The Enchantress 5
"The moon is unusually bright tonight."
"You're telling me. It's been a long time since we've had one this clear. Still, it's gotten rather chilly. Once our watch is over, I ought to stop by the kitchen and ask for a bowl of hot stew."
"Then we'll have a cup of yellow wine with it. I've got a bottle stashed away. What do you say?"
"That's my man. Why even ask? Heh heh."
The idle chatter of the guards on watch drifted to Namgang Seol as they paced near the wall. From the shadow of a pavilion, she tracked their movements, then drew an acorn from her robes and flung it hard toward the far end of the compound wall.
Tak!
The little acorn struck the stone and clattered down onto the paved ground. In the dead of night, that small rolling sound against the piled-stone wall cut through the silence and carried across the Namgung estate.
Tak-tak-tak…
"What was that!?"
"Sounded like it came from over there!"
"Let's go!"
It was not a loud noise, and it did not travel far—but for Namgung guards posted nearby, it was more than enough. The two men on watch bolted toward the source at once, and before long they had picked up the acorn Seol had thrown.
"An acorn? Did a squirrel go by?"
"Gave us a fright for nothing. Though it is autumn—peak season for squirrels to gather the things."
"Damn squirrels never sleep, do they? Scared us half to death for no reason."
While the guards stood examining the acorn and grumbling about squirrels, Namgang Seol slipped over the wall behind them like the very creature they were blaming. With her sister no longer able to help her, she would have to clear the Namgung walls alone.
She kicked off the pavilion wall, drawing on the principle of Golden Carp Cresting the Waves, spinning through the air like a loosed arrow to clear the estate wall and land as lightly as a squirrel. Undetected, purpose achieved, she sprang at once toward the wooded hill where she and her sister had once trained together.
At the foot of the hill she picked up a suitable branch. Her father had confiscated her sword, and she could not borrow her sister's either, so a stick would have to do. The legendary masters of old had refined their swordsmanship with nothing more than tree branches, had they not?
She was no legendary master herself—but still.
And so, on a quiet night when the moonlight poured down with rare brilliance, amid a hillside garden carpeted with fallen petals that had bloomed and withered in their endless cycle, Namgang Seol began her sword practice with her own life as kindling.
Before she even drew into a form, she first raised the Heavenly Thunder Sovereign Divine Art.
The moment she summoned her inner energy, a tingling current raced through her entire body. Under the influence of her Connected Meridians, the tide of power surged from her dantian to the tips of her fingers and toes in a swift, spreading wave. Vitality kindled through every limb. Feeling that rising strength, Seol allowed herself a bitter smile.
Though the art was rooted in the balance of taiji, the Heavenly Thunder Sovereign Divine Art leaned harder toward pure, fierce yang than toward yin. Simply drawing it up this strongly burned through what little remained of the pure yin energy of the Snow Ginseng still lingering in her body.
Even so, she shook off the gloom, raised the branch as if it were a sword, and began the first form of the Sovereign Sword Form—Sovereign's Reign.
The opening form of the Namgung Sovereign Sword Form was Sovereign's Reign. From the first cut, each successive movement piled weight upon an opponent locked blade to blade; when those movements gathered into a complete shape, the pressure compounded. That was the terror of the first form.
Hwing! Sheeing!
Every time the branch swept through Seol's hands, sword pressure rolled outward. The flowers, as if paying homage to a sovereign, slowly bowed their heads. And just as their stems seemed ready to snap, she moved into the second form.
This was the place she failed every time.
The third form, Sovereign's Crushing Blow, was a single, simple strike—detonate everything you had built and drive it down. There was nothing difficult about it. The second form, however, was the craft of gathering all the weight accumulated in the first into a single point. If the energy would not detonate properly when she reached the third form, the fault always lay here.
Pit! Pit!
Unlike the first form's relentless cutting, Seol's branch shifted into thrusts, gathering the energy laid across the ground and driving it into one point.
Taaak!
But before she had even completed a few thrusts, the branch exploded with a sharp crack. The gathering energy scattered in every direction; the petals carpeting the ground shot up in a brilliant spray and drifted back down.
Failure.
One more among the countless failures that had come before.
"This—!"
What startled Seol was not the failure itself, but something different from every attempt until now. Though she had failed, she stared in wonder at the empty grip where the shattered branch had been.
When she had held a real sword, she had never understood why she failed. With a wooden branch in her hand, she could suddenly sense, dimly, what she had been doing wrong. The branch had not broken because the wood was weak. It had broken because Seol had misdistributed her force—a mistake in the way she guided the energy laid around her into the blade.
Flushed with exhilaration, she scrambled back down the hill, snapped off another branch, and took it up. She had sworn she would see the end of the Sovereign Sword Form before she burned herself out completely—and tonight, somehow, she felt she had found a thread of it.
With the new branch in hand, she chased that thread and threw herself into a frantic sword dance.
How long had she whirled without thought?
Rustle!
The moon that had hung overhead slipped behind the peak of Mount Huang, and the world grew suddenly dim. A presence stirred in the brush where the garden met the forest. Startled, Seol halted her forms and called carefully toward the sound.
"Eun? Is that you?"
Her younger sister, Namgung Eun, knew this place. Perhaps she had woken in the night to check on her and come looking. Eun had always had a mischievous streak; it would not have been strange for her to come checking in the middle of the night.
But the brush gave no answer.
"Who is there? It is not proper to hide and watch someone train."
She thought it might be a lost herb-gatherer or a hunter out for night game, and searched the place where the presence had been—but there was no trace of anyone. Remembering what the guards had said about squirrels as she left the estate, Seol put it from her mind and took up the branch again. She could not spare even a single double-hour of practice to something as trivial as a squirrel.
After catching that faint thread on the first night, Namgang Seol's days settled into a pattern. By night she trained her sword in secret; by day she spent most of her hours embroidering with her sister. If she wanted enough free nights to practice, she needed to present a demure face during the day. And nothing served better for sorting out the insights she had won in the dark than sitting quietly over needlework and letting her thoughts sink deep.
For a long while she worked white thread across black cloth, stitching a peony—the flower that shared her title as the Flower King Peony. Her hands shaped the blooms with swift precision, but her mind was crowded with the new questions that had risen the night before.
Why did it suddenly feel as if I were wearing clothes that didn't fit me?
She had nearly succeeded at that form. In the razor-thin instant of almost, that had been the first thought to surface.
She was finishing her second peony, still lost in yesterday's puzzle, when a clamor rose outside. It was not Seol who reacted first, but her sister Eun.
"Why is it so noisy out there? Gye-a, go and find out what's happening."
"Yes, young miss."
Gye-a, the maid who attended both Namgang Seol and her sister Eun, had barely been gone long enough to look into the disturbance when a servant from the family head's hall came running to deliver a summons.
"Young miss, the Family Head orders you to the main hall at once."
"Father is calling for me?"
"Yes, young miss."
Half hoping he might return the sword he had confiscated—now that she had been so well-behaved of late—she made her way to the family head's hall. Beyond it, the training grounds were in an uproar, but Seol paid it little mind as she stepped inside.
"Father, you sent for me?"
"Ah, yes. Seol. Sit there."
She took her seat as ordered, and her father's careful voice followed.
"Have you heard why it's so noisy outside?"
"You mean by the training grounds? No. I haven't heard anything."
He nodded at her answer, then spoke again in that same cautious tone.
"Ah. Then… I have something I must ask you. It is not that I suspect you—but I need to be certain, so I would have you answer me without deceit. The people of the village are involved, and I cannot simply punish them without cause."
Seol blinked at her father's baffling words.
"Pardon? Yes. Of course, Father. If you ask, this daughter will answer without any falsehood."
He nodded, then asked with an expression that was both deeply embarrassed and deeply apologetic.
"It is nothing else. That is… how should I put this… Ah! Well. The villagers say they have seen you on Mount Huang these past few days. Is… is that true?"
"What!?"
At her father's question, Seol thought of the presence she had sometimes sensed while training. She assumed the villagers had caught her practicing in secret, and that word of it had reached her father. She squeezed her eyes shut and answered.
"I—I'm sorry, Father."
Then came a voice like a thunderbolt.
"What!? Then—then it was true!?"
His roar of fury shook the hall; the force of his released energy crashed through the room like a peal of thunder.
Rumble—!
The last time he had caught her training in secret, he had only quietly confiscated her sword and told her not to be so impatient. This reaction was far more violent. Seol flinched hard.
Still blinking in shock, she heard the tirade continue.
"You—you! How—hrrk!"
Her father clutched at his own throat and staggered. Seol started forward in alarm to support him—only to meet a fresh bellow and a rejection.
"F-Father! Are you all—"
"Stand back! Is anyone outside!?"
"Yes, Family Head!"
"Confine Namgung's eldest daughter, Namgang Seol, to the sealed chamber! Aside from water and Grain-Abstinence Pills, forbid all food from being brought to her—and forbid all contact with others!"
"F-Father!"
Seol was locked at once into the sealed chamber used only by direct blood of the Namgung line. Days later, the news her sister brought—after buttering up the guards outside—was almost impossible to believe.
"Unnie, it isn't true, right!? They're saying you seduced the herb-gatherers and hunters on Mount Huang and—and stole their yang energy…"
"What!?"
The injustice of it was almost too much to bear. Her father seemed to believe she had committed some wild transgression—but she had never even once held a man's hand.
"That's completely absurd!"
"Eek! I—I only heard it secondhand!"
At the waiter boy's explanation, my nuna flushed scarlet and raised her voice in anger.
"It really is completely absurd!"
Twice in a row, no less. From the bits of conversation I'd managed to pick up on the way here, she and this young lady weren't the closest of friends—but they were on familiar enough terms. Apparently the idea that someone she knew had been out having one-night stands was more than she could swallow.
They do say the quietest cats are the first up on the stove, but still…
"Young miss, there's an old saying that you can know ten fathoms of water but never one fathom of a person's heart—"
I tried to comfort her, but nuna—who almost never raised her voice—barked right over me.
"Th-that's not it!"
I flinched, and she apologized at once.
"I—I'm sorry, So-ryong. But it really is absurd. Just come inside for a moment. I can explain."
Still worked up, she seized my hand and dragged me into her room, sat me down on the bed, and spoke in a low voice.
"Young lady Namgang Seol is not someone who can be near men."
"What? What do you mean?"
She pointed at my chest.
"That thing we're bringing her. It's because of her illness. Without yin energy, her body burns through her own lifespan—so yang energy is poison to her. She is so careful that even having a man nearby is dangerous. And they're talking about yang energy? This is clearly a false charge. She once confessed to me, in tears, that she envied me. So this cannot be a lie."
Well now… a young lady with a disease straight out of a fantasy heroine?
By nuna's account she was a heroine with every condition a fantasy unicorn would go mad for—and instead she had been branded a succubus. All well and good, except a new doubt was starting to form: if this was the situation, weren't we about to get turned away at the Namgung gates?
When a child does something wrong, some parents are always ready to blame the friend. And nuna was, after all, her friend.