The Last Royal Decree
Even if that young pup dies, he will never be allowed to harbor a single thought of defiance against me. Hong-wi, you will die having abandoned everything, like a cur. Like a calf dragged to the slaughterhouse — blinking those two eyes of yours as you die, just like that.
"Tell them."
"Why should I say such a thing to them?"
Hong-wi shot back. "If you are my uncle, then fabricating the truth and proclaiming it to the world should be no trouble at all. Am I wrong?"
Oh-ho, look at this one! So he still has a streak of rebellion left in him after all.
Suyang felt a strange, perverse pleasure mingled with his surprise.
"The court already lies within your grasp, Uncle. The historians' offices are packed to a man with your creatures. All of them schemed with you to usurp the throne."
Usurpation, is it. Suyang flared his nostrils, savoring the word. Not bad. Not bad at all.
"As you wish, Uncle, you may not only tell the living how their story goes — you can bend the records that will be left for posterity. And yet, for you to make this demand of me now……"
"So you want to hear the reason."
Suyang cut him off mid-sentence. "It is so that I may make something perfectly clear to you."
Hong-wi did not ask again. He simply glared at Suyang, unwavering.
"You were the king of this country. That much is true. But you were nothing more than a puppet led about by ministers who wailed of loyalty and righteousness. You were led by such regent-ministers as Hwangbo In and Kim Jong-seo, and now it is merely Seong Sam-mun and Park Paeng-nyeon's turn. Piggybacking on your ministers' devotion, you hid behind them like a rat. Can you deny it?"
Hong-wi said nothing.
A strange heat was creeping into Suyang's voice.
"If you were ever truly a king, then step forward — just once. Show them mercy as their sovereign. Command them to submit and confess. If you will not……"
Suyang jerked a thumb toward the prison chamber and gave a careless shrug.
"Then I will torture them until they die."
"Uncle. You are truly a cruel man."
Suyang twisted his mouth into a warped smile. "Why, thank you. Now — what will you do?"
Hong-wi stepped forward to the prison door.
He gazed silently at the men imprisoned within.
Astonishingly, they were standing.
Hong-wi could hardly bear to look at them, yet he squeezed out every ounce of strength he had.
The first thing he saw was Seong Sam-mun, his hair come loose and hanging in disarray. His body was drenched in blood from head to toe.
Then he saw Park Paeng-nyeon. Whatever torments they had inflicted upon him, he had been beaten so thoroughly that he could barely hold himself upright.
Ha Wi-ji was there as well. Even the sickly Yi Gae still clung to life.
Hong-wi looked each of them over, one by one, for a long while. At last, he opened his mouth. His voice trembled, thin as a thread.
"Submit and confess."
"Your Majesty……"
Seong Sam-mun answered in a low murmur, almost a whisper.
"Tell them it was I who ordered you. Say it."
"We cannot…… do that," Park Paeng-nyeon breathed.
"If I am your true king, then accept my command. This is not a request. It is a royal decree."
A royal decree……
They could not speak a word.
"Submit. I beg you — confess that it was I who ordered it. That is how you will preserve your honor……"
"You would have loyal subjects who rose for their own sovereign declare that he was the instigator of it all?"
Park Paeng-nyeon, already more corpse than man, found some sudden wellspring of strength and surged to his feet. Unable to contain his fury, he bit through his lip and cried out as though vomiting blood.
"How could that ever be the way to protect our honor! I would rather, here and now——"
Park Paeng-nyeon could not finish. He coughed up blood where he stood.
Startled, Hong-wi seized the bars of the cell and shouted. "No — please, Insu! Steady yourself!"
He whirled on Suyang. "Uncle, I beg you — save Insu! If this goes on, he will not last!"
"In my eyes, there is not one living soul in that cell. I see only corpses — dead men walking."
Suyang's voice was ice.
Hong-wi stared at him for a long moment, and then, his face collapsing into blank despair, turned back to the men in the cell.
Seong Sam-mun spoke in a tone flat and quiet as still water.
"It is already finished, Your Majesty. Suyang speaks the truth. Those of us here have been dead a long time."
Ha Wi-ji and Yi Gae, who still drew breath, lifted their failing eyes toward Hong-wi. The relentless interrogations had drained them nearly to nothing — they hardly looked like living men — but their eyes still blazed.
"Only preserve your sacred person, Your Majesty!"
"……Since you have failed, it was long ago decided that ruin would find me, one way or another. I have already made my peace with that. I have nothing more to say."
Hong-wi forced every scrap of composure he possessed into his voice and pressed on.
"You will be remembered for ten thousand years as men of loyalty and righteousness. But posterity will criticize you thus: to serve a lord as his minister, then turn a blade against him — that was no duty of a scholar-gentleman. How could such a thing be called loyal and righteous?…… I cannot stand by and watch men of your caliber be dragged through the mud like that. You acted on my orders."
"Your Majesty!"
"Say it that way. Nothing more is needed. This is…… the last command I will ever give you."
Seong Sam-mun bowed his head in silence.
As though every ounce of strength had finally drained from his body, he sank to his knees and pressed his forehead to the floor. Yi Gae and Ha Wi-ji, their strength spent, quietly prostrated themselves as well.
Hong-wi could not bring himself to leave that place for a long time.
Then, soft and deliberate, the sound of clapping echoed through the chamber.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap……
Suyang came strolling out, applauding with languid, mocking slowness.
"What a sublime tableau of lord and vassal…… The lord frets that his ministers' fragrant names might be sullied, and the ministers fret for their lord's safety. Magnificent. Simply magnificent."
He sneered through his crooked smile.
Hong-wi did not raise his head. "Is that sufficient?" he spat.
"Mm. It will do. More than enough." Suyang bared his teeth in a grin. "You may return."
"May I go back, then?"
"Yes. Go home and rest…… for a while, that is. For a while."
Those last words were very nearly a whisper.
Hong-wi looked at him blankly. His eyes, hollow and empty, were as void as a dead man's.
At the sight, Suyang felt a satisfaction beyond all measure coil through his entire body.
Before long, Hong-wi was shuffling back toward Suganggung on unsteady legs.
"Did you see that, Ja-jun?"
"I did, Your Majesty."
From a shadowed alcove where he had witnessed the whole affair, Vice Director of the Right Han Myeong-hoe stepped forward and bowed low and long.
"Noble-minded — but not without his foolishness, is he? Worried over how his ministers' names will be recorded in the annals. What does that matter? History is written by whoever survives the day."
"Most true, Your Majesty."
Han Myeong-hoe readily agreed. From the moment he had helped Suyang plot the coup, he had long since stopped caring what infamy posterity might heap upon him. Had he entertained such worries, he would never have done any of this in the first place.
"And what does Your Majesty intend to do with the Retired King? If I may speak plainly, it would be best to end any future trouble at the root. Those implicated in treason cannot be suffered to live……"
"No."
Suyang considered for a moment, then shook his head.
At the unexpected response, Han Myeong-hoe's eyebrows shot up. "Your Majesty! After everything that has happened——"
"You think I mean to show him clemency?"
Han Myeong-hoe said nothing more. The silence answered for him. Suyang did not open his mouth either, and an awkward quiet hung between them for a moment.
"Ja-jun. I keep Hong-wi alive not out of any petty sentimentality. If that were the sort of consideration I required, I would never have come to stand where I stand today."
Han Myeong-hoe had of course known Suyang well enough to expect as much — which was precisely why the refusal had puzzled him so.
"First — this time, we managed to arrest the traitors before their plot could take shape, but who is to say there are no others still filled with hot wind, muttering about loyalty and righteousness?"
"Your Majesty — all the more reason to root out the source of the trouble, is it not?"
"You would have me — having come this far — kill that little pup out of fear of some ember?"
Suyang's gaze turned glacial. Han Myeong-hoe recognized it at once: the prince's pride had been stung. And so it was.
"Ja-jun, understand me. I am the man who, with nothing at all — not a scrap — led a mere few dozen roughnecks, cut down the great ministers of the realm, and took the palace for my own. With nothing, I say."
Pride rang through every syllable. And in fairness, it was pride he had earned. What man in this world, however reckless, however audacious, could have dared a coup with only a few dozen cutthroats and stolen an entire kingdom? That alone proved Suyang was no ordinary man.
"So long as Hong-wi lives — yes, perhaps a second Seong Sam-mun or Park Paeng-nyeon may rise, and a third. But what of it? I will trample every single one of them into the dirt. Grind them down, root and branch. Has this rebellion not proven it? The Mandate of Heaven rests with me."
Han Myeong-hoe concluded there was no talking him out of it. This was a matter of Suyang's pride, pure and simple.
"If I spare the boy and this kind of rebellion rises again, I will show him — make him watch, wide-eyed. I saw it at Suganggung today: the light in his eyes is not yet fully dead. Now, then. What face will he make, having beheld the fate of Seong Sam-mun's band?"
Suyang's face glistened with a cruel delight.
"For as long as that creature draws breath, I will make him understand — bone-deep, in his marrow — that he was nothing, that he could do nothing. Yes, Ja-jun. As you propose, he must die someday. But until then…… I will keep waking him to that truth, again and again."
Silence fell.
Suyang was intoxicated with the punishment he had just conceived. He looked up at the sky.
He was thinking of his eldest brother, Munjong — the one who had always made him feel lesser. Suyang had never known, until now, how exquisite it would feel to tear out by the roots every remnant that brother had left behind in this world.
Truly, Hong-wi was the finest masterpiece Munjong had ever made — and demolishing that masterpiece would be entertainment without equal.
The destruction of the flesh could be finished in a remarkably short time. The destruction of the mind, however, would take rather longer.
"Your Majesty is…… truly magnanimous."
Han Myeong-hoe lifted the corners of his mouth. Suyang had proven once again that he was, indeed, a lord worth serving.
"Thank you, Ja-jun."
Suyang accepted the flattery with perfect composure.
"Once this prison affair is settled, Hong-wi too must answer for the crime of joining treason. Find somewhere suitable and send him into exile. Give him time there to take stock of himself and gnaw at his own soul with guilt. Somewhere suitable — somewhere remote, hard to enter and harder to leave. But nothing so harsh that it breaks his body."
What Suyang wanted was to watch Hong-wi's mind come apart.
Han Myeong-hoe nodded. "It shall be done. I will arrange a suitable place."
"And among your men — is there someone you can trust with this? Someone to place beside Hong-wi, keep watch on him, and apply the proper pressure."
Han Myeong-hoe fell into thought. If it were mere surveillance, he could simply issue orders to some stolid, capable fellow and be done with it. But Suyang was demanding something far more refined — sustained, high-grade psychological torment. For a task like that, there was exactly one man.
"Yes. I have just the man for it."
"Good."
A look of deep satisfaction spread across Suyang's face. "Good. Is there anything else?"
"Among those implicated this time — Grand Prince Geumseong was among them."
"His reasons? The man was a stiff-necked prig. There was the plot coincidence as well. Nothing surprising in it."
Han Myeong-hoe allowed a faint crease to form between his brows, deliberately half-hidden. There was something oddly threadbare about Suyang's answer.
"Your Majesty — would it not be safer to eliminate any future trouble, as you did with Anpyeong……?"
"No. Iyong is a different matter."
Suyang shook his head. "That fellow Iyong was brimming with treachery to the gills, same as me in that respect. Which is why I had no choice but to remove the danger. But Geumseong……"
For an instant, something almost human flickered across Suyang's face — a shadow of inner conflict.
Among Suyang's full brothers — setting aside the precociously dead Princes Gwangpyeong and Pyeongwon — Grand Prince Geumseong, Lee Yu, was nearly the only one whom Suyang both acknowledged and felt he could open his heart to.
Anpyeong, Lee Iyong, a single year his senior, had clashed with him at every turn, until in the end he had to die.
To be sure, there were brothers who had backed Suyang. Prince Imyeong, Lee Gu, and the youngest, Prince Yeongyeong, Lee Yeom, did lend him their support — but Imyeong was perpetually tangled in scandal over his private life, and Yeongyeong owed Suyang his help in his own entanglements with women; they were closer to brothers who had simply never made an enemy of him.
Geumseong, nine years Suyang's junior, was nothing like them. His character was gentle, yet he had a fierce sense of honor. That was why, amid the blood-ruled chaos that followed the Gyeyu Coup, he had been almost the only one to raise his voice on Hong-wi's behalf. And then he had gone so far as to conspire in the Six Ministers' Rebellion. Suyang found such a brother at once infuriating — and, in some corner of himself, worthy of the deepest respect for his righteousness.
"He…… has no such ambition in him. There is no need to go so far as to kill him."
Han Myeong-hoe gazed steadily at Suyang. This was an unexpected side of the man who had seemed made of nothing but iron and ice.
He guessed, perhaps, that Suyang was showing the faintest residue of conscience over having already killed one brother born of the same mother. And he was not entirely wrong.
"Understood. But if Grand Prince Geumseong is allowed to live, he may attempt some new folly……"
"I will talk sense into him myself. If he values his life, he will spend his remaining years quietly."
Suyang did not particularly wish to kill Geumseong. Not yet — not now, at least.