The Wedding That Shouldn't Be
A familiar girl sat perched on the windowsill, her golden hair braided with ribbons and her rainbow-striped jacket slightly askew, her face frozen as if her soul had left her body.
"You're back."
At my greeting, the wings folded behind Anshi's back—covered in feathers of five colors—fluttered in apparent panic.
"A human... no, forgive me—is it truly Your Highness the Princess?"
"You'd know at a glance, wouldn't you?"
"But Your Highness, just now—"
"Just now what? Was there some kind of problem?"
When I brazenly deflected and asked back, Anshi stared at me blankly for a moment, and then her expression suddenly shifted as if something had clicked into place.
"Did you ask whether there was a problem? Of course there is a problem! A runaway! Your Highness the Princess, a runaway! Th-this Anshi nearly fainted from the shock of it!"
Good. That went over smoothly.
Considering I'd run away from home, a little shamelessness was nothing at all. Right?
Anshi came rushing over, on the verge of tears, and seized hold of me, inspecting me from head to toe.
"Your Highness, what in the world has become of you? A human! To place Your Highness's noble soul in such a worthless mortal shell—it is beyond outrageous! And what is this sack-like garment you're wearing besides?"
"Did you hear that I ran away?"
"It is only a matter of time! If Your Highness does not return at once, this Anshi, having failed to prevent Your Highness's escape, will have her head—kyak—chopped off..."
"So nobody's found out. Nobody but you knows yet, right?"
When I cut off her wailing and pressed the question, Anshi's face crumpled and her mouth snapped shut.
A phoenix is a terrible liar—and so her silence was as good as a yes.
They won't notice for a while yet.
I was prone to collapsing without warning and sleeping for ages, so as long as Sohwa kept her mouth shut, everyone would assume I was simply asleep again. As for the letters I'd left behind, Anshi would have found them first and quietly dealt with them.
"Anshi, did you take care of everything I asked in the letters?"
Her lips pushed out a good three spans, and she answered grudgingly.
"Yeees, Your Highness."
"Did you show Ru-hwa—no, Sohwa—the way?"
"I entrusted her to the Head Immortal Fairy."
"And did you bring it?"
"...It is here, Your Highness."
Letting out a deep sigh, Anshi drew something from the folds of her garment and held it out to me.
The Eight-Bead Bell—a divine artifact with eight branches spreading out from its stem, each tipped with a bronze chime.
It had been a gift for my two-hundredth birthday, and I'd ordered Anshi to bring it down with her when we descended to the mortal realm.
I had no intention of suffering through the lower realm with nothing but the skin on my back.
This one thing would solve nearly every problem I had.
I tapped the third of the eight chimes with my fingertip. A clear, silvery ring sang out, and smoke began to rise from the groove in the bell. The curling smoke soon wove itself into an ornate door about the size of a washbasin.
It was a door connected to my treasure vault in Sangra Palace.
Each of the Eight-Bead Bell's eight chimes was a passage linked to a different place. The bell had originally been made as a pair—I kept one, and the other I had broken apart, placing each chime at the location it would connect to.
My parents had it made for me because walking long distances wore me out so badly.
I wedged my hand into the tiny door, groaned and strained for a while, and gave up almost immediately.
"Anshi."
"Yes?"
"Pull this out for me. It's heavy."
"Honestly, this is the sort of thing you should have ordered me to do from the very beginning."
Anshi scampered over and fetched from the vault door the very thing I'd been after: a red hwarot wedding robe, piled with exquisite embroidery and adorned with crystal and pearl.
It had been woven from the feathers of the Vermilion Bird, and of all the garments in my treasure vault, it was the one that most resembled a wedding dress.
"Why would Your Highness want the Vermilion Bird robe?"
Anshi asked as she offered it to me. I spread my arms wide.
"Dress me."
"...? As you command."
Anshi tilted her head, puzzled, but dutifully changed my clothes for me.
"Braid my hair too. And fetch a long daenggi ribbon and a flower coronet from the vault while you're at it."
"Yeees, Your Highness."
Anshi braided my hair with practiced ease, draped the ribbon down my back, and set the coronet upon my head. Surveying the finished result, she hopped up and down and clapped.
"Waah! Worn like that, you look just like a little bride, Your Highness!"
"Do I?"
"You do! If it were truly Your Highness's own body, you would be lovelier still—but I suppose because Your Highness has entered into it, you are beautiful even in a human's form!"
"Great. Let's go."
I strode forward proudly, though the hem of the robe was unnecessarily voluminous and heavy.
That's why a gifted robe like this only ever sat in the vault—I could never actually wear it. Still, this body is healthy, huh... I can actually move while wearing it.
A few steps in, I stopped and looked up at Anshi for a long moment. Her face had gone slack and dopey.
"...Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Because Your Highness toddling along is just—so very, very cute..."
Toddling. Toddling, she said. Two hundred and nine years old, and toddling.
It was a devastating description—but remembering the way Ru-hwa had walked through my garden, I had to concede the point.
Ru-hwa really is a small child now, after all. She was tiny as a Jade Rabbit rice cake, and even her walk was cute.
I let out a small sigh and stretched both hands up toward Anshi.
"Carry me."
"Are you tired, Your Highness?"
"Yeah. The robe's heavy."
Anshi scooped me up briskly and asked, "And where might Your Highness be headed?"
"The Choryeocheong. The wedding hall."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I'm getting married. As of right now."
"Y-your pardon?! Married? A marriage between whom and whom, may I ask?!"
"Between me and the human Crown Prince."
Anshi's face went pale, as though she were about to faint dead away.
"Your Highness the Princess means to—to hold a wedding—with a human? H-humans wed at such a tender age?!"
"I'm human now too. And the Crown Prince is young as well. Eleven, wasn't it?"
"A wedding! As if running away were not enough, now an out-of-the-blue wedding! The Jade Emperor will be furious, Your Highness! King Yama will tear that Crown Prince or whoever he is limb from limb! And then this Anshi too, for failing to stop Your Highness, will—kyak—die...!"
I reached out and patted the shoulder of my terrified phoenix.
"Don't worry. I'm not actually planning to get married."
It's all part of the plan.
The Choryeocheong had been set up directly in front of the quarters where I was staying.
I knew little of mortal wedding customs, but I'd heard that the rites and procedures of a human wedding did not differ greatly from those of the immortals.
Naturally—the procedure had been fixed by Cheongsil and Hongsil.
Which meant the ceremony being held today had almost certainly skipped the vast majority of its steps. Everything else hacked away, straight to the Dongnoyeon—the shared-cup banquet in which bride and groom bow in turn and exchange wine.
The ceremonial table barely managed to look the part, and the wedding hall itself was so shabby it was hard to believe a royal marriage was taking place at all.
The bleak autumn weather and the dead leaves skittering across the ground only made the scene more forlorn.
And yet the guests were numerous. There was no King and no Queen—only a thronging crowd of palace maids and people in official court dress.
They're not guests so much as witnesses—proof that the Crown Prince married the Imperial Princess.
At the head table, the seat of honor where the King and Queen should have sat, a silver-haired woman sat alone.
She gripped the skirt of her dress hard enough to crumple it, her face buried low as if she might faint at any moment.
Ru-hwa's mother.
Seol Deunghwa. A mother who had followed all this way to watch over "Se Ru-hwa" herself—the daughter trailing along like baggage with the envoy delegation, never uttering a single word of protest—an Imperial Concubine of Pyeong.
On the road to Un Country, Seol Deunghwa had attempted escape with Ru-hwa again and again. Every attempt had failed.
Which is why, the moment they arrived at the royal palace, she was locked away in quarters far removed from Ru-hwa.
The Emperor, while intending to kill Se Ru-hwa, had ordered that Seol Deunghwa be brought back to Pyeong the instant the wedding ended. Less love than a raw hunger for a beauty to topple nations.
Ru-hwa's mother... really is beautiful, though.
Even in that half-soulless wreck of a state, her beauty couldn't be hidden. If even I—long accustomed to fairies—caught my breath at the sight of her, then to mortal eyes she must have seemed all the more radiant.
Off to one side, the Pyeong envoys kept glancing furtively at Seol Deunghwa, as if standing guard over her.
...Please tell my mother... I'm sorry...
Sohwa's parting words floated up in my memory.
There are too many eyes on us right now. I'll have to meet her alone once the ceremony is over.
The maids assigned to me seemed to have all been hauled off for punishment, because not a single one was waiting for me at the Choryeocheong.
However you slice it, this was sloppy. If Sohwa had been sitting here in my place, I'd have been beside myself.
Not that it mattered to me.
"Anshi."
"Yes, Your Highness."
"From this point on, you're a handmaid who followed me here from the Pyeong Empire. This wedding robe is something you prepared and brought with you. Got it?"
"Y-Your Highness? Can you really patch something like that together so... loosely?"
"Sure. Everyone believes I'm going to die tonight anyway, so nobody's going to nitpick the details."
"Yeees?"
"What are you doing? Support my arm."
"Y-yes, of course, Your Highness!"
Wearing a look of utter bewilderment, Anshi took my arm and led me into the Choryeocheong.
Upon confirming the bride's arrival, the court musicians struck up their music.
I glanced toward them without much thought—and froze, just slightly.
Did I see that wrong?
I wanted to look closer, but circumstances didn't allow it. The moment I'd entered, every eye in the hall had converged on me.
"Is that wedding robe brought from the land of Pyeong? Magnificent..."
"The doomed child, they called her...?"
"There's a noble air about her. However it came to be, a princess is still a princess..."
"Hair like a field of snow. The very same color as her mother's..."
"Well, this is unexpected..."
"A robe that expensive, and yet Pyeong deigned to treat her properly after all..."
Awave of murmuring spread through the hall, laced with equal parts admiration and bewilderment. Understandable—they'd expected some shabby little child to shuffle out in a wedding robe that didn't fit her, and instead here she came in full, luxurious regalia.
The silver hair unique to the Seol clan must have seemed strange and wondrous to them too.
And to anyone tied to the ones who had her beaten to death, a girl who should be dead standing there hale and whole—that would be the greatest shock of all.
As I took my seat before the ceremonial table, I reached out to Anshi through heart-speech, the silent language of the mind.
[Anshi.]
[Yes, Your Highness.]
[I think one of the musicians is a fox. Go check.]
[Your Highness?! You mean a fox yokai is wearing a human skin among them?!]
[Don't make a show of it. Just take a look.]
Seizing on the moment when every eye was fixed on me, Anshi stole a glance toward the musicians and sent back a frantic pulse of thought.
[Y-Your Highness, there truly is a fox yokai among the musicians! And not just any fox—it is a Maegu!]
A Maegu?
That's no small fry, that.
A fox that lives a thousand years and cultivates the Tao becomes a Cheonho, a celestial fox, and ascends to heaven. But a fox that forgoes cultivation and simply lives on as a yokai becomes a Maegu—a thousand-year-old fox monster.
What was a Maegu doing hiding among humans? Sizing up the place, waiting for a chance to devour someone?
Hold on. If that fox has been working as a palace musician here for a while... she might actually be useful.
[Anshi, catch that thing later and bring it to me. Quietly.]
[Without the humans noticing, Your Highness?]
[Yes. Can you manage it?]
[Most assuredly.]
[Don't overdo it. A Maegu is fairly dangerous.]
[Worry not, Your Highness. This Anshi is Your Highness's phoenix, is she not? I shall snap its neck—or no, its legs clean off, and deliver it into Your Highness's hands!]
While our heart-speech passed back and forth, the boy groom in his blue wedding robe approached from the opposite side of the hall.
The face-covering fan he held was enormous and thick. He even wore gloves—not an inch of bare skin showed anywhere.
So that's the Crown Prince.