Unknown
"I suppose I'll have to give up on all the martial arts. I'd even wanted to try hand-to-hand combat and spear fighting, too……"
Unlike me, the little Crown Prince was handling the sword so brilliantly that Gi Ho-cheol could hardly close his mouth.
His form was gorgeous when he drew the bow, and now he wields a sword he only learned today like he was born with it. Is it just that his stance is fundamentally sound?
I understood perfectly why Sa Young-joon was staring up at the Crown Prince in a daze. When the gap is wide enough, what rises isn't jealousy but admiration — just as only admiration welled up in me right now.
And so my first swordsmanship lesson became my last.
The breathing exercises, though, we agreed to keep doing together for the sake of my health.
About a month passed after that.
For the first time since coming down to the mortal realm, I sank into melancholy.
Is it possible that…… I'm actually not good at anything?
Astonishingly, in nearly every field I had attempted over the past month, I possessed not so much as a grain of talent. Riding, court polo, needlework, calligraphy, seesaw-leaping, painting, pitch-pot, weaving, singing, dancing, playing the geomungo zither — all of it.
The only things I was even passably decent at were baduk and arithmetic — sanhak, the art of calculation. Just those two, and only enough that the guest tutors, planted firmly in Jaebang, were practically begging to teach me more.
So what good did that do?
They're both things you do sitting perfectly still! I could have done them back in Sangra Palace……
The truth was, I was a hopelessly hopeless klutz — anything that required moving my body was beyond me. Riding, dancing, seesaw-leaping, they were all doomed to be catastrophic.
I even fell off the horse. And the horse wasn't even walking — it was standing perfectly still.
If Ansi hadn't caught me, I could have been badly hurt. At the news, the Crown Prince — and even the King and Queen — came rushing in aghast and forbade me from riding altogether. The King went so far as to grant me a personal team of palanquin bearers and a luxurious palanquin. The message was unmistakable: never touch a horse again.
As if being a klutz weren't mortifying enough, how does one have no dexterity either?
With such clumsy hands, my needlework, calligraphy, weaving, and painting were all a hopeless mess.
I can't even draw a straight line holding a brush, so there's really nothing more to say.
Worse, if my clumsiness was rooted in a poor sense of rhythm, then I was tone-deaf into the bargain, which made every musical pursuit — singing, the geomungo, all of it — equally dismal.
At this point, maybe I was better off when I only dreamed of these things instead of actually trying them……
As I grew more and more despondent, the Crown Prince did his best to console me.
"I hear the tutor who instructed you in sanhak has submitted a petition, begging on his knees to teach you further — he declares Your Highness the Crown Princess a prodigy of arithmetic."
He came running up the moment I arrived at the training ground for our breathing practice, and this was the first thing out of his mouth.
I must really be wearing a dreadful look on my face.
I swallowed the sigh that threatened to escape and answered listlessly.
"Never mind the sanhak."
"But why? You're so remarkably good at it."
"It's hardly a talent that makes one look healthy, is it?"
"……Pardon?"
The little Crown Prince blinked at me in bewilderment.
Ah. I answered far too honestly without thinking. How was I supposed to smooth that over?
"……Th-that is, um, it just seems unwise for one's health to sit in front of a desk all day long. So I'd like to try learning other things as well, not only sanhak."
"Oh, so that's what you—"
"You'd be better off just giving up, if I may say."
Sa Young-joon, who had arrived first and was already mid-breathing exercise, cut in with his peculiar stiff cadence.
"However I look at it, Your Highness the Crown Princess's head is sturdier than her body, if I may say. Wouldn't it be wiser to leave the body-work to the rest of us and put that fine head to use in front of a desk instead?"
"But if I only sit around all day, my health will suffer!"
"Why does Your Highness worry so ceaselessly about her body, if I may say? You may be a hopeless klutz, but your health is perfectly splendid."
"Well, that's……"
He's right, isn't he?
This body was already healthy — there was no need whatsoever to strain so hard to make it healthier.
When I trailed off mid-sentence, Sa Young-joon went on with an air of perfect indifference.
"If you're that worried about your health, then eat well, sleep well, and take the odd walk, if I may say. It's not as though you're training to be a warrior."
"……!"
"Just take it easy, if I may say. Keep dragging that grieving face about every day, and even your fine health will sour on you."
At those words, the purpose I had forgotten came flooding back to me.
I had come down to the mortal realm to enjoy myself. To spend my remaining time resting, in a body that was finally whole.
So what good was it — dragging my precious, limited time through the mud of gloom, all for the sake of showing Mom and Dad something I could do well, of leaving them that particular kind of memory?
I've had it completely backwards.
My parents would have been delighted even with my bizarre, grotesque paintings or my wobbly, crooked calligraphy. They would have found my stumbling dances and my fumbling geomungo playing adorable.
They never loved me because I was good at something. Never loved me because I made them proud.
They said that simply seeing me happy was more than enough.
……And yet here I am, moping my way through precious time that I'll never get back.
If I was bad at something, so what? All I had to do was do what I loved, and enjoy myself. And lately, I'd been squandering time……
No — it wasn't squandered, actually.
Come to think of it, all the failed attempts, the disasters I'd gaped at in sheer disbelief — they were, looking back, genuinely funny. Genuinely fun.
Better to have tried and flopped than to only have dreamed of it. Because I tried, there's no lingering what-if — and it's become a memory all its own.
When I returned to Heaven and told Mom and Dad and the fairy attendants about this past month's catastrophes, wouldn't every one of them get a good laugh out of it?
I felt a smile spreading across my lips.
I looked at Sa Young-joon with fond, grateful eyes.
"Thank you."
"……Pardon?"
"Thanks to you, I feel so much lighter. You're right — what was I doing, dragging that face around everywhere?"
When I said it with a radiant smile, Sa Young-joon's composure shattered on the spot. He stared at me blankly for a moment, then muttered in a thoroughly dazed voice.
"……What the— you're stunning when you smile……"
At that, the Crown Prince abruptly fixed his gaze on Sa Young-joon. Sa Young-joon flinched and shuffled backward a few steps.
Puzzled, I called to the Crown Prince.
"Your Highness?"
"……I wanted to be the one who made you smile."
"Pardon?"
He murmured it so faintly, so unlike himself, that I failed to catch it properly. When I asked him to repeat it, the Crown Prince smiled — a flawless, portrait-like smile.
"It's nothing."
Hm? That was a fake smile, wasn't it?
Ever since he had begun wielding the darkness, the Crown Prince had often worn false smiles as one means of mastering his emotions. Having long assisted his practice of exactly those smiles — and knowing full well how brilliantly sunny his real ones were — I could tell them apart at a glance.
"Nothing? But just now—"
Huh?
Suddenly my throat seized shut. Then something surged up violently from within.
"……!"
Something came trickling out of my mouth, and I clapped a hand over it. It tasted familiar. The thick taste of blood I'd grown sickeningly used to from coughing it up so often in Heaven.
I drew my hand away and looked down. It was scarlet.
……Why?
"Your Highness the Princess!"
From far off, Ansi came shrieking at a dead run. Sa Young-joon's eyes went huge and his mouth hung open. The Crown Prince, white as ash, stretched his hand toward me.
"My lady!"
Then the world went dark before my eyes.
When I opened my eyes, I was inside a river black as ink.
A familiar sight, and a familiar cold.
The Samdocheon.
……I died again?
Unable to believe it, I simply lay there in the water. As I floated motionless, my body sank little by little. The shimmering surface above me, dappled by light raining down from the crimson underworld sky, drifted slowly farther away.
This suddenly? Why? What did I die of? Is this the last time? Is it already over?
The questions bubbled up like foam and scattered into the dark water.
It's so much faster than I imagined.
So now, am I simply going to dissolve away like this?
"That child, when she dies, may reincarnate, or pass on to paradise, or even become an immortal — but Your Highness cannot, I tell Your Highness!"
Just as Ansi had once said……
Even the gods have their own afterworld — Mureungdowon, the Peach Blossom Spring — but I have no right to enter it.
Because I'm not a proper god. Nor an immortal. Nor a reincarnating human……
Because I am nothing, when I die I will scatter and leave nothing behind me at all.
Samsin Halmi had once said this to me.
"Princess Cheonmyeong was born without a divine assignment. Foreseeing that she could not live even if born, she refused an assignment of her own will — by all rights, she should have been stillborn……"
Mom and Dad had risked everything to save me, a child destined to be born dead.
To go unassigned meant I was never fated to be born. It meant I had no destiny of my own. A child who, by the natural order of things, should never have existed.
No future laid out for me. No fixed tomorrow.
And still…… I'm glad I was born. So glad it aches, that it should end like this……
My breath grows short. Each exhale breaks into bubbles and rises.
Wait — I can still feel myself suffocating…… that means this is a state I know!
The border between life and death. The state where Dad always comes for me — when my lifespan cord still remains.
Now that I think of it — my lifespan cord……
Turning my head in the water, I searched for the faint glimmering thread. My lifespan cord, its end severed clean away, swayed gently to and fro like a ribbon of kelp.
Flailing over to it, I caught hold and examined the end — and there they were: patchwork marks of black thread and jade-green thread, stitched again and again.
These are…… Mom's and Dad's hairs.
Every time Dad spliced my cord back together to save me, he had used their hairs.
Strangely, I felt as though I might cry.
I was fiddling absently with the spliced marks when a great splash thundered overhead and the bubbles whipped around me like a storm.
Startled, I looked up — and there was Dad, pale as death, plunging into the Samdocheon and reaching toward me with all his might. I could read the shape of his mouth.
Huiyo!
Dad.
I stretched my hand toward his outstretched one. He snatched up my weakly reaching hand.
Drawn upward, I was gathered into his embrace. I felt his thick, broad hand cradle the back of my head.
Thank goodness. So it isn't over yet.
Relieved, I closed my eyes once more.