The imperial court has a season for everything.
Spring is for ceremonies. Summer is for trade negotiations. Autumn is for military reviews and the long complicated dinners that follow them. Winter is for consolidation, which is a polite word for every powerful family in Haewon deciding what they want and who they're willing to hurt to get it.
I turn sixteen in winter.
My father marks the occasion with a small family dinner and a gift of a new writing set, lacquered wood and quality ink stones. Hana gives me a length of silk she selected herself, deep green, which is either an aesthetic choice or a message about how she sees me. Possibly both. I thank her and she nods and we have gotten, in the year since she found me in the garden, to a kind of understanding that requires very few words.
The morning after my birthday, a woman from the inner palace arrives at our gates.
She is not announced. She arrives in an unmarked sedan chair with two guards who stand with the specific stillness that means imperial household training, not hired security, and she asks to speak with the Yeon family's younger daughter on a matter of cultural instruction. She presents credentials from the Bureau of Court Rites, which is the office responsible for training noble daughters before their formal introduction to imperial society.
My father receives her in the formal hall. I sit beside him and watch her without appearing to.
Lady Cho Myung-hee. Sixty years old, maybe. The kind of stillness that comes from decades of reading rooms. She has the Bureau's seal and a letter from the Minister of Rites and an expression that communicates exactly nothing about what she actually wants.
"It has come to the Bureau's attention," she says, "that the Yeon family's younger daughter has not yet completed her formal court preparation. Given the family's recent positioning, this is an oversight we would like to correct."
Recent positioning. The ministerial connection. The Emperor's courtesy note.
My father is pleased and slightly cautious in equal measure. He looks like a man who has been handed something he wanted and is trying to determine where the hook is.
I look at Lady Cho and I think: the Bureau of Court Rites does not send senior officials to minor noble households for administrative oversights. They send a letter. Then a follow-up letter. Then, if ignored, a third letter with slightly more formal language.
They do not send Lady Cho Myung-hee in an unmarked chair.
"I would be honored," I say. My father looks at me. I look at Lady Cho. "When would the Bureau like to begin?"
She names a date three days out. We agree. She leaves.
My father turns to me after the gates close. "Well."
"Yes," I say.
"Do you know who she is?"
"Lady Cho. Formerly the senior instructor for the imperial consorts. She's been retired from that position for eight years."
He stares at me.
"Master Hwang's reading list included court histories," I say. "She's mentioned in the 28th year records."
This is true, though incomplete. The rest is that I have spent five years cataloguing every significant person connected to the inner palace, and Lady Cho Myung-hee is not a woman who comes out of retirement for bureaucratic housekeeping. She came here because someone asked her to. The question is who.
I go to my room and I sit at my writing desk and I look at the wall.
The Emperor's secretary noticed us. Then someone noticed the secretary's notice. And now Lady Cho is coming to instruct me in court preparation, which could mean any number of things and probably means the most uncomfortable of them.
I open my notebook to a fresh page and I write: Someone in the inner palace wants a closer look.
Below it: Do not give them anything they didn't already know.
Below that: Find out who sent her before she gets here.
The system, which has been quiet all morning, offers one line.
VISIBILITY HAS BEGUN. THE SYSTEM NOTES THAT YOU ASKED FOR THIS.
"I know," I say. "I just didn't expect it to knock on the front door."
Hana comes to my room that night without being invited. This is new. She sits in the chair by the window with her legs tucked sideways and her composure set aside the way it only is when she's decided something.
"Lady Cho Myung-hee," she says.
"Yes."
"She trained the previous Emperor's first consort."
I look up from the notebook. "You knew who she was."
"I've been keeping records since I was seven." She says it without inflection. "The previous Emperor's first consort died three years into her role. The official record says fever."
We look at each other.
"That's two fevers," I say.
"Three," Hana says. "There's a court lady from that period whose name comes up in a records gap. Also fever."
I close the notebook. Outside the window, snow is falling on the compound's inner courtyard, soft and indifferent. I think about my mother's locked room and the ward placed on it from outside. I think about a man from the previous Emperor's household who came to visit before she got sick.
Hana is watching me work through it. She has gotten good at this, reading the pace of my silences.
"You think Lady Cho is dangerous," she says.
"I think she's been sent by someone who knows more about our family than they should," I say. "Which makes her worth being very careful with. Not afraid of. Careful."
Hana nods. Then, unexpectedly, she says: "I could come to some of the sessions."
I look at her.
"I'm nineteen. I'm past the age for this kind of instruction. But I could come as a family observer." She meets my eyes and doesn't look away. "You shouldn't be alone with her."
This is the most direct thing my sister has ever offered me. Not information at a distance, held out like something she might need to take back. A presence. A witness.
I think about what it cost her to say it.
"Thank you," I say.
She unfolds herself from the chair. At the door she pauses. "The silk I gave you is the right shade for the first court presentation season. Whatever they're preparing you for, wear it for that."
She leaves.
I sit with the particular weight of having a sister who has been paying attention much longer than I realized, who trusts me enough to stand in the room, who has been building her own ledger in parallel with mine and never said so.
The snow keeps falling.
THREE YEARS REMAINING.