Ah-Rin moved through the familiar motions of closing: stacking slates, tipping the last of the water from the small basin, checking that no inkstone was left uncovered. She slid the door shut, leaving the room to its own shadows, and climbed the narrow stairs to the small room above.
The space under the roof had never quite lost the feeling of being someone else’s workshop. Even after two years of calling it home, she still half expected to see Eun-Jae’s tools against the wall when she opened the door: saws, planes, curls of shaved wood on the floor. Instead, there were folded blankets, a low chest, a lamp, the faint smell of paper and dried flowers.
She lit the lamp with a practiced hand. The flame caught, flared, then settled into a steady glow.
On the chest by her sleeping mat sat a small wooden box, no larger than both her hands together. The grain was smooth from years of fingers resting on it. She had brought it back from Hanyang with the same care she’d given her ledgers, as if losing it would mean misplacing some part of herself.
She sat down beside it and rested her fingers on the lid for a long moment, feeling the slight dip where her thumb had worn the wood over the years.
Inside were the things she had not been willing to leave behind: Master Im’s bone folder, its handle polished by his years of use and hers after; the thin botanical notebook filled with her careful drawings of leaves and stems; a folded scrap in Bo-Seok’s hand, reminding her that paper could carry loyalty as well as orders.
And one other thing.
She opened the lid. The familiar smell—old paper, old wood, faint flour—rose to meet her.
The bread stamp lay tucked into one corner, wrapped once in a strip of cloth that had once been part of an apron. She lifted it out and unwrapped it as carefully as if it might break.
It sat in her palm, small and solid. Carved when In-Su’s hands had still been learning their strength, its pattern was simple: a sheaf of grain and, below it, three shallow curved lines like tiny waves. The edges had softened with years of handling. The carved grooves still held the ghost of flour in them, no matter how often she brushed them clean.
She turned it between her fingers, letting the lamplight catch in the indentations. Her thumb found the little nick near one edge where he’d slipped, once, and sworn under his breath before smoothing it as best he could.
He had given it to her the week before she’d left for the capital. They’d stood under the lanterns soft light, the sea’s cool breath at their faces. He had pressed it into her hand without ceremony, as if he were passing her a roll.
“So you don’t forget bread,” he’d said, not quite meeting her eyes. “Or that it tastes better when someone is waiting at the oven.”
She had taken it, fingers brushing his, every part of her eighteen-year-old heart loud with things she had no words for yet. Then she had turned away towards Hanyang, toward Master Im, toward a life painted in different colours.
In the capital, the stamp had sat on the corner of her worktable, where it could see her fail and try again. Sometimes, when she baked a small loaf in a cramped hearth with bad wood and worse flour, she pressed the stamp into the dough for the comfort of seeing those little waves. Most days, she had simply picked it up when the walls felt too close and turned it in her hand until her pulse slowed.
She’d told herself she kept it out of stubbornness, a refusal to let any part of herself be claimed entirely by the city. Now, with the sound of In-Su’s laugh still lingering faintly in her ears from the doorway, she was not sure that was the whole truth.
“I never threw you away,” she murmured, thumb tracing the grain. “Even when I thought I had thrown everything else away.”
The room answered only with the small crackle of the lamp.
She thought of the way he had looked that afternoon, standing with two girls at his sides: one his own daughter, all bright elbows and opinions; one another woman’s child, wary and quiet, being gently tugged into the circle. He had not flinched from the extra hand to hold. He had simply made room.
He had always been like that, she realised. Even as a boy, he had been the one to share the last bun, to step aside in a queue, to carry what others could not. She had left to become something the capital would have refused to see in him. He had stayed and become exactly what Haesong had needed.
“Seventeen years,” she said softly. “And you’re still you.”
Her thumb rested on the carved grain again. It would have been so easy, years ago, to let someone else’s story swallow theirs: to say that a girl had to choose between the road and the oven and that was that. But her life had not gone neatly into any of those boxes. It had come back around, awkward and stubborn, like herself.
She closed her fingers around the stamp until the edges pressed into her skin, not enough to hurt, just enough to remind her she was holding something real. “I’m not ready to put you away for good.”
Outside, the sounds of the town shifted towards night: shutters closing, a distant dog barking, someone laughing too loudly in the direction of Madam Hong’s inn. Down the hill, the warm square of light in the bakery window would be shrinking as Mi-Young chased the last customers out and scolded her son for working too late.
Ah-Rin wrapped the bread stamp back in its strip of cloth and laid it gently in the box. For a heartbeat, she let her hand rest there, palm over the small weight.
Then she closed the lid.
The box sat, quiet and patient, at the edge of the lamplight. Not a shrine, not a wound. Just a place where a few stubborn pieces of her life waited together: tools, pages, and a small, imperfect stamp from a boy who had grown into a man she found she liked all over again.
She lay down beside it, the day’s fatigue finally catching up with her. As her eyes closed, she thought of the girls’ hands on paper, of Beong-i’s fingers on the gayageum’s wood, of Han-Byeol’s grip, fierce and sure.
The world outside could argue as much as it pleased. Inside the little house by the stream, some things, at least, had been carried safely from one shore to another.
Sleep came quietly. The box stayed where it was, keeping its secrets until morning.
21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡAtCl5B2kiv
Weeks later, on a day when the summer rain pressed its forehead against the windows and refused to move on, Seol-Ha brought out a handful of offcuts from the mill. The sheets were too small or too uneven for orders, but perfect for experiments.
“Today,” she told Beong-i, after the others had gone, “we write what music feels like. Not what it sounds like.”
The girl watched her, wary but interested. Her hands slid, almost unconsciously, onto the gayageum’s soundboard, ready.
Seol-Ha played a bright, skipping pattern, fingers light on the strings. She felt the old bamboo bridge hum under her third string, carrying the vibration into the wood and up into the girl’s palms. Beong-i’s shoulders lifted, just a fraction, as if something inside her had done the same.
“Here,” Seol-Ha said, setting a scrap of paper and a brush in front of her. “Write how that feels.”
Beong-i stared at the blank page. Writing had always been a duty up to now: copying letters, counting beans, matching teacher’s chalk. This was different. This was being asked something no one could mark wrong.
Her fingers tightened on the brush. Slowly, clumsily, she wrote two syllables she had seen before in one of Ah-Rin’s readers, the ones that had sat under a picture of children running through summer rain.
기쁨
Seol-Ha leaned to see. “‘Gippeum,’” she read softly. “Joy.”
She tapped once on the soundboard, matching the word to the memory of the pattern. “That fits.”
Later, on another afternoon when nothing she played seemed to land right under Beong-i’s hands, when the girl’s brow stayed furrowed and her fingers were tense on the wood, Seol-Ha pushed the scrap back towards her.
“Again,” she said. “How does it feel today?”
This time the brush moved faster, almost impatiently. The characters came out crooked, crowded together at one side, but they were clear enough.
답답
“Dappdap,” Seol-Ha murmured. “Stuffy. Tight. Frustrating.”
Beong-i let out a breath through her nose and nodded once, fiercely.
Seol-Ha smiled. “Then we know two words,” she said. “Joy and frustration. Enough to start a song.”
She tacked the tiny papers to the wall by the window with two careful pins, side by side. Under them, the gayageum sat in its usual place, ready to argue with both.
The snippets of code didn’t stay entirely secret.
One late afternoon, Han-Byeol came back for the slate she had forgotten and paused at the doorway when she saw them: Seol-Ha cross-legged by the gayageum, Beong-i’s hands resting on the wood, the two of them bent over a scrap of paper between them.
“Hello…?” she ventured.
Two sets of eyes lifted. Seol-Ha gave the tiniest nod. On the paper, in Beong-i’s careful hand, was another word, new and a little shaky:
편안
“Pyeon-an,” Seol-Ha read. “Calm. At ease.”
Han-Byeol’s chest warmed. She didn’t know exactly how they had got from joy and frustration to calm, but she knew it mattered that the word existed at all in Beong-i’s hand.
On the walk home, she didn’t tug or chatter quite as much. When one of the younger boys on the lane opened his mouth to make a face at Beong-i, he hesitated; something in Han-Byeol’s steady glance made him rethink it. She had seen what the girl’s hands could say now. It was harder to pretend she was empty.
Another evening, Ah-Rin passed by the classroom on her way to put away ledgers and stopped just out of sight.
Through the open door she saw Seol-Ha’s fingers moving on the strings, slow and thoughtful, and Beong-i’s eyes half-closed, hands flat on the soundboard. Between them, the pinned scraps on the wall stirred slightly in a draft: joy, frustration, calm.
She stood there for a moment, throat tight, listening to the quiet pattern of plucked notes and the softer rhythm of fingertips answering on wood.
Of course it would be you, she thought, watching her niece. Of course, you’d find a way to turn sound into something she could hold.
Then she stepped back, leaving them to it, and went on to her ledgers, the faint ghost of their greeting rhythm tapping at the edge of her thoughts.
21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMjfz59r04U
Autumn had the schoolyard by the stream overflowing.
By October 1810 the little house that used to echo with the thud of Eun-Jae’s tools was full of other noises: girls’ voices rising and falling over syllables, the soft scrape of brushes, the flutter of pages pegged on lines under the mulberry tree. The tree itself had shaken off winter; its fresh leaves held sunlight like coins. Beneath it, thin cords stretched between posts, carrying drying practice sheets that nodded gently whenever the breeze made its own corrections.
Inside, Ah-Rin watched Han-Byeol argue with a sentence.
“Seonsaeng-nim, why is ‘deep’ written the same here and here,” she demanded, jabbing at her page, “if the sea is deep and the heart is deep but they’re not the same kind of deep?”
“Because words are lazy and let context do half their work,” Ah-Rin said. “Copy it twice. You’ll see the difference in your own head.”
Beong-i, sitting beside her, copied more quietly, her lips shaping the word without sound, her fingers tracing the line with familiar precision. Across the room, Soo-Yeon read a short story about a stubborn fisherman, stumbling a little, then straightening the rhythm when Seol-Ha’s voice, gentle and low, slipped in to guide her.
At the back, Go Eun-Sook sat on a low stool mending a frayed sleeve. For years, when Ah-Rin was away, she had taken her cup of barley tea at the mill, listening to the river and Hye-Won in equal measure. These days she divided herself more evenly: mornings sometimes at the mill, afternoons more and more often on this stool, her needle flashing while she listened to the girls struggle and triumph over characters.
“You’re pricking your thumb again,” she said without looking up, as one of the younger ones winced. “That means you’re rushing. Nothing worth knowing is learnt faster by bleeding.”
The girl blushed and slowed her stitching. Ah-Rin hid a smile.
When the brass bell by the door chimed to mark the end of the lesson, the room spilled its contents into the yard in a rush of chatter. Girls ran to point at their drying sheets, to compare ink stains, to complain theatrically that numbers were cruel and ungrateful. Beong-i lingered a little closer to the door, as she always did, her hand hovering for a heartbeat on the frame before stepping out into the full noise.
The quiet after they went felt almost as solid as a piece of furniture.
Ah-Rin was stacking slates when she heard footsteps: firmer, heavier than small sandals, accompanied by a low murmur outside. A moment later, Han-Byeol’s head popped back in.
“Seonsaeng-nim,” she said, solemn as a magistrate. “The magistrate sent someone. Not a tiger.”
A man in a neat but travel-stained coat appeared behind her, bowing in the doorway. He wasn’t from the mill or the harbour; he had the air of someone used to carrying other people’s words more than sacks.
“Kim Ah-Rin Seonsaeng-nim?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, wiping her hands.
“The magistrate requests your presence this afternoon,” the man said. “There will be a gathering at Madam Hong’s. Elders of the town, some merchants. They wish to… consider the matter of your girls’ school.”
The words were politely arranged, but something in them dropped cold into her stomach. Consider the matter sounded very like the phrases that had prefaced worse things in Hanyang.
“I understand,” she said. “At what hour?”
“After the day’s business is done,” he replied. “When the men are free.”
Of course, she thought. When the men are free.
She bowed, because there was nothing else to do, and saw him out. When the noise of his departing footsteps faded, she realised that Han-Byeol and Beong-i were still hovering in the doorway.
“Is something wrong?” Han-Byeol asked immediately.
“Town business,” Ah-Rin said lightly. “Grown-ups arguing. You would find it boring, Byeol-ah.”
“I never find arguing boring,” Han-Byeol said.
“Precisely,” Eun-Sook put in from her stool. “Which is why you’re not invited.”
Han-Byeol made a face. Beong-i watched Ah-Rin’s own face instead, reading the set of her jaw more accurately than any words.
“Go home,” Ah-Rin said gently. “Do your sums. If invisible tigers come, tell them I’ll deal with them tomorrow.”
Han-Byeol huffed, but she took Beong-i’s hand and led her away, chattering about what kind of tiger would be foolish enough to show its whiskers near Madam Hong’s courtyard.
When they had gone, the schoolroom seemed to shift around the absence of small bodies. Ah-Rin stood a long moment in the middle of it, palms flat against a table, letting her breath find its way back to something that wasn’t a tight, high flutter.
“You’re thinking of Hanyang,” Eun-Sook said quietly, without looking up from her mending.
“I’m thinking of doors,” Ah-Rin answered. “I walked through the wrong ones there. This feels like someone reaching for the same handle from the other side.”
Eun-Sook snipped a loose thread and tucked it in. “In Hanyang you walked alone,” she said. “Here, if they reach, they will find my hand on the same handle.”
“And mine,” came Hye-Won’s voice from the doorway.
Ah-Rin turned. Hye-Won stood there with Jin-Ho just behind her, a bundle of offcuts under his arm. The boy’s shoulders had broadened in the last years; he carried paper and responsibility with the same earnest care.
“Madam Hong sent word to the mill too,” Hye-Won said. “The elders do not know how not to talk. It leaks like bad barrels.”
“Eomma says they’ve been grumbling louder since Soo-Yeon corrected a stall keeper’s sums at market,” Jin-Ho added. “Apparently that was the end of civilisation.”
“Of course,” Hye-Won murmured. “Numbers in a girl’s mouth are more dangerous than in a cheating man’s ledger.”
There was anger in her eyes, banked and steady. Eun-Sook met it and nodded once; an old understanding passing between women who had both lived too long with decisions made over their heads.
“I have to go,” Ah-Rin said. “If I don’t answer, that will be its own answer.”
“Then you won’t go alone,” Hye-Won replied. “We’ll walk with you to Madam Hong’s. The town can see exactly who stands on which side of that door.”
21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡD8mfCp26MH
Madam Hong’s inn had been emptied of its usual clatter. Benches lined the walls; low tables had been pushed aside. The smell of rice and broth clung to the beams, but the room felt stripped, like a stage waiting for actors who hadn’t decided whether they were playing a comedy or a trial.
The magistrate sat near the far wall, his posture careful, his expression as neutral as someone whose job depended on seeming reasonable. On either side of the room, the town’s older men had settled according to habit and alliances. Nam Seung-Mo occupied a place near the front, his arms folded, his face pinched into the kind of frown that suggested he believed the world was personally disobliging him.
Master Baek sat farther back, hands on his knees, eyes steady. Madam Hong herself moved between jugs and cups, pouring barley tea as if this were any other gathering. Cho Mi-Young lurked near the doorway with a cloth still tied at her waist, claiming she had just come to drop off bread, though no one believed that for a heartbeat.
When Ah-Rin stepped in, with Hye-Won and Eun-Sook close behind, conversations faltered. Some men shifted, uneasy. Others watched with polite interest, as if they were about to inspect a new tool.
“Kim Ah-Rin Seonsaeng-nim,” the magistrate said, rising slightly in his seat. “Thank you for coming.”
“You asked,” she said, bowing. “It would be rude not to give you the chance to say what you think.”
A few men snorted at that, not unkindly. The magistrate’s mouth twitched, as if he might have smiled on another day.
“This town has a custom,” he began, “of speaking plainly when something touches all its households. Your school has grown.” His gaze moved briefly to Madam Hong, to Master Baek, to Nam Seung-Mo. “Some are pleased. Some are… concerned. We thought it better to talk together than to let gossip grow mould on it.”
He nodded to Nam Seung-Mo. “You asked the loudest. Speak first.”
Nam Seung-Mo cleared his throat as if the room owed him attention and he meant to collect it with interest.
“We all know Kim Ah-Rin is a diligent woman,” he said. “No one denies she has used her learning well before. But this—” he flicked his fingers as if shaking ink from them “—this school. Girls with their heads bent over books when they should be learning to run households. Who will marry them if they argue like men?”
“A man afraid of a wife who can count cannot be very strong,” Mi-Young muttered near the back. Madam Hong coughed to hide a laugh.
Master Nam shot them a look, then continued. “If they spend mornings here, who tends younger children? Who learns the loom? This may be harmless in Hanyang, where people have silver to waste. We are a small town. We can’t afford daughters who think they are sons.”
The magistrate looked at Ah-Rin. “You have heard the concern,” he said. “What do you say?”
She let her gaze travel around the room. There were faces she had known since childhood; faces that had watched her leave and come back; faces that had never looked her straight on until she started writing on a board instead of on paper in someone else’s workshop.
“I say girls’ hands do not fall off when they touch a book,” she replied. “And that a girl who can read a contract is less likely to see her family cheated when she’s left alone.”
Someone shifted at that. A man near the side coughed, not quite hiding his discomfort.
“You teach them to despise the house,” another said. “To think they are above the rice pot.”
“I teach them to count the rice,” she said. “So, they know when there is enough, and when someone is taking what isn’t theirs.”
“There are stories,” Master Nam persisted, “of women in the capital who read so much they forget their place. They answer back. They leave their children to servants.”
“And there are stories of men in the capital who drink away half their house,” Eun-Sook said sharply, before she could stop herself. “But no one is calling for a ban on rice wine.”
A ripple of laughter went round the room, small and quickly smothered. The magistrate raised a hand for quiet.
“Leave the capital’s vices to the capital,” he said. “We are talking about Haesong.”
“Exactly,” Ah-Rin said. “We are talking about our daughters. Our granddaughters. The girls who carry water here, who mend your sleeves, who will one day be the widows behind your stalls.”
She took a breath. “I do not teach them to run away. I teach them to stay standing. Reading a number on a scale won’t unteach them how to stir a pot. Knowing the price of grain won’t unteach them how to comfort a child.”
“But it may teach them to say no,” Nam said. “To a husband. To a father. To a bargain they do not like.”
“It may,” she said.
There was a small silence. Some of the men looked more unsettled by her agreement than they had by any argument.
The magistrate folded his hands together, thinking. He did not radiate the blunted hostility of the capital’s officials; he radiated a wearier, more local worry. He had to balance the town’s temper with the uncertainty of an empire that changed its mind slowly and punished quickly.
“Haesong is not alone in the world,” he said at last. “We sit under the same sky as Hanyang. When we step outside custom, even a little, it is prudent to see which way the wind is blowing there.”
He looked at Ah-Rin. “You began this school on your own responsibility. I have not interfered, because I have seen no harm. But now it touches the comfort of more households, and that makes it my concern, whether I like it or not.”
A lesser man might have pretended he enjoyed this. To his credit, he did not.
“I will write to Hanyang,” he said. “Not to accuse, but to ask. I will describe what you are doing and ask whether it sits within acceptable bounds. Until we have an answer, you may continue with the girls you already teach. Take no new ones without informing my office.”
“I understand,” she said. Her voice was steady. Her fingers were not.
By the time she stepped out into Madam Hong’s courtyard, the light had shifted towards late afternoon. The inn’s usual smells of broth and fried fish were beginning to creep back under the door, as if the building were impatient to remember it was a place of food and laughter, not arguments.
Hye-Won and Eun-Sook were waiting just beyond the gate. Jin-Ho stood beside them, the set of his jaw making him look a little more like Eun-Jae than usual.
“Well?” Hye-Won asked.
“They will ask Hanyang to decide whether my work is harmless,” Ah-Rin said. “Until then, I am to behave as if my own judgement has no weight.”
“Of course,” Eun-Sook snorted. “Why trust the woman who has actually kept their daughters from being cheated at market?”
Jin-Ho shifted. “You’re not standing in front of them as a girl they think they know,” he said. “You’re standing as the woman who kept their ledgers straight. That matters.”
He was still young enough to believe fairness might notice hard work on its own. She didn’t have the heart to tell him how often it walked past with its eyes closed.
“They will call the capital because they are afraid to carry their own decision,” Hye-Won said. “It’s a way of saying ‘You punish her, if punishment is needed. We will just nod.’”
“And?” came another voice.
They turned. In-Su was there, flour on his sleeves, as if he had come straight from kneading dough. He must have closed the bakery early, or ordered their apprentice into minding the counter.
He looked at Ah-Rin. “Ah-Rin-ah, are you alright?”
It was such a simple question, and so rarely asked for her sake rather than the towns, that she couldn’t answer immediately.
“I’m tired of being a question other people send away to be answered,” she said at last.
He nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “Last time you faced them alone,” he said. “This time, if they ask this town to choose, I won’t stay in the back of the room.”
She looked at him. The boy who had once carved her a clumsy stamp stood there as a man, sleeves dusted with flour, chin level.
“You don’t have to, In-Su-yah,” she said.
“I know,” he replied. “That’s why it will mean something when I do.”
The chill of the meeting still lay under her ribs, but something else settled over it now: inexplicable warmth and weight shared. Behind her, she felt Eun-Sook’s quiet presence, Hye-Won’s steady anger, Jin-Ho’s awkward earnestness. Ahead, the road curved back towards the mill and the house by the stream.
“Then we wait,” she said.
“We work while we wait,” Hye-Won corrected. “Ink dries, paper tears, children grow. Hanyang can take its time. We don’t have to.”
Ah-Rin let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding.
“All right,” she said. “We work.”
21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMw8HR5SaEz
The letter from Haesong did not rush.
It travelled the way most things from the provinces did: tied up with other letters in a courier’s pouch that smelled of dust and rain, handed from one set of tired hands to another, passed through stations where clerks yawned and sanded edges and thought mostly about their next bowl of soup.
By the time it reached the Office of Censors in Hanyang, the paper had softened a little at the corners; the ink had the faint blur of air and time. The letter’s seal, though, was still clear enough: Haesong county, respectful, slightly nervous. The capitals roofs were sprinkled with white feathers of soft snow.
A junior scribe broke the seal and flattened the sheet on his desk.
“Report and inquiry concerning a girls’ school in Haesong,” he read aloud, more to the room than to anyone in particular. “Taught by one Kim Ah-Rin, commoner, scholar, previously of this city.”
At another desk, a man looked up.
“Previously of this city?” he repeated. “Read that name again.”
“Kim Ah-Rin,” the boy said. “From the coast. The magistrate asks whether her work sits within acceptable bounds. He seems… unsure what to do with her.”
The man at the second desk did not sigh, though something in him wanted to. He simply held out his hand.
“Bring it,” he said.
The junior scribe obeyed at once. Few people in this room ignored Censor Min Sang-Uk when his voice took on that particular dry edge.
Censor Min read the letter once, expression unreadable, then again more slowly.
The magistrate had been careful. He described the school in neutral terms: instruction in letters, numbers, simple accounts; pupils mostly daughters of labourers and tradesmen; some unease from elders about “improper ambition”. He requested guidance “so that Haesong may not offend custom or neglect opportunity.”
There was no accusation. No demand. Just a man trying not to put his foot wrong on a floor he knew could crack.
Under the magistrate’s neat script, Censor Min saw the shadow of another paper, years old now, that had crossed his desk with the same name on it.
“Kim Ah-Rin,” he murmured. “You again.”
He nodded to the junior scribe. “Fetch me the file from the year of Master Im’s petition,” he said. “The conservation work for the royal household. It will be in the third chest, under ‘Concessions’.”
The boy hurried to obey. A few minutes later he returned with a bound bundle, the string around it worn smooth.
Censor Min set the new letter beside the file and untied the old cords.
There she was: in cramped, careful handwriting, a record of the Hanyang workshop that had restored flaking pages for the royal ladies; a note of Master Im’s death; a petition naming his chosen successor, Kim Ah-Rin; the first complaint from a jealous apprentice; the heated suggestion from a junior censor that any woman teaching girls to read must be trying to “unmake the natural order”.
And next to it, written in Censor Min’s own hand, the guidance he had drafted after Choi Yeon-Seo’s quiet intervention: a stamped notice warning against “unauthorised instruction of minors” and urging prudence.
He remembered the look on the young woman’s face when he had delivered that guidance in person—surprised, wary, unbent. He had not expected to hear her name again. Most people turned quiet after the first brush with his office.
The junior scribe shifted, unsure what to do. “What shall we answer, Yeonggam?” he asked carefully.
Censor Min tapped the edge of the Haesong letter with one finger. “If we send another warning and call it done, we are lazy,” he said. He did not say cowardly. Some things didn’t need to be written down to be visible.
“You were given a fence,” he murmured, eyes on the old stamp. “You chose to walk around it.”
“Yeonggam?” the boy said, uncertain.
Censor Min laid the old paper beside the new letter. Here they sat, years apart: the same name, the same stubborn ink.
“She left the capital,” he said. “Now she has planted a school in some fishing town and filled it with girls. After we explicitly warned her about teaching minors.”
The junior swallowed. “Then… she has ignored guidance?”
“She has treated it as weather,” Censor Min said. His voice had gone flat. “Something that passes if she waits indoors.”
He tapped the desk lightly.
“We’re not weather,” he said. “We are law.”
The boy stood very straight. “Shall I draft a reply, Yeonggam?”
“Yes,” Censor Min said. “Not guidance.” He let the word hang, heavy. “A recommendation of prohibition. State that in light of previous notice, this development shows disregard for counsel. Advise that the so-called school be dissolved and that the woman be cautioned against further unsanctioned instruction.”
The boy hesitated. “Do we send it straight away?”
Censor Min shook his head once. “No. This is not a note about a crooked spice tax. This touches the King’s dignity by implication. We said ‘no’ once. To be defied is to admit we were not heeded.”
He rose, taking both the old file and the new letter in hand.
“I will bring it to the Chief Censor,” he said. “It will need his endorsement before it goes forward.”
The junior scribe bowed deeply as Censor Min left his desk and disappeared into the inner corridor.
21Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpNq0g42sYJ
The Office of Censors prided itself on discretion, but men with ink on their sleeves still needed somewhere to pour their talk at the end of the day. Taverns caught words the way gutters caught rain. By the second evening, a junior clerk with a loose tongue had already described the “stubborn woman from Haesong” to his cousin over cheap rice wine.
“They say the Chief himself will sign it,” he crowed. “A full prohibition, not just a scolding. She was given warning before and still opened a school for girls. This time they’ll pull her up by the roots.”
The cousin’s eyes widened. “For teaching letters?”
“For ignoring us,” the clerk said, with the peculiar righteousness of petty authority. “It’s not the letters. It’s the disobedience.”
The cousin happened to share a courtyard wall with one of the apprentices from Master Im’s old atelier. By morning, the story had slipped between those stones like water.
Park Bo-Seok heard the rumour at lunchtime, when one of the younger apprentices came in late, smelling faintly of tavern smoke and bad decisions.
“…and he said they’re going to ban it completely,” the boy was saying breathlessly to another, “because she didn’t listen the first time. A whole school, just—” He made a chopping gesture. “Gone.”
“Whose school?” Master Park asked, setting down his bowl a little harder than necessary.
The boy jumped. “Ah—just gossip, Hyeong-nim, I—”
“Whose,” Master Park repeated.
“A woman,” the boy muttered. “From some coastal town. Kim… Kim Ah…” He squinted, dredging up the name. “Ah-Rin. My cousin says the censors are angry because they were lenient once and she ignored them.”
Silence fell over the table like a dropped cloth. Master Park stood up.
“Finish your meal,” he said. “And if any of you repeat that story outside this room without knowing what you’re saying, I’ll have you sorting pulp with your bare hands for a month.”
He left the half-eaten rice and went to find Seo Dan-Mi.
Dan-Mi was in the side room that had once served as her little office, bent over a half-repaired ledger. She didn’t look up when Bo-Seok entered; she rarely did until she’d finished the line she was copying.
“Dan-Mi-yah,” he said.
“Mhm,” she replied, finishing the character before lifting her head. “If it’s about the rag delivery, I already—”
“It’s about Ah-Rin-seonsaeng-nim,” he cut in.
That brought her fully upright. “What about her?”
He told her, in the plainest words he could find. As he spoke, the colour drained a shade from her face.
“A full prohibition,” she said slowly. “Not guidance. Not advice. An order.”
“So, the clerk’s cousin says,” Master Park replied. “The draft is on the Chief’s table, he claims. It will go round for signatures. Then it’ll be bundled with other business and sent up to the King’s hand like any other line on any other day.”
She pressed the heels of her hands briefly into her eyes, then dropped them and looked at him.
“They’re punishing her for disobeying the first notice,” she said. “For daring to try again.”
“They don’t like being proven ignorable,” he agreed.
There was a small, taut silence.
“Who can reach them?” she asked. “Not with paper from below. They’ll squash that under a pile and call it a day.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. They were both thinking of the same woman.
“Choi Yeon-Seo,” Dan-Mi said.
Choi Yeon-Seo received them in late afternoon, when the palace’s outer shadows had grown longer and the air between her house and the inner courts smelled of cooling stone and cooked rice.
“You look like people who have brought me a knot,” she said, setting aside the scroll she’d been reading. “Sit down before your legs forget how.”
They sat. Master Park spoke first, more bluntly than would have been wise with most noblewomen. That was one of the reasons Yeon-Seo liked him.
“They are drafting a ban, Agassi,” he said. “A full prohibition on Ah-Rin-seonsaeng-nim’s school. Because she ‘ignored guidance’ when she left the city and planted it in Haesong.”
Yeon-Seo’s fingers tightened on the edge of the table.
“Of course they are,” she said softly. “Men who give advice think they are generous as long as you don’t use it to walk somewhere they can’t follow.”
“They’re carrying the draft to the Chief today,” Dan-Mi added. “It will go to other censors tomorrow. Then, likely, straight into the packet the King nods through at the end of some long, dull audience.”
“Ink on a line he won’t even remember,” Yeon-Seo murmured. “While a woman at the coast has to look each of those girls in the eye and tell them why their books have to close.”
She rose and walked to the window, staring out at the slice of sky visible between roofs.
“I softened their hand once,” she said. “They extended it and she slipped past their fingers. They will not make the same mistake twice for my sake.”
“Then we need more than your sake,” Master Park said.
Yeon-Seo turned back; her gaze sharp.
“You ask much,” she said. “Do you know that?”
“Yes,” he said simply. “So did she, when she asked you to risk your name over sheets of mouldy paper. You said yes then.”
Yeon-Seo’s mouth twitched, not quite into a smile.
“She asked for nothing,” she corrected. “She simply refused to lie down. That is what caught my eye.”
She thought for a long moment, fan resting against her chin.
“The censors serve the King’s dignity,” she said at last. “If we make it his dignity to protect this school, not crush it, their hands will have to change direction.”
“And how do we make that?” Dan-Mi asked. “We cannot exactly walk into the throne room and tell him he is wrong.”
“No,” Yeon-Seo said. “But we can walk nearer than most.”
She folded her fan with a snap.
“Lady Hyeon has been restless,” she said. “She is tired of approving boys’ academies to polish her husband’s image. This will interest her. A woman who once served the palace quietly, now teaching fishermen’s daughters to read? It has all the elements she likes: humility, defiance, potential scandal wrapped in virtue.”
Dan-Mi stared at her. “You want to turn Ah-Rin into… a story at court?”
“I want to give the King a story he prefers to the one where he looks petty,” Yeon-Seo said. “He likes to think of himself as a patron of learning. Let’s see if that extends to girls whose names he’ll never hear.”
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The Chief Censor had a face like a man shaped by too many years of holding other people’s misdeeds at arm’s length. Lines bracketed his mouth; his eyes were tired, but not soft.
Censor Min laid the file and the Haesong letter on his table and bowed.
“An old matter came back,” he said.
The Chief read with the slow, methodical attention of someone who knew that hasty signatures could have long, messy shadows.
“So,” he said at last. “We softened our hand once because of useful work for the inner court. She took that as permission to move her trouble elsewhere.”
“The previous guidance seems to have… failed to impress her,” Censor Min agreed.
The man’s mouth turned down. “We are not in the business of offering advice that can be ignored,” he said. “If word spreads that a woman may open schools for girls after being warned, we will be chasing a dozen of them by next year.”
He considered, tapping the back of his knuckles lightly against the desk.
“Draft a formal prohibition,” he said finally. “Advise dissolution of the school. Note that if she persists, further measures may be considered.”
“Immediate dispatch?” Censor Min asked.
The Chief shook his head, practical even in severity. “We will circulate it among the senior censors first,” he said. “Let them add their names, in case anyone wants to object. Then we will send it with the usual packet for royal review. The King need only glance at it to nod; no one will waste a full audience on one provincial woman. But the record will show we did not act alone.”
He looked at Censor Min. “Prepare it today. We will review it together tomorrow before it goes round for signatures.”
“Yes, Chief,” Censor Min said.
As he walked back through the office, the file under his arm, he felt something sour coil in his chest. It was not exactly satisfaction. It was closer to irritation tempered with a bureaucrat’s grim comfort: the sense of having found the neatest way to close an open file.
A weed pulled up by the roots, he thought. And this time, no one can say we were not clear.
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The meeting with Her Highness Lady Hyeon happened in a small side room in the Crown Prince’s residence, where painted screens showed mountains no one present had time to visit.
Yeon-Seo spoke. Lady Hyeon listened, her head tilted, her eyes sharpening the more details she absorbed: the conservation work, the first guidance, the town’s school, the impending ban.
“So,” Lady Hyeon said when she was done. “We have a woman the palace has already used once, now being punished for extending the same skill to poor girls. And the censors are more concerned with being obeyed than with whether the work helps the realm.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Yeon-Seo said. “If they send this prohibition, it will not make Haesong obedient. It will make them resentful and make us look afraid of our own subjects’ literacy.”
Lady Hyeon sat back, tapping a finger on her knee.
“The King won’t appreciate being told he looks afraid,” she mused. “But he does enjoy being told he looks magnanimous.”
She glanced towards the inner door, where the muffled scratch of the Crown Prince’s pen could be heard in the next room.
“My husband is tired of taxes and petty land disputes,” she said. “A small, clean problem may feel like relief.” Her mouth quirked. “And if I present it as an opportunity for him to be praised in future histories as ‘the monarch who did not fear knowledgeable daughters’…”
“It will flatter him,” Yeon-Seo finished delicately.
“Exactly.” Hyeon rose in a swirl of silk. “Wait here.”
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The King did not receive the matter as a grand case. It arrived as one more line in a folder set beside his tea.
“A provincial school for girls,” the Crown Prince said carefully. “The local magistrate asks for guidance. The censors propose a ban, citing an old notice she has ‘ignored’.”
The King’s brows drew together. “Ignored?” he repeated. “She has done useful work for us, this woman?”
“She conserved several books in the inner women’s library,” the Crown Prince said. “The Queen Mother still uses some of them. Her hands are recorded as careful.”
“Careful hands, disobedient feet,” the King muttered. “A dangerous combination.”
His son did not smile. “If we crush her now,” he said quietly, “we tell the empire we fear a handful of coastal girls reading numbers. If we allow her, we can call it a trial—an experiment in loyalty. ‘Look how confidently we let even fishermen’s daughters read our proclamations.’ Future records will not bother to note she troubled the censors first. They will remember only that you did not fear her.”
The King considered his son. Behind him, Lady Hyeon knelt with lowered head, exquisitely still. She said nothing, but the suggestion hummed in the air: be the generous king, not the petty one.
At last, he exhaled.
“Very well,” he said. “Tell the censors their zeal is noted. Instead of a ban, there will be a royal decree. We name this… what? A supervised study? A special allowance?”
“A girls’ study in Haesong,” the Crown Prince suggested. “Under royal observation.”
“That sounds safe,” the King said. “Draft it. Emphasise that this is favour, not precedent. One woman, rewarded for past service, permitted to teach within bounds. That will let any grumblers mutter about exceptions, while the rest of the world hears that we are not afraid.”
He waved his hand. “And make sure the censors see my seal on it before they send anything. I will not have them tripping over my shadow.”
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Choi Yeon-Seo received the news three days before the Censors’ scheduled meeting to endorse the ban.
The contrast between the two documents made her snort aloud, when she read them side by side: the draft prohibition, bristling with phrases like “unsuitable” and “must be dissolved,” and the new royal decree, written on finer paper, recognising “the useful and loyal service of Kim Ah-Rin of Haesong” and granting official sanction to her girls’ school as a “modest study under our benevolent gaze.”
Men, she thought, would rather twist their tongues in knots, than admit they had been wrong. But ink in the right place was still ink.
She sent a copy of the decree to the Office of Censors with a note: By royal command, to be entered before other correspondence regarding Haesong is dispatched. She did not bother to hide her satisfaction, when she imagined Censor Min Sang-Uk’s face.
The original, she kept. Two days later, in the atelier, Dan-Mi held that original in her hands.
“It overturns the ban completely,” she said. Her voice sounded distant to her own ears. “Not just ‘do not act yet’. It says: this school stands, and under royal favour.”
“It snaps the censors’ teeth off in front of a mirror,” Master Park said, not without relish. “If they send their ban now, they look like men, who don’t read their own packets.”
Dan-Mi traced the clean strokes of Ah-Rin’s name with her gaze. It sat there, unmistakable, written in a script far more permanent than gossip.
“How long until an official copy reaches Haesong?” Bo-Seok asked.
“Too long,” Dan-Mi said. “Couriers have their own delays. And every day until it arrives, the town waits, not knowing whether Hanyang is sharpening a knife.”
She lifted her eyes.
“I’m going,” she said.
Master Park blinked. “With the decree?”
“With this,” she said, folding it back into its wrapping with a care usually given only to relics. “And with a spare copy in your hand in case I fall into a river.”
“There is no need to such—”
“There is,” she said, not sharply, just firmly. “You have a workshop to hold. You are Master Im’s successor in practice. I am the one who spent years listening to Ah-Rin-seonsaeng-nim mutter over margins about Haesong, about her family, about girls who would never see the city. If anyone carries this, it should be someone who remembers the sound of her voice when she talked about them.”
He studied her face for a long breath, then nodded.
“At least let me send you with letters,” he said gruffly. “From me. From the others. Proof that there were men here who did more than sit on their hands.”
She smiled, small and fierce.
“I’ll take them,” she said. “I’ll put them in her hand myself. And I’ll tell her that Hanyang tried to close its fist again, and that this time, other fingers pried it open.”
That night, she packed. Tools. Clothes. A little food for the road. The decree, wrapped and double-wrapped, slid into the safest part of her bundle. As she was tying the last knot, Master Park appeared in the doorway with a small, folded scrap.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“A note,” he said. “From the atelier. It says: We remember you.”
Dan-Mi tucked it in beside the decree.
When she stepped out into the dark edge of dawn, the city still smelled of damp stone and last night’s fires. Somewhere beyond its walls, the road unwound towards the sea and a little town she had only ever seen through the narrow window of Ah-Rin’s stories.
She squared her shoulders.
“All right, Seonsaeng-nim,” she murmured. “Once they almost crushed you for saving old pages. This time they tried to crush you for writing new ones. Let’s see how you look, when the King himself has inked your name.”
Then she set her feet towards Haesong and began to walk.
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Winter leaned into early spring 1811, and in the narrow space between we have asked and they have answered, life went on in a careful, shortened way.
Ah-Rin did what the magistrate had asked of her: she kept the girls she already had and turned away new hopefuls with a politeness that left her throat sore.
One morning, a woman from the far side of town came with her daughter, a small, serious thing with neatly plaited hair and a writing board hugged to her chest.
“I’ve heard of your school,” the woman said, shifting her bundle from one shoulder to the other. “My husband grumbles, but he doesn’t forbid it. I thought… if she could read notices, at least…”
She trailed off, as if ashamed of wanting so much.
Ah-Rin felt the longing like a hand pressed against her own ribs.
“I wish I could say, ‘Come in,’” she said. “But the magistrate has written to Hanyang. Until he answers, we agreed not to take new pupils.”
The woman’s face tightened, not in anger but in something heavier.
“Is it wrong?” she asked quietly. “Wanting her to read? I’ve never crossed the magistrate’s threshold in my life. I don’t know how these things sit with men who wear blue robes.”
“It isn’t wrong,” Ah-Rin said. “They are deciding whether it looks wrong from far away.”
The woman glanced down at her daughter, who was examining the cracks in the doorstep with the solemnity of someone memorising every line.
“If they say no?” the woman asked. “From Hanyang? If a piece of paper comes that says, ‘This must stop’?”
Ah-Rin hesitated. She had lived the weight of such paper. She knew how it bent backs, even when no hand forced them down.
“If they forbid the school,” she said slowly, “we will obey with our walls. We will not invite punishment on the town. But walls are only wood and paper. Houses are made of people.”
The woman’s eyes lifted.
“Fathers and mothers have always taught their children at home,” Ah-Rin went on. “If we cannot gather the girls in one room, we can still gather them in our kitchens. One girl at your table, one at mine, one in Madam Hong’s yard. We will not call it a school. We will call it… family.”
The woman swallowed, a little of the sag in her shoulders easing.
“So, there would still be letters?” she whispered.
“There will always be letters as long as there are mothers who want their children to read them,” Ah-Rin said. “This room makes it easier. If they take it from us, they do not take our hands.”
The woman bowed, deeply this time.
“Then I will wait,” she said. “If the answer is kind, I’ll bring her back to your door. If it isn’t…” She glanced at her daughter again. “I’ll keep a stool empty by the fire. You can sit there with her if you wish.”
When they had gone, the schoolroom felt quieter, not because of anger but because of all the things that were not yet allowed to happen. Inside, the girls sensed the waiting even when no-one named it.
Lessons continued, but the air was a little different. Each new character, each new list of numbers, had the flavour of something rescued from a tide that might yet steal it back.
“Today,” Ah-Rin said one afternoon, “we’ll practise reading a trade notice. Imagine you are at the harbour and someone has pinned this up. What do you need to know?”
Soo-Yeon raised her hand. “Who is selling,” she said, “and what they’re really charging. Not just the pretty words.”
Han-Byeol snorted softly. “And if it says ‘fresh fish’ in big letters and ‘three days old’ at the bottom in little ones,” she added, “we know to hold our noses and walk away.”
A ripple of laughter eased the strain along the mats.
Beong-i watched everything with that intent gaze that made it easy to forget she could not hear the words. Her fingers rested on the edge of the board as Ah-Rin wrote, tracing each character slowly, committing the shapes to memory.
When Seol-Ha came in later to help clear slates, she found the page with four words repeated in pairs down one side: 기쁨, 답답함, 기다림, 평안. Joy. Frustration. Waiting. Calm.
“You’ve added ‘waiting’,” Seol-Ha said, crouching to catch Beong-i’s eye.
The girl nodded, then drew a small circle around the word. Her hand wobbled a little, as if she couldn’t quite decide whether to make the line closed or leave it open.
“Feels like that?” Seol-Ha asked. “Like being inside something you can’t quite see past?”
Another nod.
“Then we’ll keep it on the board,” Seol-Ha said. “So, we remember what we’re learning to live through, not just what comes after.”
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At the mill, the work of hands went on in its own seasons.
“You told her we’d have paper ready,” Hye-Won reminded Jin-Ho as they stood over the vat, sleeves rolled, steam softening the air. “Whatever the answer is, those girls will need pages. To copy, to keep, or to burn and start again.”
Jin-Ho lifted the screen through the vat with practised care, watching the fibres settle into a thin, even layer.
“What if they never see them?” he asked. “What if they sit in a stack on a shelf until the edges curl and we use them to wrap dried fish?”
“Then they’ll be the strongest fish wrappings on this stretch of coast,” Hye-Won said, a smile in her voice. “Nothing we make is wasted. Sometimes paper finds its work later than we planned.”
She nodded towards the row of newly pressed sheets laid on boards.
“And if the school stands,” she added, “they’ll have something in their hands that says, ‘Someone believed in this long before Hanyang did.’ That counts for something.”
On one corner of each sheet, Jin-Ho pressed his small mark again: not grand, not boastful, just a promise at the edge of the page.
Later, when the sheets hung under the eaves to dry, he stood for a moment looking at the row of pale rectangles swaying gently like a line of quiet possibilities.
“If they ban the school,” he said at last, “we can cut them in halves and quarters. Smaller books. Pocket-sized. Easier to hide.”
Hye-Won glanced at him, then at the paper.
“See?” she said softly. “You’re already thinking like someone who intends to keep teaching, whatever the letter says.”
He flushed, but didn’t deny it.
Evenings returned to the mill-house with a slightly different weight. There was the usual comfort—steam from the soup pot, the cats sprawled where they had no business being, the small, familiar chaos of a family—but under it all hummed a thin, high string of tension.
One night, Seol-Ha sat by the window with her gayageum across her knees, plucking and stopping and starting in fits and starts. A scrap of paper lay beside her, covered in half-finished notations: curves and dots that looked almost like a new kind of script.
“What are you trying to catch?” Eun-Jae asked from the table, where he was quietly oiling a bridge.
“A feeling,” she said. “The way the room at the school feels when they’re all pretending not to listen to the rumours.”
He watched her fingers as they moved.
She played the greeting rhythm she and Beong-i had invented. Tap-tap… tap. Under her hands it became a small, steady motif: two notes, a pause, a third held just a little longer than necessary. Around it she wove a line that climbed and dipped, like someone walking uphill with a basket they weren’t sure they were allowed to carry.
“It keeps wanting to fall into something sad,” she said. “I’m trying to keep it from doing that.”
“Let it, for a while,” he suggested. “Then show it how to climb back out.”
She tried it. The melody wavered, sank, then caught itself and rose again, thinner but more stubborn.
“I want to play it at the school,” she said. “When… when there is something to celebrate.” She didn’t say if. She had inherited her mother’s dislike of feeding possibility with the wrong words.
Eun-Jae said nothing, but later, in his own ledger in the quiet room beyond the paper wall, he wrote one small line: She composes for rooms that haven’t been built yet. I did not know music could do that.
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The second town gathering at Madam Hong’s inn came on a day when the sky was the flat grey of tin. It was not raining, but it might, and that uncertainty felt like a fitting backdrop.
The room was full again, but the mood was less sharp than the last time. People were tired of not knowing, which made them, for once, a little kinder to one another.
The magistrate sat at the front, the same blue robe, the same careful posture, but the set of his mouth had softened around the edges. He had been living in the same waiting as everyone else; that left its mark.
“I have no reply yet from Hanyang,” he said honestly. “The packet will come when it comes. Still, some of you asked to speak again. I see no harm in that.”
Nam Seung-Mo cleared his throat. “My concerns are unchanged,” he said, less combative than before. “I worry about work left undone, about customs altered faster than we can understand. It is not that I wish harm on the girls. I simply…” He searched for a word. “I fear we are walking on a path we do not see the end of.”
It was the most reasonable he had sounded on the subject yet. A few men nodded; fear was something they understood.
Ah-Rin inclined her head. “It’s fair to fear what we have not walked before,” she said. “I feared Hanyang the first time I went there. I fear letters from it now.”
A faint smile flickered around the room.
“But we do not walk blind,” she went on. “We can already see some of what has happened. Soo-Yeon reads numbers now; her uncle says she caught a miscount on the scale. Han-Byeol reads notices; she came to tell me about a warning post at the harbour before half of you had heard.”
Soo-Yeon’s uncle, sitting near the back, shifted and nodded, a little sheepish.
“We have not seen daughters running wild in the lanes,” Ah-Rin added gently. “We have seen them helping their mothers keep shops, checking prices, writing letters for those whose hands shake too much to hold a brush. That is not the end of the path, but it tells us something about the direction.”
Master Baek rose, his joints creaking as always.
“I have watched the town a long time,” he said. “Longer than some of you. I have seen fashions come and go, tempers flare and cool. This…” He gestured vaguely towards Ah-Rin. “This feels less like a fire and more like… like adding another lamp to a dim room. The furniture does not move. We just see it more clearly.”
Cho Mi-Young, by the door, smiled. “And if a girl reads that the flour sacks are short by a handful, that lamp saves us all from eating thinner bread,” she said. “I call that worth the trouble.”
There was a small, honest ripple of amusement. Even Nam’s mouth twitched.
In-Su stood when the magistrate’s eyes came to him. His hands were loosely linked in front of him, flour still dusting the skin around his nails.
“I said most of what I needed to say last time,” he began. “I won’t pretend my mind has become cleverer since.”
A few chuckles greeted that.
“I have one daughter,” he said. “Her mother died bringing her here. I bake bread. I cannot follow her every step.”
His gaze swept the room, steady and unashamed.
“If she knows how to read a warning, a price, a contract, I sleep a little easier,” he went on. “That’s all. Not a philosophy. Just a father’s selfishness.”
He glanced towards Ah-Rin for a brief, unreadable heartbeat, then back.
“If Hanyang sends word that this school must close,” he said, “I will listen. I don’t intend to bring the King’s displeasure on Haesong.” He took a breath. “But I will still ask Ah-Rin-ssi to come to my table and teach my daughter there. One small lamp in my house is better than none in the whole street.”
That picture seemed to land gently. Men thought of their own tables, their own daughters or granddaughters leaning over bowls.
From the wall, Eun-Jae added only a few words.
“I make instruments,” he said. “I cannot force anyone to play them, but the village is poorer if the strings stay silent. They are useless unless someone teaches others how to play them. A gayageum hung on a wall is just wood and string.”
He glanced at Ah-Rin.
“It is the same with minds,” he said. “You can keep them as decoration and hope they stay obedient, or you can teach them and accept that they will make new sounds. New doesn’t mean wrong.”
He let that hang for a moment.
“You have two choices with girls,” he said, more quietly. “Teach them yourselves and guide what they learn, or leave them ignorant and let the world teach them without you. If you refuse to teach, they will still learn—from hunger, from cheats, from hard hands. Then you have lost the right to say you cared how they turned out.”
The magistrate listened to all of it, hands folded.
At last, he nodded, slowly.
“I hear three things,” he said. “Fear of change. Hope for safety. And a willingness to bend if Hanyang’s answer is hard.”
He spread his hands a little.
“Until that answer comes, I see no reason to close what is already open,” he said. “We will not bar the door on our own, nor will we throw it wider until we know which way the wind blows. When the letter arrives, we will read it together. Then”—he looked around the room, including everyone, even the women at the edges— “then we decide what courage looks like, in the light of what we have heard today.”
It wasn’t a rousing call or a vow of defiance. It was something quieter: an agreement to keep standing, to keep listening. No-one cheered. No-one shouted him down. The room simply sat with it: the uncomfortable compromise of people who wanted a clean victory and had been handed a waiting room instead.
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Outside, as the meeting broke apart into murmurs and shifting feet, Ah-Rin stepped into the thin autumn light. The sea smelled the same as it always had, salt and distance and a hint of rot. The sky did not look any different for all the words that had been thrown under it.
Madam Hong pressed a cup into her hand.
“You handled them like hot kettles,” she said approvingly. “No burns on anyone and the tea still warm.”
“I’m not sure about my own fingers,” Ah-Rin murmured, flexing them.
Eun-Sook stood with her, watching townsfolk drift away in twos and threes.
“You did well,” her mother said. “You reminded them they are not just men with opinions, but fathers and grandfathers with faces they would have to look at across tables if they help close your door.”
“And if the letter from Hanyang tries to close it anyway?” Ah-Rin asked quietly.
“Then we do what you told that mother,” Eun-Sook said. “We obey with our walls and disobey with our kitchens. We make the circle smaller and sturdier. We have always taught within families. We will just be more deliberate about which relatives we ‘adopt’.”
She nodded towards the lane where Han-Byeol and Beong-i were walking ahead, heads bent together, a book between them.
“Some bonds are already half-made,” she added. “Royal ink can’t unwrite those.”
Ah-Rin followed their gaze: the two girls—one loud, one quiet—moving in step without thinking about it. The waiting still lay over everything like a thin veil, but behind it she could see shapes: tables pulled closer, rooms made wider, not by decree but by choice.
“All right,” she said softly. “We wait. And while we wait, we plan where to put the lamps.”
The sea answered with its usual indifferent shush, carrying no letters and no promises.
Somewhere far away, on a road turning slowly towards Haesong, a woman with ink-stained fingers was already walking with a rolled decree in her pack.
The waiting, though none of them knew it yet, was almost over.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.