Chapter 38: Enough

She was smaller than I remembered.

That’s a weird thing to think about someone you only knew for three months. But it’s true. In the Baek estate, in her silk and her jade and her rooms full of servants, Lady Min always seemed bigger. Now she was standing by a muddy well in a plain gray cloak, with a cloth bundle in her hands, and she looked like she could fit in my pocket.

I walked across the courtyard.

I didn’t know what to do with my hands. Bow? Hug? The old Mu-jin was a third son. Third sons bow.

I stopped in front of her and started to bow.

She grabbed my face with both hands before I got halfway down.

Her palms were cold. She held my face and looked at it. Turned it a little to the left. To the right. Looked at the bruise on my cheekbone. The one on my jaw. The bandages poking out of my collar.

Her eyes filled up.

"You’re thin," she said.

"I eat."

"You’re thin. And you’re hurt." Her thumb touched the bruise. "They say you jumped off a roof."

"Onto another roof."

"That’s still jumping off a roof, Mu-jin."

She pulled me down and hugged me.

And I just... stood there. With my arms hanging. In the middle of the courtyard with Captain Jin’s soldier staring and a laundry woman pretending not to stare and the whole dock district waking up around us.

In my last life, my mother died when I was fourteen. I don’t remember the last time she hugged me. I don’t remember a lot of things about her.

I put my arms around Lady Min.

She was so small.

She wouldn’t come up to my room. "A lady doesn’t go to a young man’s room in a place like this." So we sat on the bench by the well, and she untied her bundle.

Rice cakes. The kind with red bean inside. The kind the old Mu-jin used to sneak from the kitchen.

And a clean robe. Dark blue. With the Baek crest stitched in silver on the collar.

"Your father doesn’t know I’m here," she said.

"I figured."

"He knows about the duel. The whole city knows." She folded her hands in her lap. "He’s forbidden anyone in the house to speak of it. He sits in his study all night. He doesn’t sleep."

I didn’t say anything.

"Gu Seung-hwan came to see him," she said. "Three days ago. They sat in the main hall for an hour. I don’t know what they said. But after, your father went out to the training yard and broke two practice swords against the post." She looked at me. "He hasn’t touched a sword in ten years, Mu-jin."

Huh.

"He won’t help you," she said quietly. "He can’t. If the Baek Clan takes your side, it’s a feud. The Gu Clan is bigger. Richer. Your brothers would be the ones to pay for it." She swallowed. "But he’s not sleeping. I want you to know that. He’s not sleeping."

I looked down at the rice cakes.

The man who threw me out without raising his voice. Breaking swords in the dark.

"...Tell him I’m eating," I said.

She laughed. It was wet.

Then she was quiet for a long time. Watching me. The way only a mother watches.

"You’re different," she said.

My heart stopped.

"Since the fever," she said. "Everyone says so. The servants. Your brothers. You used to be so quiet. You trained all day and spoke to nobody. You never laughed." She tilted her head. "After the fever you woke up and you laughed at a chicken. A chicken, Mu-jin. In the courtyard. For a quarter hour. I’d never heard you laugh in your life."

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t breathe.

She knew. Somewhere. Somehow. A mother knows when her son comes back from a fever different.

She reached out and fixed my collar. The way she used to. Tugged it straight.

"I don’t know what happened to you in that fever," said Lady Min softly. "I don’t want to know." She smoothed the collar flat. "But I like this son. This son laughs."

She stood up. Wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

"Wear the blue robe to the duel," she said. "With the crest. Let them all see whose son you are."

And she walked out through the gate without looking back. The soldier at the desk wrote down the time. Captain Jin, standing on the walkway above, watched her go with her arms folded and a face I couldn’t read.

I sat on the bench with a bag of rice cakes in my lap for a long, long time.

I didn’t cry.

Okay. A little.

In my last life, nobody ever told me they liked me the way I was.

At the night bell, somebody knocked on my door.

Three knocks. Sharp. Like a teacher.

I knew that knock.

I opened the door — I had a new one now, a cheap one Seo-rin had charged to my account — and Madam Gwak Ji-yeon was standing on the walkway in her navy robe buttoned all the way to the throat. Spectacles on. Bun perfect. A small, flat package wrapped in brown paper clutched against her chest with both arms.

She looked like she was about to give a lecture on moral decline.

She also looked like she hadn’t slept.

"Fifth day," she said.

"It’s been like nine days."

"I am aware of how many days it’s been." She pushed past me into my room. Looked up at the hole in my ceiling, now covered with a waxed cloth. Looked at the new bed. Seo-rin had charged that to my account too. "I was busy. Sponsorship papers. Your duel registration. The bookmakers." She turned around. "And... other preparations."

"What preparations?"

She went red.

Not pink. Red. All the way from her collar up to her hairline.

She held out the brown paper package.

I took it. Unwrapped it.

A book. Small. Thin. Old. Hand-painted cover. A man and a woman on the front, in a garden, doing something that involved a lot of very flexible legs and one very confused crane in the background.

The Hundred Springtime Postures of the Jade Chamber.

I looked at the book.

I looked at Madam Gwak.

She was staring very hard at the waxed cloth on my ceiling.

"...Where did you get this?"

"My late husband’s library." Her voice was perfectly flat. "Behind the agricultural treatises. I’ve known it was there for eight years. I’d never opened it."

"And now you have."

"I have read it," said Madam Gwak, "four times."

I almost dropped it.

"With notes," she added.

I opened it. There were notes. In the margins. In tiny, precise, perfect handwriting, the same handwriting that had signed my sponsorship papers. Unclear.Is this physically possible?Requires a sturdier bed.No.Possibly.Ask Hwang (NO).

I looked up at her.

"Ji-yeon," I said slowly. "Why?"

She took her spectacles off. Folded them. Put them in her sleeve. And when she looked at me without them, all the stiffness was gone, and she just looked tired and nervous and forty.

"Because you have six of us," she said quietly. "Seven, with the captain looking at you like that. The physician. The swordswoman. The bookkeeper. Cha Mi-ran. Hwang Yu-seon, who was trained by a whole sect. Seol Hwa-ryeon, who has apparently had several lovers." She swallowed. "And me. A widow who sells silk and had exactly one husband who never took his socks off."

"Ji-yeon—"

"I just want to be enough," she said. "Next to them. I don’t want to be the one you’re kind to because you feel sorry for her." She pointed at the book. "So I studied. I’m very good at studying. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at."

I closed the book.

Set it on the stool.

Then I walked over and put my hands on her face. The same way my mother had held mine that morning.

"You found my margin notes on the scroll," I said. "You put my name back. You got my sponsorship through. You sent a thousand silver with one word on the envelope." I held her face. "You’re not the one I feel sorry for, Ji-yeon. You’re the one who keeps saving my life."

Her eyes went wet.

"That’s a terrible argument," she whispered. "That’s not about the bedroom at all."

"It’s the best argument I’ve got."

She laughed. Shaky. Then she grabbed the front of my robe and kissed me so hard I stumbled back into the new bed.

[Target: Gwak Ji-yeon.]

[Harmony: dormancy ended.]

[Harmony reawakened.]

Cool ink. Sharp. Neat. Sliding back into place in my belly like it had never left.

The second one back.

She wanted to try page forty-one.

I’m not going to describe page forty-one.

I’ll just say that the crane in the background looked confused for a reason, and the new bed Seo-rin charged to my account was not as sturdy as advertised, and at one point Ji-yeon said "Wait, wait, I think the diagram was upside down," and I laughed so hard I fell off.

She threw the book at me.

Then she climbed off the broken bed onto the floor where I was lying, and put both hands flat on my chest, and looked down at me with her hair falling out of its bun and her face burning.

"Forget the book," she said.

"You read it four times."

"Forget it." She leaned down. "Just... you. Like the palanquin. Like the first time on that stool. Just do what you did then."

So I did.

And it turned out that was the only page she needed.

She was so tight I thought she’d break. Eight years of nobody. She gripped my shoulders and shook, and said my name like a scolding and a prayer at the same time, and at some point she was crying and laughing and telling me she was going to throw that stupid book in the river, and I was telling her she should frame it, and she bit my shoulder to shut me up.

She was enough.

She’d always been enough.

She just needed somebody to say it.

Afterward, she lay on the floor next to the broken bed with her head on my arm and her spectacles back on, crooked, reading her own margin notes by candlelight and making little corrections with a stick of charcoal.

"Page forty-one," she muttered. "Not physically possible. Confirmed."

"You’re grading the book?"

"Someone should."

I laughed. She smiled without looking up.

Then somebody knocked on my new, cheap door.

Not three sharp knocks. Not a clack. Not the laundry women’s tap.

Fast. Desperate. Fist against wood.

"Mu-jin? Mu-jin, are you in there?"

Ji-yeon went completely white.

She knew that voice.

So did I.

"Mu-jin, please. I need to talk to you." The voice cracked. "I went home and Mother wasn’t there. And her copy of the Hundred Springtime Postures is gone from Father’s library. I put a bookmark in it three years ago to see if anybody ever touched it."

A long pause.

"The soldier at the gate says she signed in at the night bell," said Nam Gi-chul through the door. "To see you."