The winter of 1811 did not arrive in Haesong with storms so much as with a slow tightening.
By early morning the air itself felt pulled thin. Breath showed in small white puffs over the road, the stream ran with a skin of ice along its edges, and the mule at Nam Seung-Mo’s yard stamped and huffed as if offended by the very idea of frost.
Down the lane that led towards the mill and the old stream-house, small figures in padded hanbok moved like bright beads on a string. Mothers stooped at doorways to tug hoods a little closer around ears, to tuck hands into sleeves, to call last instructions.
“Don’t run on the ice.”
“Share the slate if there aren’t enough.”
“Don’t argue with your Seonsaeng-nim; argue with your book if you must.”
Han-Byeol hopped from bare earth to frozen tuft, trying to step only where the frost glittered. Her winter coat was tied one notch too loosely; she refused to let anyone fix it.
“You’re letting the cold in,” In-Su said, walking beside her with a basket of bread balanced on one hip. Steam still leaked faintly from its lid.
“I’m old enough to be cold,” Han-Byeol replied, chin up. “You don’t walk with me to the school because I’m little. You walk because you like dropping bread off for Seonsaeng-nim.”
“Insolent creature,” he said, exactly as he had the last ten times she’d said it.
She grinned, knowing she’d scored a hit. He hid his smile by shifting the basket against his shoulder.
By the bend in the road, where the sound of the mill wheel began as a low, familiar groan, Jin-Ho came into view, a stack of wrapped paper under his arm. Frost dusted the tips of his hair where steam from the vats had collided with outdoor air.
“Morning,” he called, adjusting his load with one shoulder.
“Morning,” Han-Byeol returned, business-like. Then, lowering her voice as she slowed to fall into step with him: “Appa’s pretending his feet just happen to go this way.”
“I heard that,” In-Su said mildly.
“I meant you to,” she shot back.
Jin-Ho kept his eyes on the road to hide the smile tugging at his mouth.
Past the mill, the path dropped gently towards the stream. The old house there, once Eun-Jae’s workshop, had changed more in the past three years than in the decade before. The roof was still sound, the walls still straight, but papered windows glowed with lamplight even at this hour, and wooden racks outside held lines of hanging practice sheets that fluttered stiffly in the cold.
Above it, the mulberry tree stood almost bare, its branches holding only a few stubborn leaves that rattled faintly in the wind, like thin hands applauding something only they could see.
On the porch, sweeping frost and stray bits of trampled paper into orderly heaps, Dan-Mi paused and straightened as the first group of girls approached. Her breath smoked in front of her, but her hands looked as if the cold had to negotiate with them to be felt at all.
“You’re early,” she called.
“Beong-i wanted to come before everyone,” Han-Byeol answered.
From behind her, the quieter girl stepped forward, clutching her slate to her chest. She lifted one hand and tapped twice against the porch rail, then once more, their agreed little pattern for “hello”.
Dan-Mi replied by tapping the broom handle gently on the floor in the same rhythm. Beong-i’s shoulders dropped a fraction; some of the stiffness left her face.
“We can light the brazier inside,” Dan-Mi said. “Frost makes handwriting worse, and it’s bad enough in summer.”
Han-Byeol snorted as if personally attacked, but she followed obediently when Dan-Mi opened the door.
Inside, the schoolroom was already breathing warm air. The small brazier at the far end ticked and sighed with charcoal. On either side of the room, low benches were pushed close to the walls; mats with cushions lay rolled at the back, ready to unfurl. Shelves held inkstones, brushes, slates, and, lately, a stack of slim readers with Yoon Jin-Ho’s small, steady mark in one corner.
It had once been more than enough space for two or three girls, a table, and a dream. Now, even empty, it looked as if the air remembered how tightly it would be filled by mid-morning.
Dan-Mi set the broom aside and went to the corner to coax more life out of the brazier.
“Come, Beong-i,” she said. “Warm your hands before your letters punish us.”
Beong-i obeyed, palms held cautiously towards the heat. She closed her eyes, feeling the shift from outside to in; the sounds changed too. The stream’s murmur dulled, replaced by the soft scrape of brush on paper from the back room where someone was already practising.
Ah-Rin emerged from there a moment later, sleeves folded back, hair pinned up in a way that had learned to accommodate ink and interruptions.
“You’ve beaten me, as always,” she said to Beong-i, then looked over the girl’s shoulder to the doorway. “And you’ve brought half the road with you.”
Jin-Ho had arrived, stamping snow from his boots, the stack of paper hugged close. In-Su hovered just behind him, his basket of bread breathing out warm air that made the girls’ noses twitch.
“I come as a necessary evil,” In-Su said, lifting the lid to show neat rows of bread and a separate cloth-wrapped bundle of sweet buns. “Children learn better if their stomachs aren’t plotting rebellion.”
“We all do,” Ah-Rin acknowledged. “Leave it there, please. I’ll try to stop them eating everything before midday.”
“You won’t,” Han-Byeol murmured. “You never do.”
Ah-Rin patted her head without argument.
“Paper?” she asked Jin-Ho.
He nodded and set the bundle on the nearest low table, peeling back the wrapping.
“Thinner than the last batch,” Dan-Mi said, already at his elbow. “For younger hands, less ink.”
“And more sheets cut from each vat,” he added, glancing at her. “Han-Byeol doesn’t know how to keep her quill from sitting too long in one place.”
“I heard that,” Han-Byeol said, but there was no real heat in it.
Slowly, the room filled.
Soo-Yeon arrived with her plaits already fraying, Mi-Ran with carefully folded hands and a face set to “earnest”. Two younger girls from the harbour came together, smelling faintly of salt and fish scales despite their clean clothes. Each new arrival brought a swirl of cold air, a murmur of greetings, and a brief scramble for a place on the benches.
By the time the brazier had settled into its steady glow, there were more bodies than there were easy spaces.
“Sit closer,” Ah-Rin said, moving through the room like someone setting pieces on a board. “Shoulders can touch; you won’t catch each other’s sums.”
At the back, Soo-Yeon and one of the harbour girls squeezed together on a single board, their knees pressed so tightly side by side that every shift of weight tilted them both.
“There is no more room,” Mi-Ran whispered, eyes wide.
“Only because we are still thinking in old shapes,” Dan-Mi replied, under her breath.
Ah-Rin heard that and glanced up, taking in the crowded benches, the stacked slates, the way Jin-Ho’s newly cut readers sat in a single neat pile when they would soon scatter to different small hands.
“I remember when I worried the room would feel too large,” she said quietly.
“It still does first thing in the morning,” Dan-Mi said. “For about three breaths.”
They exchanged a look the girls did not see: pride, worry, a faint, almost giddy sense that they were standing at the edge of something larger than this low ceiling.
“Perhaps,” Ah-Rin murmured, “we need to admit that this isn’t just a borrowed room any more. It’s a roof growing too small.”
“Magistrates don’t like hearing that roofs are too small,” Dan-Mi said. “They hear ‘cost’ even when you say ‘light’.”
“Then we will tell them we’re saving them from the wrath of offended beams,” Ah-Rin replied, glancing upward.
The rafters, darkened by years of smoke and sawdust and now ink, said nothing. But the way they stood, steady and uncomplaining over too many heads, made Dan-Mi think of another building not far off: the old magistrate’s hall near the well, its paper windows patched with whatever could be found, its big room hosting nothing more important these days than the occasional argument about fishing rights.
She followed Ah-Rin’s gaze as it drifted, as it often did lately, in that direction even through solid walls.
“Do you think of it often?” she asked quietly, as Ah-Rin handed her a pile of slates.
“The hall?” Ah-Rin said. “Ever since Jin-Ho made readers faster than we could find laps to rest them on.”
“So, since last month,” Dan-Mi translated.
“Since last month,” Ah-Rin conceded.
She turned back to the girls, clapping her hands lightly.
“All right,” she said. “Today we’ll divide. Younger ones with Dan-Mi here, older ones with me under the mulberry, if we can convince the tree not to drop its last leaves directly onto your pages. Han-Byeol, Beong-i, Soo-Yeon—outside. Mi-Ran, you stay with Dan-Mi and the littlest.”
Several faces lit at the word “outside”, even in this weather. The yard, cold as it was, still felt bigger than four walls.
Ah-Rin fetched extra mats from the corner and held the door while her half of the class trooped through it, a small tide of colour against the white breath of the stream’s banks.
“Wrap your scarves properly,” Ah-Rin called after them. “I won’t have mothers blaming me for frozen ears.”
“You already get blamed for ink,” Jin-Ho said, gathering up the empty wrapping from the paper.
“I can live with ink,” she answered. “Frostbite is another line entirely.”
When the door slipped shut again, the room felt both strangely spacious and still too full. Eight girls remained, knees knocking, fingers already itching for brush or chalk. Dan-Mi moved among them, laying out slates, smoothing sleeves, quietening one pair of bouncing legs with a gentle push.
From outside, the muffled sound of Ah-Rin’s voice drifted in as a rumble, then the sharper ring of Han-Byeol’s laughter and the softer rhythm of clapped hands as someone, somewhere, started to tap out one of Seol-Ha’s little teaching songs against a bench.
Jin-Ho lingered a moment, the empty paper wrapping in his hands.
“You’ll really ask the magistrate?” he said, low enough that the girls bent over their slates would not hear.
“One day,” Dan-Mi replied, dipping her brush into the inkstone. “When we can no longer pretend this is just a crowded corner of someone else’s house.”
“He’ll think of money first,” Jin-Ho warned.
“Then we’ll show him what this costs, if we don’t do it,” she said. “Look at them.”
He did. The small bent heads, the tongues caught between teeth in concentration, the way Mi-Ran’s fingers hovered over the slate before she committed the first stroke. The way one girl absent-mindedly traced the outline of a letter on the knee of her trousers, unable to stop her hand from rehearsing.
“They’re outgrowing the room,” Dan-Mi said. “The hall has been shrinking into itself for years. It would be a kindness to both to put them together.”
“You sound as if you’re matching people for marriage,” Jin-Ho said.
“Buildings and people are not so different,” she replied. “Give them someone to share the wind with and they complain less.”
He shook his head, but the corner of his mouth lifted. As he turned to go, he caught sight of Ah-Rin through the window: outside, under the bare branches, her breath clouded the air as she bent over a slate with Beong-i, one gloved hand guiding the girl’s fingers over the grooves of a character.
He realised, not for the first time, that the world he had grown up in—the mill, the stream, the town—had quietly grown a new centre around that old house. The path from his front door to this one felt as inevitable as his own heartbeat.
He tucked the empty wrapping under his arm and stepped back out into the cold, the school door closing behind him on warmth and murmurs and the scratch of beginnings.
14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9ESffj7X6i
By the time winter began to loosen its grip after changing years, the cold had stopped feeling dramatic and settled into something more mundane: damp hems, cracked fingertips, the constant negotiation between brazier and draft.
On a late afternoon in Second Month, the stream-house held the particular quiet that comes after a heavy day. The last of the girls had gone, their voices fading up the road. The brazier glowed in a small, stubborn way. Chalk dust lingered in the air like the ghost of sums.
Dan-Mi stood at the long table by the window, sleeves rolled up, hair coming loose from its knot. Stacks of used sheets lay before her in three messy towers: one for salvageable scraps, one for sheets to turn into practice cards, one for the fire.
Normally, she sorted quickly, fingers decisive. Today she moved more slowly, pausing to trace a line of worn fibre, to frown at a particular crease.
“Again,” she murmured, setting aside a sheet with the corner softened almost to holes.
On the top right, neat Hangul read: Han-Byeol. The rest of the sheet was a battlefield of sums and doodles.
“I should make her write her name lower,” Dan-Mi muttered. “Top corners have a hard life.”
At the far end of the room, Eun-Sook clucked her tongue as she wiped down the low benches.
“You mutter exactly like Ah-Rin-ah, when you’re tired,” she said.
“That’s a baseless slander, Halmeoni,” Dan-Mi replied, without looking up.
“Mm.” Eun-Sook straightened slowly, hand pressed into the small of her back. “I’m going to Madam Hong’s before she sells the last decent piece of dried squid to some man who will only waste it in soup.”
She picked up her basket, then seemed to remember something and set it down again. From a shelf near the door she retrieved a little clay kettle and two small cups and carried them back to the long table.
“I boiled this earlier,” she said, placing the kettle down. “If I leave it here, perhaps the room will remember there are ways of being warm that don’t involve charcoal fumes.”
Dan-Mi eyed her.
“You’re leaving tea unsupervised?”
Eun-Sook sniffed.
“I am going out. My age excuses me.” She glanced at the empty doorway, at the lingering smell of pulp and steam on the air. “Besides, there is bound to be a Yoon in need of something hot before long.”
With that mysterious pronouncement, she gathered up her basket and left, closing the door firmly behind her.
Dan-Mi stared at the kettle for a moment, then huffed a soft laugh and went back to her sorting.
It took very little time for Eun-Sook’s prediction to prove itself.
The door opened again on a gust of cold air and the sound of boots being thumped against the threshold. Jin-Ho stepped in with a bundle of paper under one arm and his scarf hanging half-unwound around his neck. His cheeks were raw from the wind; his hair tufted in inexplicable directions where steam had kissed it and the air had punished it.
He blinked at the sight of the nearly empty room.
“Dan-Mi-ssi, where is everyone?” he asked.
“Driven away by my temper,” Dan-Mi said dryly. “Or errands. Take your pick.”
He shrugged the bundle off his shoulder onto the nearest clear space and blew on his fingers.
“Halmeoni went to Madam Hong,” Dan-Mi added. “She left this so the walls wouldn’t complain.”
She nodded towards the kettle.
Jin-Ho’s expression brightened in a way that suggested he agreed with the walls.
“I respect her priorities,” he said. “May I?”
“You may, if you surrender that paper first,” she said. “I’m low on ways to torment myself today.”
He unwrapped the bundle, revealing a neat stack of fresh sheets. They had a faint sheen in this light, a mix he had been testing: thin enough for young hands, strong enough to withstand flailing brushstrokes and overenthusiastic corrections.
Dan-Mi lifted one, held it between both hands, and flexed it gently. Her face settled into the look it wore when counting heartbeats between raindrops.
“Better,” she said. “The last batch frayed at the corners if you looked at them with too much disapproval.”
“Children do that to everything,” he protested. “You should see what Jin-Ho, age five, did to the mill ledger.”
“I’ve seen what Jin-Ho, age seventeen, does to his hair,” she said. “The ledger got off lightly.”
He reflexively reached up to flatten the worst of the damage. His fingers were still stiff; they did little good. “Eighteen.”
She watched him with concealed amusement, then turned her attention back to the paper.
“More mulberry, less hemp?” she asked, bending it again.
“Winter fibre,” he confirmed. “The river bundle was cleaner than last year. I tried a longer soak and a shorter beating.”
She nodded slowly.
“Girls’ hands will crease, not tear,” she said. “At least the ones who only fight the page and not the air.”
“That narrows it down to three,” he said. “Four on good days.”
He reached for the kettle and poured tea into both cups, setting one near her elbow without asking. Her fingers brushed the warm clay, and she realised with a faint start that she had been colder than she thought.
For a while they worked in companionable quiet: he cutting the stack into precise halves for smaller readers, she sorting the day’s casualties into their three fates. Every so often she would read a line aloud from a discarded page.
“‘My aunt says books are for boys’,” she quoted at one point. “Underneath, perfectly finished sums.”
“Ah,” he said. “That one came from the harbour family.”
“She pressed so hard the slate almost cracked,” Dan-Mi said softly. “I expect the aunt will discover quite soon that opinions are not as heavy as she thought.”
He smiled into his tea, the corner of his mouth crooking up.
After a time, she laid her fingers flat on one particular sheet and did not move them.
“Look at this,” she said.
He bent closer, leaning to see. Their heads nearly touched; he could feel a strand of her hair almost touch his cheek.
The sheet bore Beong-i’s careful, hesitant characters. They were not pretty; there were too many strokes in some, not enough in others. But the line of them marched steadily across the page, the spacing careful. In the margin, a series of small symbols that only she and Seol-Ha would have recognised as their private code for “happy”, “confused”, “proud” dotted the edge like little flags.
“She writes to herself,” Dan-Mi said quietly. “Not just what we set, but little notes. This one says ‘good’ by her own name. This one says ‘try again’ next to a lopsided letter.”
“Then your paper has achieved more than half the people who write ordinances in Hanyang,” Jin-Ho said. “It made a child decide she is ‘good’.”
She huffed a breath that might have been a laugh.
“It’s not the paper,” she said. “It’s the room. And the fact that Ah-Rin-imo lost patience with the old words for ‘useless’ years ago.”
He did not argue.
They sat like that for a heartbeat too long: shoulders almost touching, eyes on the same uneven line of ink. Then they both became aware, in the same moment, of how close they were. He sat back a fraction; she did the same. The space between them filled up suddenly with the steam from the cups.
“You’re brave,” she said, after a moment.
He looked up, startled.
“For someone who hides his failures in such tidy stacks,” she clarified, gesturing at the neat pile of trimmed-off edges and rejected sheets he had kept to one side.
He flushed, heat rising under the winter pallor.
“I don’t hide them,” he protested. “I just… don’t invite everyone to slip on them.”
“Mm,” she said, unconvinced. “Master Im used to say the paper that shows its maker’s doubt is stronger than the one that pretends it never hesitated.”
“I thought Master Im liked his sheets invisible,” he said.
“He liked them honest,” she replied. Her eyes flicked to his mark in the corner of the finished readers. “Yours are getting more honest. Less afraid to be themselves instead of copies of your mother’s.”
He swallowed; throat suddenly dry despite the tea.
“You can tell that from a thumb-sized mark?” he asked.
“I worked six years with a man who could tell which apprentice stirred a vat by the way the fibres lay,” she said. “I can certainly tell when you stop trying to carve your mother’s name with your own hands.”
The words landed somewhere between his ribs and sat there, warm and unsettling.
He cleared his throat, hunted for something clever, and found nothing at all. In the silence, she reached for the kettle again and poured more tea into his empty cup without looking at him.
“So,” she said lightly, “what did you do with the batch that almost tore if I frowned at it?”
He grimaced.
“Turned it into kindling before anyone else could see it.”
“Aha,” she said. “Hidden.”
“Recycled,” he corrected. “Under controlled conditions.”
She looked at him sidelong.
“You’re very brave for someone who is terrified of witnesses,” she said.
“I work in a family where my life was a public performance from the day I learnt to walk,” he shot back, then stopped, surprised at his own sharpness.
Her eyes softened.
“And yet you still risk bringing your work here,” she said. “Where these girls will put ink on it in ways you can’t control, and I will sit over it and mutter about fibres.”
He stared at her for a moment, then let out a breath he had not realised he was holding.
“If I didn’t bring it here,” he said, looking down at his hands, “I think it would feel… unfinished.”
There was a quiet beat.
“See?” she said. “Honest.”
He looked up, and this time he did not look away as quickly. The room felt smaller, suddenly, not because of benches and slates, but because he was painfully aware of how her hair had come loose in a thin strand that brushed her cheek, and how ink had dried in a faint smudge along her wrist.
He reached for another sheet to cut, misjudged the distance, and their fingers brushed properly this time.
They both froze.
Her skin was colder than his, but the jolt that went through him felt like the opposite. He snatched his hand back as if he had touched the brazier; she pulled hers away a fraction too quickly, nearly knocking over her cup.
For a heartbeat they stared at each other, twin expressions of alarm bordering on absurd.
Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. It broke out of her like a sudden crack in a frozen pond, small but unmistakable.
“We are very dignified,” she said, voice dry, “terrified of each other’s knuckles.”
He found himself laughing too, relief bubbling up into something light.
“That was a lethal knuckle,” he replied. “I felt its murderous intent.”
“You should see my thumb when a sheet tears in the wrong place,” she said. “It can ruin you.”
They were still grinning like conspirators when the door banged open again and a small whirlwind in boots clattered over the threshold.
“Seonsaeng-nim!” Han-Byeol called. “Are you hiding all the tea in here? Halmeoni said—”
She broke off, looking between them: the closeness, the scattered sheets, the second cup.
Her eyes narrowed with the precise, merciless understanding of a ten-year-old who had lived among adults all her life.
“I knew it,” she said.
“You know nothing,” Jin-Ho said quickly. “This is a secret negotiation between paper and its critics.”
Han-Byeol folded her arms.
“Then why are your ears red?” she asked.
“Because it’s cold,” he said.
“It’s warm in here,” she countered.
Dan-Mi intervened before he dug himself deeper.
“Halmeoni left this kettle,” she said. “Either help me drink it or watch it grow mould. Those are your choices.”
Han-Byeol considered this, then advanced to claim the third cup Eun-Sook had not left, but which somehow materialised from the shelf anyway.
As Jin-Ho wrapped his scarf back around his neck to go, Dan-Mi reached out almost without thinking and tugged it tighter where he had left a gap.
“If you catch a chill,” she said, eyes on the knot she was tying, “your nose will drip on my paper and I will have to start a new stack of failures.”
He swallowed.
“I’ll try not to disgrace your stacks,” he said.
She let go of the scarf and stepped back, hands returning to her work.
“See that you don’t, Jin-Ho-ssi,” she replied, more formal than the gentleness in her face.
He stepped out into the cold again, heart beating a little faster than the walk home required, and thought, not for the first time that month, that the paths of Haesong had quietly rearranged themselves so they all seemed to lead back to a room where her ink smudged the air.
14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRBSwcktHaf
Summer 1812 arrived not so much with warmth as with insistence.
By the fifth week of heat, the stream lay low between its banks, glassy and slow, and the air inside the old house felt as if it had been boiled and left to cool only halfway. The brazier sat sulking in a corner, unused. Even the ink seemed lazier, reluctant to flow.
“Today,” Ah-Rin announced one morning, fanning herself with a scrap of card, “we divide before we melt.”
The schoolroom agreed in a chorus of small groans.
“Younger ones, stay with Dan-Mi-yah,” she said. “Older ones, you go with me under the mulberry before the sun decides we are soup. Take mats. Take your slates. Do not take the brazier.”
Han-Byeol sprang up as if released from a spring. Beong-i followed more quietly, slate hugged to her chest, eyes already drawn to the rectangle of bright glare where the doorway sat.
Soo-Yeon and Mi-Ran gathered their things with the solemn importance of those entrusted with going outside during lessons. Behind them, three younger girls stayed rooted to their bench, looking half-regretful, half-relieved.
“Imo,” Jin-Ho said from the doorframe, where he was delivering a bundle of trimmed practice sheets, “if you send them out now, you’ll have to peel them off the mats later.”
“The mats will forgive me,” Ah-Rin said. “The walls will not.”
She cast a look around the room. Even with half the pupils, the space felt full: elbows nudging, knees touching, the whisper of sleeves on sleeves. Inkstones and brush pots crowded the shelves; paper readers leaned in restless stacks. The old beams above seemed to stoop lower in sympathy.
Ah-Rin took charge of the “outsiders” with brisk efficiency.
“All right,” she said. “Slates, under the arms. Mats, one each. Han-Byeol, you help Beong-i carry hers.”
“I can carry my own,” Beong-i wrote quickly on her slate, then underlined it.
“I know,” Han-Byeol said cheerfully. “But I’m faster. We’ll both carry it and show the mat who is in charge.”
Beong-i considered this, then allowed it. Together they manoeuvred a rolled mat towards the door like a small, determined log.
Outside, under the thin shade of the mulberry, the air felt only marginally kinder. But there was space, and the small breeze that came from the stream was enough to lift hair from damp necks and make the heat feel less like a hand pressing down.
Ah-Rin spread the mats in a loose circle.
“Older girls here,” she said. “We’re practising more than letters today. We’re practising keeping ink on the slate and not on your neighbour’s sleeve.”
That produced a faint ripple of laughter.
She sat on the low stone at the base of the tree, slate propped on her knees, and began to draw a simple character.
“This one,” she said, “is a friend of yours now. We’ve met it before.”
“Hak,” Soo-Yeon said. “Learning.”
“Good,” Ah-Rin replied. “Put it down as if you mean it. Not like it’s a guest you’re hoping will go away.”
Around her, eight heads bent, eight hands started to move. Beong-i’s strokes were still cautious, but they wavered less than they had in spring, and her hand did not hover as long between each line.
From the open window of the schoolroom came the murmur of Dan-Mi’s voice with the younger ones; from somewhere nearer the road, a snatch of melody floated down, familiar enough to still the girls’ hands for a moment.
Seol-Ha, carrying her gayageum, had chosen a spot just beyond the mulberry to sit with two of the older girls who were finished with their reading for the day. The instrument’s low body rested across her lap; her fingers plucked gently, and the string’s vibration hummed faintly against the wood. She invited Beong-i to lay her fingertips along one edge and feel the sound instead of hearing it.
“Here,” she said softly. “This is how you listen with your hands.”
Beong-i’s eyes shone as the pattern thrummed up through bone and skin. She closed her eyes and let the rhythm write itself along her nerves. When Seol-Ha changed the pattern—short-short-long, short-short-long—Beong-i traced it back on Han-Byeol’s wrist in their little tap-code.
“Happy,” Han-Byeol whispered. “That’s our ‘happy’ rhythm.”
“Good,” Ah-Rin called from the tree, louder. “Now that you’ve proven you can feel joy, feel your sums as well.”
Groans rolled through the circle, but hands went back to slates with a little more light in them.
14Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYxGOOyUkF2
By the time the sun had shifted enough to carve a new angle of light through the mulberry branches, the day’s lessons were finished. Mats were rolled up, slates wiped, chalk dusted off skirts. The girls scattered towards their homes in clumps and streams, leaving the yard quieter and the house at last breathing out.
Later that week, when the heat lay over the town like a heavy blanket and even the mill wheel seemed to turn more slowly, Jin-Ho took refuge in the small side room off the drying loft.
He had commandeered the space over the past year, nudging it from “place where old crates sulk” to “place where hands can make small, unnecessary things”. Hye-Won had indulged him, on the strict condition that nothing he did in there interfered with vats, screens, or ledgers.
Tools hung on nails along one wall: chisels, knives with carefully wrapped handles, a sanding block worn down to a smooth curve. On the workbench lay a half-finished wooden box, long and shallow, its lid off to one side.
He sat with the box between his knees, carving careful grooves along the inside to cradle brushes and knives. The wood was plain, not precious, but he had chosen the piece with an eye for grain: it would move with the seasons, not split at the first hint of damp.
He did not hum, but his breath came in a steady rhythm that matched the slow stroke of his knife.
The lid bore a simple raised line along its length, carved in a gentle arch. It was not quite a river, not quite a beam. If pressed, he might have admitted he had been thinking of the small wooden bridge by the stream-house where the girls stood to watch paper set out to dry.
“Hmm,” a voice said from the doorway. “That is either an ambitious chopsticks case or you are planning to imprison a very thin cat.”
He glanced up.
Hye-Won leaned against the frame, arms loosely folded, a faint smile tucked into one corner of her mouth. She had flour on her sleeve where she had wiped a hand earlier after helping Eun-Jae with a glue mix; the mill’s work left its marks everywhere.
“It’s for tools,” he said. “Not cats.”
“Good,” she replied. “Cats prefer softer accommodations.”
She stepped closer, peering down at the box.
“Brushes?” she asked.
“And knives,” he said. “Her knife is forever rolling under tables. It sounds like thunder when it hits the floor.”
“Her,” Hye-Won repeated. “Which ‘her’ are we rescuing from a life of disorganised tools?”
He gave her a look he hoped was noncommittal and failed.
“Dan-Mi-yah,” he admitted. “She has three boxes, none of which is the right size, and she arranges them as if they are soldiers under inspection. It’s… annoying to watch.”
“Ah,” Hye-Won said. “Annoying.”
She ran one finger lightly along the raised arch on the lid.
“And this?” she asked. “What is this hill you have carved for her to climb?”
“It’s not a hill,” he said, flustered. “It’s just… a line. So it doesn’t look like a shipping crate.”
“Mm.” She tilted her head. “Looks like a bridge to me. But perhaps that is just my sentimental eye.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“You could have left her tools in three badly sized boxes,” she went on. “She has survived worse in Hanyang.”
“She shouldn’t have to,” he said, before he could stop himself. “Not when it’s… easy to make something that fits.”
Hye-Won’s eyes softened.
“Then make sure it fits her hands,” she said quietly. “Not just the way you imagine them.”
He nearly sliced his thumb in his effort not to choke on his own breath.
“I am carving grooves, Eomma,” he protested. “Not a poem.”
“Every groove you carve is a sentence,” she replied. “You just don’t always know who is reading it.”
He bent his head over the box again to hide the colour creeping up his neck.
She watched him work a little longer, seeing how carefully he measured each space, how often he checked width against one of the spare brushes he had borrowed, how he sanded edges that would never be seen.
“You have your mother’s precision,” she said finally. “And your father’s habit of leaving feelings in the wood instead of on your tongue.”
“I would prefer not to inherit the second part,” he muttered.
“Then you’d best practise saying some of them aloud,” she said. “Before the wood rots from carrying more than its share.”
She left him to it.
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By the next afternoon, the box was finished: sanded smooth, wiped with a thin coat of oil that brought out the grain and dulled the paleness. Inside, each compartment sat ready for a brush, a knife, an awl; a small shallow square at the end would fit an inkstone or whatever else she chose to tuck away.
He wrapped it in cloth more to protect his own nerves than the wood, then carried it down the path to the stream-house.
The school was between lessons. Through the open window he could hear Dan-Mi’s voice with the younger girls, and the sharper, more clipped tones of Ah-Rin outside under the mulberry, drilling older ones on dates from a simple history scroll.
He waited until the outside group had scattered for the day, then slipped into the schoolroom as Ah-Rin and Seol-Ha were straightening benches.
“Imo,” he said.
“Mm?” Ah-Rin looked up from adjusting a stack of readers. “If you have brought more paper today, at least pretend to look exhausted.”
He held up the wrapped bundle.
“I brought something much heavier,” he said.
“More work?” she asked. “I accept, but only if it can be graded without ink.”
“It’s for Dan-Mi-yah,” he said, ears already warming.
Ah-Rin’s eyes flicked from his face to the bundle, then to Seol-Ha, who pretended to find the far wall suddenly fascinating.
“Ah,” Ah-Rin said. “In that case, I think I have remembered an urgent need to examine the brazier in the back room. Seol-Ha-yah?”
“Yes, Imo?” Seol-Ha said.
“Come and help me stare at it until it behaves,” Ah-Rin said solemnly.
They disappeared, leaving Jin-Ho alone in the main room.
A moment later, Dan-Mi came in, collected slates under one arm, hair escaping again where she had pushed her fingers through it in exasperation at a misremembered date.
She stopped short when she saw him.
“You look like you’ve done something you’re not sure you should have,” she said.
“That is my normal state,” he replied. “But today, more so.”
He held out the bundle.
“For you,” he said, and cursed his own lack of poetry at once.
Suspicion and curiosity wrestled briefly on her face. Curiosity won. She took the bundle and unwrapped it with the neat economy of someone who had unpacked fragile deliveries for years.
The box lay in her hands, smooth and quiet.
She turned it over, thumb running along the raised arch on the lid.
“It’s beautiful,” she said simply.
“It’s meant to be useful,” he said quickly. “Beauty was… an accident.”
She ignored this.
She lifted the lid. Inside, the compartments waited.
“You measured,” she said, voice softer now. “This one is exactly the width of my big trimming knife.”
“I’ve watched it try to escape under tables for the last year,” he said. “It seemed time to confine it.”
She huffed a small laugh and began, without ceremony, to fetch her own tools from the corners of the room. Little by little, the box filled: the good cutting knife, the spare with the slightly crooked handle, the awl with the worn grip, three favourite brushes with chewed ends, a tiny brush for correcting smudges.
Each slot received its occupant as if it had been waiting all its short life for it.
“When did you have time to do this?” she asked, not looking up.
“In the evenings,” he said. “When Eomma pretends not to notice I’m taking offcuts from the lumber pile.”
“And you don’t need it yourself?” she asked.
“I’ve already cluttered enough corners of the mill,” he replied. “You’re cluttering this one with more grace.”
She stopped, hand resting on the lid.
“If you keep making things that fit my hands this well,” she said slowly, “I might start to believe you plan to stay near this door.”
There it was, no teasing, but something clear and steady beneath the lightness.
His heart stumbled once, then found a new rhythm.
“I don’t dislike the idea,” he said, and was faintly surprised to hear the words come out without breaking.
For a moment, they just looked at one another. It was not the clumsy shock of fingers touching this time, but something quieter, like stepping from one stone to the next across a stream and realising halfway that you have already crossed.
Dan-Mi closed the lid gently and rested her palms on the smooth wood.
“Thank you, Jin-Ho-yah,” she said. “My tools will stop plotting rebellion.”
He shrugged.
“They were frightening me more than you,” he said. “It was self-defence.”
“Self-defence, is it?” a voice said from the back room.
Ah-Rin reappeared with a brazier that had clearly done nothing noteworthy while she was gone. Seol-Ha followed, eyes bright.
“I see my school is full of brave, practical altruists,” Ah-Rin went on. “Protecting helpless knives, freeing brushes from bad boxes…”
Dan-Mi shot her a look that would have withered a less stubborn woman. It only made Ah-Rin’s smile widen.
“Your Halmeoni will be pleased,” Ah-Rin said. “She worries you work with your tools in chaos and your heart in neat lines. This seems a step towards balance.”
Dan-Mi muttered something impolite about hearts and lines and busied herself placing the box in the corner near the low table where she usually sat.
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Later that month, when news spread that the summer festival would be held a little earlier than usual—fishermen had returned with good catches, and the town, for once, wanted to celebrate before storms could think of interrupting—the threads laid down in winter and spring tugged together.
The announcement came by way of Madam Hong’s inn: a notice inked in careful script, tacked to the wall where everyone buying rice wine could pretend not to read it and then announce it as if they had heard it personally from the magistrate.
“Lanterns at the harbour,” she read aloud that afternoon, squinting slightly. “Games. Music. And no mention of free drinks, which is unkind.”
“Music?” Seol-Ha said, looking up from a ledger she was helping to copy.
“Of course, music,” Madam Hong said. “No festival is complete without someone banging a drum badly and someone else playing something too beautifully for us to deserve.”
Her eyes slid meaningfully towards Seol-Ha.
“I’m only free if the school releases me from my duties,” Seol-Ha said modestly.
“The school will survive one evening without you,” Ah-Rin replied. “We’ll ask the letters to behave until you return.”
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That night, as the house by the stream settled into its usual evening rhythms, In-Su came by with a basket of bread that did not strictly need delivering at that hour.
“Appa,” Han-Byeol said, hands on hips when she opened the door. “The bread did not get lighter since morning. Why are you bringing it now?”
“Because some people forget to eat when they’re closing ledgers,” he said, nodding towards the lamplight where Ah-Rin and Eun-Sook were hunched over a page.
“And,” Han-Byeol said, eyes narrowing, “because you wanted an excuse to ask her about the festival.”
He gave up.
“Fine,” he said. “Yes.”
Han-Byeol grinned in shameless triumph and went to announce his arrival.
Later, when Eun-Sook had retreated to her room with a muttered complaint about her knees and her daughter’s insistence on counting every coin twice, and Han-Byeol had worn herself out inventing festival games in advance, Ah-Rin and In-Su found themselves on the porch steps, the basket between them.
“The town is planning to light the harbour on fire,” he said, by way of opening. “With lanterns, they say, not with carelessness.”
“Lanterns are kinder than some sailors I’ve met,” she said. “Will you be selling bread?”
“Eomma says yes,” he replied. “I say yes, if Han-Byeol doesn’t eat the stock on the way.”
Ah-Rin smiled, then fell quiet. The stream’s faint rush and the distant clink of someone washing pots filled the space.
“I was thinking,” In-Su said, and then stopped, as if the act itself surprised him.
“That’s encouraging,” she said gently. “Many people start with ‘I wasn’t thinking’ and it never ends well.”
He huffed a small laugh.
“I was thinking,” he tried again, “we might all go. Together.”
“All?” she asked.
“You,” he said, ticking off on his fingers, “me, Han-Byeol … and perhaps Dan-Mi, if she can be persuaded to leave her ink for one evening. It would be… less pointed, if there are four of us. Less for tongues to play with.”
“Less pointed,” she repeated. “And yet more people to witness you trying to knock over painted bottles with beanbags.”
“I have improved since we were eighteen,” he protested.
“We shall see,” she said.
She hesitated, then added, “And Jin-Ho, of course. If Dan-Mi goes, she will need someone to carry whatever impractical thing she wins and regrets.”
“So,” he said, “a chaperoned excursion. Two sensible adults and two foolish ones.”
“Which of us are which?” she asked.
“We will let the games decide,” he answered.
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When the evening of the festival came, Haesong seemed to shrug on a different face. Banners fluttered from windows, lanterns bobbed along the road towards the harbour, and the smell of grilling fish and sweet batter joined the constant perfume of brine.
The harbour’s edge transformed into a narrow street of stalls. One offered skewers of squid; another rice cakes dusted with bean powder; another little paper fans painted with clumsy cranes. At the far end, a makeshift stage held a drum and a couple of string instruments, awaiting players.
Ah-Rin arrived with Dan-Mi and Han-Byeol in tow, all three wrapped in lighter outer clothes than winter required but still with shawls against the breeze from the water. Behind them, Jin-Ho carried a basket that suspiciously resembled a bakery’s.
“You didn’t have to bring bread,” Ah-Rin said.
“It’s my excuse for walking with you,” he replied. “If anyone questions us, I’m ‘helping with stock’.”
“In that case,” she said, “you had better not eat your evidence.”
Han-Byeol bounced on her toes when she saw In-Su and Mi-Young already at their stall, trays laid out, steam rising from fresh buns.
“Halmeoni!” she called, weaving through the crowd.
Mi-Young snagged her by the shoulders and kissed the top of her head.
“You’re late,” she said. “The festival would have been cancelled if you hadn’t arrived to supervise.”
Mi-Young’s eyes flicked over Han-Byeol’s shoulder to where Ah-Rin and Dan-Mi were approaching with Jin-Ho, and she carefully did not comment.
Further along the row of stalls, Hye-Won and Eun-Jae stood side by side, a skewer of something crisped between them. Eun-Jae was watching the carpenters at a nearby game stall trying to keep their stacked blocks from collapsing; Hye-Won was watching everyone else.
“Look,” she murmured, nudging him with her elbow.
He followed her gaze: In-Su, instinctively stepping to the outer side when Ah-Rin came up beside him, so she was shielded from the press of the crowd. The way he angled his body without thinking to make a small pocket of space around her. The way she relaxed a degree when she realised, he had done it.
“That is a man who has decided something,” Eun-Jae said.
“At long last,” Hye-Won replied. “I was beginning to think I would have to draft him a proposal myself and nail it to his bakery door.”
“And the other two?” he asked, jerking his chin towards Dan-Mi and Jin-Ho.
Jin-Ho had just been badgered into trying his hand at the ring-toss. He threw too carefully; the first three missed. On the fourth, he let go with less thought and more annoyance. The ring sailed and caught neatly over a painted wooden duck.
The stall keeper clapped his hands.
“Prize!” he announced. The prize turned out to be a tiny, useless painted top.
“It does nothing to improve paper quality,” Dan-Mi observed.
“It spun once,” Jin-Ho said defensively, giving it a flick. The top wobbled bravely for half a heartbeat and fell over.
“Twice,” she amended. “First when they made it, and now.”
He held it out to her.
“It failed with enthusiasm,” he said. “I thought you might appreciate that.”
Her lips quirked.
“I’ll put it in my tool box,” she said. “As a warning.”
“Those two have decided something as well,” Hye-Won said.
“They just haven’t told themselves yet,” Eun-Jae replied.
As the sun sank and lanterns began to glow properly against the deepening blue, the festival settled into its rhythm. Children ran in ragged packs between stalls, older folk clustered in small knots to exchange news, fishermen compared catches with exaggerated hands.
At one point, In-Su handed the stall over to an apprentice and took Ah-Rin walking along the harbour’s edge.
“It isn’t Hanyang,” he said, nodding at the lights reflected in the water. “But for a small place, it tries.”
“It’s better,” she said. “Hanyang never smelled this honestly of fish.”
“That’s something no one there would argue with,” he replied.
A clatter drew their attention; at a nearby game stall, someone had toppled a small tower of stacked pottery with a well-aimed stone. The cheer that followed was far louder than the victory warranted.
“Go on,” Ah-Rin said, elbowing him lightly. “Prove you’ve improved since you smashed Ajumma’s plates.”
“That was an accident,” he said.
“That was three accidents in a row,” she corrected.
He took up a stone from the stall keeper’s basket and weighed it in his palm. The bottles on the far plank were painted with crude faces; the central one wore an expression of smug superiority.
He aimed. The first throw went wide.
“So much for improvement,” she said.
“I was… assessing wind,” he muttered.
The second clipped the edge of the stack and made it wobble.
The third knocked the smug bottle cleanly off its plank. The others followed in a satisfying cascade.
The stall keeper applauded. Han-Byeol, who had appeared as if summoned by the sound of smashing, cheered loudest.
“You see?” In-Su said, straightening as if he had never doubted himself. “I’m practically a marksman.”
“Congratulations,” Ah-Rin said. “Haesong is safe from painted bottles.”
The prize here was a small paper lantern in the shape of a fish. He held it out to her without ceremony.
“For the school,” he said. “So, they remember festivals even when they’re stuck inside.”
She took it, fingers brushing his.
“I’ll hang it where Beong-i can feel it when the breeze moves it,” she said.
A drumbeat from the makeshift stage called the town’s attention more tightly. Someone began to play a stringed instrument—clumsy at first, then more confident. Seol-Ha, seated near the front with her gayageum at her side, listened with a small smile that was half encouragement, half calculation.
“When do you play?” Jin-Ho asked her quietly.
“After they’ve all tired themselves cheering for their neighbours,” she said. “Music goes in more deeply when people have already loosened their pride.”
Later, when Seol-Ha did take the stage, the harbour fell into a hush that felt almost reverent. Her melody was simple at first, then spread, threads weaving in and out like the tide. Even at the edge of the crowd, under a lantern hung from a rigging line, Beong-i stood very still, one hand on the wooden railing, feeling the faint tremor travel up.
“Happy,” Han-Byeol whispered, tapping the rhythm on her wrist.
“Happy,” Beong-i mouthed, no sound, but the word clear.
Behind them, Dan-Mi’s fingers found the carved ridge on her tool box later that night and rested there. Jin-Ho, back at the mill, would run his thumb along a small patch of wood where a knot had once been and was now sanded smooth. In different rooms, with different work still ahead of them, they all carried the same quiet, fizzy realisation:
The paths they walked had begun, without announcement, to bend towards one another.
And above it all, Haesong’s lantern light fluttered on the water like a hundred small, tentative promises not yet put into words.
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