that came from being thought about.
On one particular afternoon, heat pressed against the tiles; the sound of cicadas poured in through the cracks like boiling water. The door to the shed stood open to coax a breeze into cooperation.
Jin-Ho stood at the bench with a small chest braced in front of him. Its body was already smooth, the lid seating neatly, the hinges obedient. Now he was carving a modest wave pattern along the front edge; nothing elaborate just a suggestion of Haesong’s bay in shallow curves.
His tongue had found its old place at the corner of his mouth, where it lived whenever he concentrated too much. He didn’t notice. The chisel bit, lifted, glided. Tiny chips gathered in the tray below.
On the other side of the bench, Eun-Jae was shaping a bridge for a gayageum, his own hands moving with that unhurried assurance, that made even rough work look like a finished performance. He glanced up now and then, not to supervise so much as to sync his ear to the rhythm of his son’s tool.
“Don’t chase the curl,” he said quietly. “If you go after it, you’ll dig too deep. Let it come to you.”
“I know,” Jin-Ho said, and adjusted his pressure.
“That’s what you said to the vat last year,” Eun-Jae replied. “The vat disagreed.”
“That ugly sheet is still there to remind me,” Jin-Ho said. “You don’t have to.”
“Good,” his father said. “That means it’s working.”
A soft knock sounded on the door-frame. “Can I come in?” a small voice asked.
They both turned.
Han-Byeol stood in the doorway, hands folded around a rolled scrap of paper. She had grown taller in the past year, but her face hadn’t quite decided whether it belonged to a child or a young girl yet. Her hair was in two plaits today, one slightly looser than the other, as if she’d undone it twice while thinking and forgotten to tighten it again.
“You don’t have to ask,” Eun-Jae said. “Come in, Byeol-ah. Mind your feet, or the shavings will eat you.”
She stepped carefully over a drift of curls, eyes wide. “It looks like the wood shed its own hair,” she said, stopping to nudge a twist with her toe. It rolled, light as a feather.
“Better here than on the trees,” Jin-Ho said. “The trees look offended when Appa takes too much.”
“The trees have good reason,” Eun-Jae murmured.
Han-Byeol came closer, peering at the chest. “Oh,” she said, soft with admiration. “It’s like waves.”
“They’re supposed to,” Jin-Ho said, trying to sound offhand and failing. Praise always seemed to find the bit of him that still felt ten.
“It’s like you’re drawing,” she went on, “but slower. And louder.” She mimed his chisel strokes in the air.
“It’s just a box,” he said, but there was warmth under the words.
She shook her head. “We put important things in ‘just boxes’,” she said. “Ledgers and letters and secrets and sweets.”
“Sweets are the most important of those,” Eun-Jae said gravely.
Han-Byeol giggled. “Appa says if he eats too many, his trousers complain.”
“Wise trousers,” Eun-Jae said.
From outside came the faint clatter of a cart and the familiar calling voice of Baek In-Su, drifting from the lane: “Byeol-ah! Don’t make your Halmeoni chase you all over the village again!”
Han-Byeol’s head tilted at the sound. Something in her eyes flickered—affection, exasperation, the automatic pull of a child towards the centre of her world.
“I have to go soon,” she said. “We promised to help at the bakery. There’s a festival coming, and people want breads shaped like things they can’t afford.”
“Like taxes,” Jin-Ho muttered.
“Like shoes,” she corrected. “And fish. And babies. Someone ordered bread shaped like a baby.” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like that one.”
“Some people have strange hearts,” Eun-Jae said. “At least you’re making them chew their worries.”
Han-Byeol smiled, then looked back at the chest. “When it’s finished… will you show Seonsaeng-nim?” she asked. “She likes pretty things that have work in them.”
“Ah-Rin-imo likes anything that has work in it,” Jin-Ho said. “Pretty comes after.”
“Then she’ll like it twice,” Han-Byeol said promptly.
Footsteps crunched closer outside. In-Su’s shadow brushed the threshold before he did. He appeared in the doorway with his usual armful of trays and lists, flour dusting his sleeves and a streak of it on his cheek, where he’d wiped away sweat without thinking.
He bowed to Eun-Jae, then nodded to Jin-Ho. “Han-Byeol-ah,” he said, “you promised your Halmeoni you’d be back before the dough rose higher than her temper.”
“I was just looking,” she said, lifting her rolled paper to prove there had been purpose.
“I can see that,” he replied. His tone was mild, but there was a tightness at the corners of his mouth that hadn’t been there years ago, before grief and single parenthood had set their weight on his shoulders.
His gaze flicked past Han-Byeol’s shoulder, to where, further back in the mill-yard, the path curved towards the house by the stream. For a heartbeat, his eyes lingered, then he pulled them back as if they’d strayed.
“Thank you for watching her, Master Yoon,” he said, deliberately formal.
“She’s hardly in danger of being harmed by wood,” Eun-Jae said. “Unless she tries to eat it.”
“I wouldn’t,” Han-Byeol protested.
“We’d have to make it into bread first,” In-Su said, the corner of his mouth softening.
Something in his tone, in the way he did not say Ah-Rin’s name though they all knew whose house his daughter came from each afternoon, pricked at Han-Byeol’s attention. She couldn’t have put words to it yet, but it sat wrong in her chest, like a song played in the wrong key.
“Come,” In-Su said, resting a hand on her head for a moment. “If we’re late, Halmeoni will bake us instead.”
Han-Byeol lingered just long enough to touch the carved wave with one fingertip. “I’ll tell Seonsaeng-nim you’re making boxes the sea would be proud of,” she said to Jin-Ho.
“Do that only if the sea pays on time,” he replied.
She laughed, then ran to her father’s side. In-Su bowed again and moved away, his shoulders straight, his voice picking up its usual warmth as he spoke to his daughter. The distance he kept in his manners hung behind him like a shadow.
Jin-Ho watched them go, then looked down at the chest.
“She’s right,” Eun-Jae said quietly. “Ah-Rin-ah will like it.”
“She has to,” Jin-Ho said. “It’s going to hold her paper. If it offends her, she’ll tell me every time she opens the lid.”
“That’s one way to test your work,” his father agreed. “Make it live with someone who complains honestly.”
16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbFS2HYizlv
On another afternoon, when the heat had drained out of the day and the light came in sideways, Ah-Rin’s classroom was full of the kind of silence that seldom lasts.
Three girls sat at low tables, each with a brush and a sheet of paper. The blackboard at the front held a neat row of characters: 바다, 밀, 종이.
“Bar-da,” Soo-Yeon sounded out, hesitating slightly over the consonant.
“Ba-da,” Ah-Rin corrected gently, tapping the board. “Sea. Say it like water, not like you’re scolding it.”
“Ba-da,” Soo-Yeon repeated, cheeks colouring. The fishmonger’s niece smelt faintly of brine no matter how much soap she used, but her brush strokes were as careful as if each one were worth a coin.
“At least you know what it looks like,” Han-Byeol whispered, grinning sideways. Her own 바다 sat on the page in firm strokes, a little more dramatic than it strictly needed to be.
“Next,” Ah-Rin said, pointing. “Mil.”
“Mil,” Mi-Ran, Mi-Young’s apprentice’s little sister read, eyes narrowed. “Flour.”
“Good,” Ah-Rin said, warmth in her voice. “Sea, flour, paper. All the things this village would be useless without.”
“People, too,” Han-Byeol said.
“People are noisy,” Ah-Rin replied.
A ripple of giggles passed through the room. Chalk dust hung in the beam of sunlight that cut across the tables, turning the air pale and soft.
“Copy each word three times,” Ah-Rin said. “Neatly. Then under them, write one thing you can think of that uses all three.”
“Bread,” Han-Byeol said immediately.
“And?” Ah-Rin prompted.
“And… list of people who owe money for bread,” Han-Byeol added, with the hard-won wisdom of a baker’s child.
Outside, footsteps passed the open door. Voices floated in with the breeze.
“…there again, are they?”
“Mm. It keeps them quiet, at least.”
“As long as she doesn’t fill the house. Teaching a handful is one thing; teaching half the town is another.”
“Let her have her hobby. Better there than shouting at the magistrate’s gate.”
The words were not loud; they probably weren’t meant to be heard inside. But they threaded through the thin wall like smoke.
Ah-Rin’s hand stiffened for a heartbeat where it rested on the table. The smile stayed on her face, but a small line appeared between her brows. She picked up a piece of chalk with rather more force than it required.
Han-Byeol glanced up, caught that tiny shift, and frowned. She hadn’t paid much attention to the voices outside, distracted as she was by deciding how to fit 바다, 밀, 종이 and 빵 (bread) on the same line. But she knew that look: it was the one adults wore when something hurt and they were pretending it didn’t.
Slowly, she bent back over her page and, under her careful versions of the three words, she added another in even more careful strokes:
선생님. Teacher.
Then, underneath that, she wrote 아-린, sounding it out to herself under her breath. It came out a little crooked, but it was hers.
When the lesson ended and the girls tumbled out into the lane, gossiping about anything but characters, Ah-Rin stood in the doorway, arms folded loosely, watching them go. The light caught the chalk dust on her sleeves, the ink on her fingers. Behind her, the board still held 바다, 밀, 종이, and, squeezed in low as if someone had hoped it would go unnoticed, 선생님. She shook her head once, then smiled, small but real, and wiped the board clean.
16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡthlzKZPEWj
Later that year, when the first sharpness of cold had returned to the air and the stream had begun to complain about stones again, a merchant came to the shed.
He was not a stranger: Kim Do-Seung from Guryong, his coat patched in one place with careful stitches, his hands chapped and ink-stained. He had the look of a man who spent his days balancing other people’s numbers and his nights wondering which ones would topple first.
The chest Jin-Ho had made for him sat on the bench, oiled and drying. It wasn’t large—meant to hold ledgers and spare sheets rather than anything grand—but it was solid, the lid fitting snugly, the corners true. The wave motif along its front edge was simple but sure, the curves echoing the bay outside.
Do-Seung ran his fingers along the top, the nails kept short and square for turning pages.
“Ah,” he said softly. “This suits a ledger. Feels honest.”
“It won’t warp if you don’t leave it sitting in a puddle,” Jin-Ho said, trying for modest but failing to keep the pride from his voice.
“I’ll tell my book-keeper not to bathe with it,” Do-Seung replied dryly. He nodded towards the carving. “Your hand?”
“Yes,” Jin-Ho said. “Appa argued with the wood first, but the carving is mine.”
Do-Seung smiled. “Of course,” he said. “It looks like something your father would have done once he’d checked it over.”
The words were light, meant as praise. To him, it was a compliment to be compared to Yoon Eun-Jae’s work. To be almost indistinguishable from it was, in his mind, something to aspire to.
In Jin-Ho’s chest, something tightened.
“Master Yoon’s pieces,” Do-Seung went on, oblivious, “have a way of making numbers behave. If your chest learns that trick as well, I’ll be back for a second.”
He bowed to Eun-Jae, paid with the right amount and a little extra for “the carving that saved me hiring a painter”, and left, carrying the chest as carefully as if it already held a decade’s worth of debt and promise.
The shed felt quiet after he’d gone. The curl of shavings on the floor seemed louder.
“He meant well,” Hye-Won said from the doorway. She had come in unnoticed, drawn by the sound of unfamiliar footsteps.
“I know,” Jin-Ho said. He stared at the place the chest had been, as if he could still see its outline. “He still saw Appa’s hand first.”
Eun-Jae leaned back against the bench; arms folded loosely. “You’ve only just started letting the wood know who you are,” he said. “It’s not surprising other people haven’t learnt your name for it yet.”
“It’s my work,” Jin-Ho said. “But it counts as yours until you’ve looked at it.”
“That’s not an insult,” his father said calmly. “When I began in the capital, half my pieces went out under someone else’s name. The work still learnt my fingers.”
“That’s different,” Jin-Ho muttered.
“How?” Eun-Jae asked.
“You chose that,” he said. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I… I don’t know. It just feels… small. To be praised for being almost you.”
Hye-Won stepped inside and put a hand briefly on his shoulder. “Give them time, Jin-Ho-yah,” she said. “We knew your walk before you could stand without holding on to the table. They’ve only seen your work a handful of times.”
“They know his,” Jin-Ho said, tipping his chin towards his father. “One wave and they say, ‘Ah, Master Yoon.’”
“Master Yoon has more mistakes buried in old shavings than you have years,” Eun-Jae said. “If you envy anything, envy the time, not the result.”
It was meant to comfort. It did and didn’t.
Later, when they had tidied the shed and swept the curls into the basket, Jin-Ho lingered by the bench. His fingers itched.
On impulse, he picked up a small offcut and his knife. On the underside, where only the wood and anyone foolish enough to turn it over would see, he scratched a tiny mark: a crooked line and a dot, nothing that would mean anything to anyone else.
It wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t even a proper symbol yet. But as the knife lifted, he had the odd, stubborn sense of having signed something the world hadn’t asked to see.
He set the offcut aside. Outside, the stream muttered and turned. Inside, the shed breathed quietly around him, smelling of oil and wood and the faintest trace of pride.
16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNvvus4vQ6y
Interlude – Spring 1809
Hanyang’s spring did not smell like Haesong’s.
It smelt of stone warmed too quickly, of ink and horse and the sour lift of river mud where the banks were trodden thin. The air in the alleys carried laundry steam and fish and smoke from ten thousand kitchens. If you stood still too long, the city simply flowed around you, like water around a rock that hadn’t yet learnt it was in the way.
Inside Master Im’s old atelier, the air was thinner and quieter. Paper absorbed noise as well as ink.
Seo Dan-Mi sat at the long table with her sleeves neatly tied back, a stack of folios at her left elbow and a ledger open in front of her. The folios smelt faintly of medicine and age: these were the clinic’s records, sent in batches for repair and rebinding. In the margin of each slip she wrote, in her small, tidy hand, the date they had arrived, the number of leaves, and any obvious damage.
“Spine broken,” she murmured as she lifted one. “Edges chewed, but not too deep.” She dipped her brush and noted it down. “Not as bad as I expected. Someone here actually cares.”
“At least one physician does,” Master Park Bo-Seok said from the far bench. “The others seem to believe records are immortal.”
He was adjusting a clamp around a binding, the cord creaking under his hands. His movements had grown more economical since taking over the lead, as if every gesture had learnt to justify its cost.
A new boy, barely more than fifteen, sat closer to the window, flattening creased pages under a warm weight-stone. His eyes flicked between his hands and the older two with the anxious energy of someone desperate not to be the one who drops anything.
“Seonbaenim,” the boy said to Dan-Mi in a low voice, as if afraid to disturb the bindings, “was it really true, that we used to have another senior here? Kwon Gyu-Tae Seonbaenim?”
Dan-Mi’s brush paused on the page for a fraction. “Yes,” she said. “We did.”
“What happened?” the boy pressed, whispering. “I heard he went to work for some very important noble. And then someone else said he was sent away in disgrace. And someone else said—”
“Someone else should mind his own paper,” Master Park said mildly, without looking up.
The boy blushed and bent his head. “Ne, Park Seonsaeng-nim,” he muttered.
Dan-Mi dipped her brush again, buying herself a heartbeat.
“Kwon Seonbae wanted different things,” she said at last, keeping her voice even. “The workshop and he did not match. He chose travelling work in the end. Less… patience required. More talking.”
Master Park’s mouth twitched. He tightened the clamp one last turn. “And less paper that bites back,” he added under his breath.
Dan-Mi didn’t smile. It wasn’t that she wished Gyu-Tae well, exactly. She hadn’t forgotten the way his face had looked that day he’d watched Master Im hand Ah-Rin the letter naming her successor, jealousy sitting in the corners of his eyes like mould. She hadn’t forgotten the way his words had wrapped themselves in politeness when he’d gone to the Office of Censors, either. But she didn’t particularly enjoy thinking of him, even to gloat.
She shifted the folio pile, letting the habit of order soothe her. One neat column for “clinic records”; another for “private libraries”; a third, smaller, for “court ladies’ requests”. That last pile was never large, but it was treated with the kind of care that meant everyone double-checked each stitch and each note.
“Dan-Mi-yah,” Bo-Seok said presently, “when you finish that column, I need you to take a bundle up to the Censor’s office.”
She looked up. “Now?”
“The clerk sent a boy this morning,” Bo-Seok said. “They want the clinic’s confirmation stamped. You can breathe fresh air on the way.”
“Fresh,” she repeated dubiously, thinking of the main road.
“Fresher than in here,” he amended. “Besides, you walk faster than I do.”
She closed the ledger, marked her place, and stacked the sorted folios. The bundle for the office was wrapped in plain paper and tied with red cord, the stamp on the outside already dry.
“Remember,” Master Park said as she tucked it under her arm, “you’re carrying the workshop’s name as well as the paper. Walk like it won’t fall out of your sleeves.”
“Yes, Seonsaeng-nim,” she said.
The Office of Censors sat on a street that never seemed to be empty. Officials in dark robes went in and out, their hats bobbing like black boats in a river. Couriers hurried between doors with packets and scrolls; petitioners waited under the eaves, clutching their grievances like fever.
Dan-Mi stood to one side of the main flow; bundle held carefully against her chest. The building’s front steps had been worn into a shallow dip by decades of feet. A boy from some other office was sweeping at a corner where wind had tried to root a drift of leaves.
Inside, the air was cooler, the stone bearing the kind of chill that never quite left, no matter the season. The clerk at the front desk took one look at the wrapping, saw the atelier’s neat stamp, and jerked his chin towards an inner door.
“Censor Min is in,” he said. “Go through. Don’t drip ink on the floor.”
“I’m not carrying any ink,” Dan-Mi said before she could stop herself.
“Everyone in this corridor is carrying ink,” he replied, already turning away to snap at another petitioner.
She bit back a retort and slipped through the indicated door.
The inner room was narrower than she’d expected, lined on both sides with shelves that weren’t quite bookcases and weren’t quite pigeon-holes. Boxes, scrolls, and bundles of paper sat in them like soldiers in a disorderly army. A man in a clean, precisely folded robe stood on a small stool, reaching for a packet near the top.
“One moment,” he said without looking round. “If you take one step further, you will discover why we don’t store anything heavy above head-height.”
Dan-Mi stopped. “I brought the documents from Master Im’s atelier,” she said. “For Censor Min.”
“That would be me,” he replied. He tugged once more; the bundle came free with a soft thump. He stepped down, dust motes swirling in his wake, and turned.
Recognition hit Dan-Mi immediately like the dust from the press. He was looking older than the last time she’d seen him, but not by much. He was not very tall, but he gave the impression of neatness more than size: his hair perfectly bound, his sleeves precise, his expression arranged in professional politeness. Only his eyes betrayed a certain weary amusement, as if he had seen too many people thinking their problems were new.
“You’re the girl from the paper workshop”, he said.
“Yes,” she said, bowing. “Seo Dan-Mi.”
He set his brush down, wiped the tip on the ink-stone’s edge, and regarded her for a heartbeat. Something flickered in his expression—recognition, then the brief calculation of a man sorting memory into boxes. He took the bundle from her, weighed it in his hands, and set it on a clear patch of table. “Let me see… ah. Yes. The clinic’s request.” He untied the cord with quick, deft fingers. “You people keep better notes than half the offices in this building.”
“If we don’t,” she said, “the work forgets who it belongs to.”
He made a small sound that might have been agreement. “If only that were the worst forgetfulness we dealt with here,” he murmured, scanning the top sheet.
For a moment, she hesitated. The air in the room felt busy even when he wasn’t moving—petitions stacked, judgements half-written, decisions waiting for their weight of ink.
“Yeonggam,” she said quietly, “may I ask a small thing?”
He did not sigh, but the impulse passed across his face. “If it is smaller than most of these,” he said, gesturing to the pile, “you may try.”
“A year ago,” she said, “your office sent a… guidance notice to our atelier. About instruction. About a woman named Kim Ah-Rin.”
There. A tiny pause. His brow lifted a fraction.
“I remember the matter,” he said. “In outline.”
“Is it still… a matter?” she asked. “Or has the ink dried and cracked?”
“The ink is in a bundle,” he said, tone level. “Until someone pulls it out again, it sleeps. I deal now with governors and ministers, not with village tutors who trouble three or four households.”
The words weren’t cruel. They were simply precise. In his ledger, Ah-Rin’s case was one line among thousands, resolved to the extent the court had found convenient. Dan-Mi saw the distance in his eyes: this was, to him, a small thing compared to mandarin quarrels and tax disputes.
“If someone pulls it out?” she asked.
“Then we see who is tugging and why,” he said. “For now, Seo Dan-Mi-ssi, your former master has other worries closer than my shelves. And I,” he added, glancing back at the stack of petitions, “have thirty-seven complaints today alone about matters that will not wait for her schoolroom.”
He picked up the confirmed sheet, gestured to the door with a brief flick of his wrist. “Tell your current master the clinic papers are in order,” he said. “And that if he wishes the court to continue to respect his work, he should keep his ledgers as neat as his stitching.”
“Yes, Yeonggam,” she said.
By the time she stepped back into the brightness of the corridor, his brush was already moving again on another page. Whatever memory she had briefly stirred had been filed back into its proper place.
On her way back to the atelier, she cut through a market lane where cheap fans and flimsy notebooks hung from lines like tired birds. Behind one stall, a man in a fading outer coat argued with a customer over the price of a stack of paper, that looked as if it would fall apart at the first touch of a brush.
“It will do for practising,” he insisted. “You don’t need the best to write lists.”
The customer shook his head. “If it tears when I fold it, why should I trust what I wrote on it?”
Dan-Mi recognised the angle of the man’s jaw, even thinned by frustration. Kwon Gyu-Tae’s hair had more grey in it now, and his belt hung on a notch tighter than it had at the atelier, but his mouth still pulled taut when he thought someone wasn’t giving him what he was due.
He caught sight of her at the edge of the crowd. For a moment, his eyes widened. Pride and old resentment lit and dimmed in them in the same heartbeat.
She bowed—just enough to be polite, not enough to be familiar. He inclined his head in return, a fraction, then turned back to his customer with renewed urgency, voice rising.
She walked on.
Back at the atelier, the air felt thicker with glue and familiarity. Master Park looked up when she slid the door aside. “Well?” he asked.
“They stamped everything,” she said, handing him the outer packet with the fresh seal. “The clinic will have their confirmation. Censor Min told you to keep your ledgers as neat as your stitches.”
“Wise advice,” he said dryly. He set the packet on the table.
Dan-Mi didn’t sit down again immediately. The question she hadn’t quite let herself ask in the office was still humming in her bones.
“Seonsaeng-nim,” she said, “where did you file that… notice? The one about Ah-Rin Seonsaeng-nim.”
Master Park’s hands stilled. He looked over at the high chest against the wall, the one where Master Im had kept anything that smelled of officials rather than customers.
“In there,” he said. “Why?”
“I want to see exactly how they wrote it,” she said. “Before someone else decides to read it differently.”
He studied her for a moment, then nodded. “Bring the stool,” he said. “I’d rather you didn’t climb the chest like a squirrel.”
She fetched the low stool, set it in front of the chest, and opened the upper drawer. Bundles of paper sat inside, each tied and labelled in Master Im’s precise hand. Receipts. Contracts. Official notices.
It didn’t take long to find the one she wanted. The outer sheet bore the office’s stamp and, beneath it, in Master Im’s writing: “Guidance — Instruction matter — Kim Ah-Rin.”
Her chest tightened at the sight of the name.
She carried the bundle to the table. Master Park untied it and spread the notice open. The ink had browned a little at the edges, but the characters were still sharp.
They read it together.
…no unauthorised instruction of minors…16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDE4wzJKRUK
…any class must attach to a registered seodang or licensed household…16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡijdzzTwyRi
…in consideration of services rendered… guidance rather than prohibition this season…16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡD8QGbF5dTi
…future contraventions subject to review…
The phrases felt both stiff and slippery, like stiff new paper that would fold whichever way the hand insisted.
“At least it’s not a ban,” Master Park said at last, voice low.
“It wanted to be,” Dan-Mi said. She could see the places where words had been scraped and rewritten, where one character had been substituted for a softer one. “Someone pushed the ink.”
“Choi Yeon-Seo-ssi, most likely,” Bo-Seok said. “Her collection kept this place busy for years. Her opinion carried weight where yours and mine never will.”
He folded the sheet back along its original crease, more gently than it deserved. “But Censor Min didn’t sound as if he was waiting to hunt Ah-Rin again?” he asked.
“No,” Dan-Mi said. “He remembers the matter. He has much bigger things on his table now.” She hesitated. “That’s what frightens me a little.”
“How so?”
“If someone out there pulls this out again,” she said, tapping the folded notice, “he won’t go looking for reasons not to use it. He’ll just… deal with what’s in front of him. And we won’t know who tugged the string until it’s already moving.”
Master Park exhaled. “Then we make sure we remember what the ink says,” he replied. “And what it doesn’t say. If trouble comes to Haesong, at least our former Seonsaeng-nim won’t be walking into it blind.”
He retied the bundle and, instead of putting it back at the very back of the drawer, he set it closer to the front.
“Keep working,” he said. “The best argument we have for her worth is the quality of the paper that carries her name.”
Dan-Mi went back to her ledger. At the bottom of the day’s page, just above the neat line that separated one day’s work from the next, she added a single small note in her own hand:
“Guidance still sleeping. Strings attached.”
Then she turned the page and reached for the next folio.
16Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTNtC93TVK8
Winter left more slowly in 1810 than anyone thought was polite.
Snow clung to the field edges like a guest who took too long to say goodbye; the wind kept wandering back down from the hills to test the door-latches. Inside the mill-house, people moved as they always did—between work and meals and small quarrels—but there was a faint sense of waiting, as if the year itself were standing with one hand on the door, unsure whether to step through.
One evening, when the light had gone thin and blue and the hearth’s warmth felt like a decision rather than a habit, Eun-Jae carried his gayageum into the main room and set it on the floor.
The instrument had lived with them through years and weathers. Its paulownia body had darkened from pale cream to a deeper honey, the wood worn smooth where his hands most often rested. The silk strings ran the length of it like a series of small, taut roads; the little bamboo bridges sat under them in a neat procession, each one a tiny humped back bowing up to meet the tension.
He sat cross-legged, laid the gayageum across his lap, and plucked one string, then another. The sound was faint under the thick air of the room, but it carried, the notes threading into the rafters.
Hye-Won, stirring a pot in the hearth, glanced over. “What did it do to be called to account?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “That’s the problem.” He plucked again, frowned. “It’s been too long since I scolded it. The bridges are lazier than they should be. The strings have forgotten they’re alive.”
“Like some people,” she said, but there was fondness in it.
At the low table, Seol-Ha was copying a short passage from one of Ah-Rin’s readers, her brush moving in slow, careful strokes. At the first breath of sound from the gayageum, her hand paused. The characters on her page waited half-born.
“Finish the line first,” Hye-Won said without turning.
“I was only listening,” Seol-Ha protested.
“You have two ears,” her mother replied. “One can listen to your father, the other can listen to your brush. The ink will dry if you abandon it.”
Jin-Ho, sprawled on his stomach with a carpentry diagram under his nose, snorted. “That’s not how ears work,” he muttered.
“That’s exactly how they work when I say so,” Hye-Won said.
Eun-Jae smiled to himself and began untying the silk cord at the tail of the instrument. He worked carefully, loosening the tension on each string in turn, letting the pitch fall with small sighs. As the strings went slack, he lifted them away from their tiny bamboo supports and laid them gently aside.
“Appa?” Seol-Ha said, unable to stop the word slipping out. “Are you… taking it apart?”
“Cleaning,” he said. “Checking. If you don’t look under things once in a while, they grow complaints.”
“Like ledgers,” Jin-Ho said.
“Like sons,” Hye-Won added.
“Like wives,” Eun-Jae said lightly, and ducked the spoon Hye-Won flicked at him.
Beneath the lifted strings, the row of bamboo bridges stood revealed fully. Each one was not much larger than his thumb, curved and cut so that the string would rest in a shallow groove at the top while the feet sat steadily on the wood below. Most were pale and almost new; a few were older, their surfaces polished by years of vibration.
He picked up one of the older ones, held it between finger and thumb, and ran his nail very gently along its side. It gave a tiny answering shiver, more felt than heard.
“Come here,” he said.
Seol-Ha looked to her mother automatically. Hye-Won waved the spoon. “Go,” she said. “Before he starts talking to it instead of you.”
She set her brush carefully in the rest, blew on the last damp character, and crossed the room. Her skirts brushed the floor with a soft hush. She sat opposite him, folding her legs under, the way he had taught her when she first begged to sit close enough to watch his hands on the strings.
“What’s wrong with it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said again. “That’s the trouble. It’s done nothing wrong. It’s done everything I asked it to for years.”
She frowned. “That sounds like a good thing.”
“It is,” he said. “Until the day you ask it to do something new and it remembers it’s old.”
He held out the small piece of bamboo. “Look,” he said.
She took it between her fingers. It was lighter than it looked, the curve of it fitting unexpectedly well against her skin. Up close, she could see tiny notches and wear-marks, places where the silk had bitten over and over in the same path.
“This one has been on my gayageum longer than you’ve been taller than the table,” he said. “It’s lived through more storms than you remember. It’s done its work. It still sings, but… it’s time I stopped making it carry all my weight.”
He nodded towards the open case by the wall, where a tidy row of newer bridges sat in a small cloth bag. “I’ve had replacements waiting. I was just stubborn.”
“You?” she said, eyes widening in exaggerated mock shock. “Never.”
“Watch your tongue,” he said, but his mouth quirked.
He reached for the bag, took out a new bridge—its edges still crisp, its surface unmarked—and set it on the soundboard in place of the old one. His hands moved with the care of someone who had done this many times and never quite ceased to be cautious.
As he began to thread the strings back, looping and tightening, he glanced back at her. “Hold onto it,” he said, nodding at the old bridge still warm in her hand. “Don’t drop it, or I’ll make you find it with your feet in the dark.”
“Why?” she asked. “Are you putting it back somewhere else?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not putting it back anywhere.” He paused. “You are.”
She blinked. “What?”
He finished knotting the next string, gave the peg a small, testing twist, then looked straight at her. His expression was as calm as if he’d asked her to pass the salt.
“This one has known my hands,” he said quietly. “My storms. My mistakes. My attempts to be a bridge when I was only a plank.”
“Yeobo,” Hye-Won murmured from the hearth, but she didn’t actually interrupt.
“If it stays on my instrument any longer,” he went on, “it will only remember old songs.” He nodded at her gayageum, propped neatly on its stand against the far wall. “Put it on yours.”
The room felt smaller for a moment, the air between them taking on a different weight.
“Appa…” she began, then stopped. The urge to argue—It’s yours—collided with something else in her chest: the memory of watching him play on rain-strangled nights, the way that tune had wrapped itself around her childhood, the way that same melody had moved under her own fingers months ago before she realised what she’d stolen.
“I have bridges,” she said instead, weakly. “They’re fine.”
“Some are,” he agreed. “Some are young. This one is not. Young ones need to learn from old ones. Old ones need to learn what happens when they meet new hands.” He gave a small shrug, as if he were discussing timber, not his oldest gayageum piece. “If it breaks, it breaks. It would have, for me, eventually. Better it breaks carrying your song than clinging to mine.”
She turned the tiny piece of bamboo over in her fingers. It seemed suddenly heavier. “What if I don’t play well enough,” she said, voice low, “and it gets bored and sulks?”
“Then it will be in excellent company,” he said. “It’s spent years with a man who plays the same tune every time a storm thinks it’s won.”
She snorted, helpless. “That tune saved us some nights,” she said.
“It saved me,” he corrected. “You were asleep on Eomma’s lap.”
“Sometimes.”
“Most times,” Hye-Won put in. “The one time you stayed awake, you spent the whole night lecturing the thunder.”
“It was being rude,” Seol-Ha muttered.
The laughter in the room thinned the seriousness enough that she could pick it up again without flinching.
“What if it changes the sound?” she asked softly. “My sound, I mean.”
“It will,” Eun-Jae said. “That’s what bridges do. They change how the string speaks. But it won’t turn you into me. Wood doesn’t lie that well.”
He reached across and, very gently, touched the bamboo in her hand with one fingertip. “Seol-Ha-yah,” he said. “Use it while I’m alive to be annoyed if you treat it like an artefact. Play it until it sings or snaps. Either is honest.”
She exhaled slowly. The idea of putting such a thing on her instrument seemed outrageous for a heartbeat. Then she thought of the girls at Ah-Rin’s school, their hands clumsy on brushes, the way Ah-Rin made them use the good paper sometimes instead of the scraps, just so they’d learn what it felt like.
‘If we only ever practise on rags,’ Ah-Rin had said once, ‘we forget how to hold something precious without shaking.’
Seol-Ha curled her fingers around the little bridge. “Alright,” she said. “I’ll use it. I promise.”
“Good,” Eun-Jae said. He went back to tying and tightening.
By the time he had restrung his own instrument and brought it roughly back into tune, the stew at the hearth was ready, the house full of a comfortable, ordinary hunger. They ate, talked about small things—orders, the price of rice, a funny story from Soo-Yeon about a fish that had apparently tried to escape its own basket—and only when the bowls were empty did Seol-Ha slip away to the corner where her own gayageum waited.
Her instrument was younger than his, the wood paler, the strings not yet smoothed by decades of use. It had its own voice—quicker, perhaps, less deep—but it still felt to her like an apprentice in his shadow.
She knelt beside it; heart ticking faster than it had any right to.
“Do you want help?” Jin-Ho asked from the table, where he was still fiddling with his scrap of carved mark.
“No,” she said. “If I break the string putting it on, I don’t want witnesses.”
“At least you’re honest,” he murmured.
She loosened one string—her third from the left, the one she favoured when she played the road-melody—and eased the existing bridge out from under it. It came away reluctantly, leaving a slight indent in the wood.
She placed Eun-Jae’s old bridge in its place. It sat a fraction differently: its feet had learnt another instrument’s curves. For a moment, she wondered if it would complain at the change.
“Stay,” she whispered to it, absurdly. “I’ll make it worth your while.”
She brought the string back up, fingers careful on the peg, listening as the pitch crept higher. The silk pressed into the tiny groove worn by years of storms. The wood under her hands felt, inexplicably, more crowded.
When she plucked it, the note that sprang out was not louder than before, nor magically transformed. But there was a difference—a faint roughness at the edges, a certain depth that hadn’t been there. It sounded, to her ears, like a voice that had laughed and argued in other rooms, now clearing its throat to see what this one wanted.
She played the same phrase twice. On the second run, she adjusted her hand without thinking, giving the note just a shade more space.
Behind her, she felt rather than saw her father pause on his way to stack bowls. He didn’t say anything. The silence was its own acknowledgement.
Hye-Won, carrying spoons to the basin, caught his stillness and followed his gaze. For a heartbeat, her throat tightened. There they were: her husband, her daughter, and a line of sound stretching between them, invisible and perfectly clear.
Then she let out the breath and smiled, small and private. Time turned, she thought, and sometimes it did it gently.
The next day, when Seol-Ha went down to Ah-Rin’s school, the old bamboo bridge still sat under her third string. Its tiny age creaked quietly under her hand. She did not treat it as a relic. She played.
Somewhere inside the wood, the storms it had outlived shifted to make room for new weather.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.