Namjung [3]
Lately, Lee Seol-ah had been feeling something she did not recognize.
Since when?
Yu Hajin's voice had come to sound warm, and pleasant to the ear. The face she had always thought handsome seemed, all at once, handsomer still. His broad chest was warm, and easy to rest in.
Ask her when it had begun, and she could not have said. What she did know was that the ticklish, peculiar feeling had been eating into her heart by the smallest degrees — the way a drizzle soaks through cloth, so slowly you never catch the moment it turns wet.
At first she had simply been drawn in because his swordsmanship was so beautiful it would not have looked shabby beside the elders of her own house. When she went to him as he wept alone and listened to his story, it had hurt her to hear it. After that, talking with him was just fun. Sleeping curled in that broad embrace was warmer and more comfortable than she had expected, and she liked it more than she would have thought. Yes. Back then, it had only been that.
Then she began to see his tender side, and the moments when he looked magnificent, and that was when the signal flare seemed to go up. Of course, she had not known it at the time.
"Mmm... don't... go..."
A nightmare. The one she always had. The damned patriarch of the Lee Clan putting to death the maid he himself had gotten with child — her mother.
Crimson blood burst with a wet crack. Her mother's head, the light already gone from its eyes, rolled across the floor. The severed neck twitched and vomited blood. The beheading blade, still smeared with her mother's blood, caught the sun and flashed silver. It was the first moment in her life she had found a sword, and blood, revolting — and the last memory she kept from just before she fled the clan, driven out in all but name.
As she thrashed in that pain, a warm hand came to rest on her back. A soft stroke, and another. The pleasant hush of a palm brushing cloth, and a hand large and rough, nothing like her own, whose growth the Nine Yin Severed Meridians had slowed. And yet the touch itself was gentle.
"Haa... Mo... ther..."
The word left her, and her mind surfaced with it. Ah? ...Right. I fell asleep in Hajin's arms. She felt the warmth against her back.
"Hehe..."
The laugh slipped out before she could stop it. It was like being little again, held by her mother while a hand swept down her back. That touch, steeped in tenderness, was so easy, and so good.
Ah. She should not have laughed. If she did, Yu Hajin would know she was awake and take his hand away.
She swept her arms through the empty air, this way and that. She liked swinging a sword well enough on ordinary days; let him think she was dreaming of it. Fortunately, Yu Hajin was taken in.
She lay under his hand and remembered her mother — a memory that went a little sad in the recalling, and was warmer even so. From the instant it rose in her, her heart beat faster. Only a little. So faintly that even she barely noticed.
"Huh?"
"Mmm... what's the matter...?"
Startled by the surprise in his voice, she startled with him — the small disaster of pretending she had only just woken. She was someone who usually had to be shaken several times before her eyes opened, and her heart dropped at the thought of how unnatural she must have looked.
"Ah, you're up? Look at that."
Fortunately, he had not caught on.
In any case. Even while they talked, he would laugh under his breath, smile, and go so far as to pull her chair out for her. It was a gentle thing.
"Ah. You've got something on you."
He said it and, as though nothing could be more natural, wiped a smear of Wave Hand-Stretched Noodles sauce from the corner of her mouth. For an instant her breath stopped.
"Hah. Knew it. Not a muscle to be found."
When he suddenly seized her own arm, her heart lurched.
"Go on. Feel it."
The arm she touched at those words was so solid it flustered her, and inwardly she marveled, picturing the work that had gone into it.
"Are you my father?"
"A lord, a teacher, and a father are one and the same. You know that."
That he saw her as a disciple — a daughter, at most — irritated her, somehow.
"Easy, now. Moderation. All right?"
Hearing that did sink her spirits; she hated having her treats rationed. And yet part of her was pleased to be worried over.
When he sighed and swung a sword sheathed in crimson blade-qi, she felt proud of him for no reason she could name, and he looked splendid besides.
When a laugh broke out of him and his hand came down to stroke her hair, satisfaction filled her heart to the brim.
And so, little by little, a feeling she had no way of naming kept growing.
"Seol-ah. Mind clearing the area around us?"
He was about to fight a master of the Transcendent First-Rate.
Steel rang on steel. Even as she held her ground, knocking the lackeys' blades aside, worry for him rose in her like a flood. What if he's hurt badly? No — what if he simply died?
The thought alone dropped through her chest and left her heart stinging.
And then she saw his final attack.
The mortal shell, shed in a single stroke — and the rise beyond it.
The air detonated.
Oh...
Magnificent, she thought.
She watched with her mouth hanging open as he cleared away, without effort, the small fry who had given her so much trouble. His back was broader even than she had imagined. He's so cool... Her heart was pounding hard enough to see. From moving so much? No. It was not that. This beat was sweet past any comparison with pain.
He would assume that, in that moment, she had been watching his sword. Her eyes had been on nothing but him.
She was still standing there, lips parted in wonder, when a rough, panting breath cut through the quiet and drove into her ear. Only then did she come back to herself.
"Hah—! Wait, th-those wounds — what are they? Are you all right?"
Merely seeing Yu Hajin hurt, Lee Seol-ah felt her heart plunge and burn. If this keeps on... if this keeps on, and I'm left alone again... She did not want that. No. Even if she were left behind, it must not be because he had died. Never. She wanted him unhurt. She wanted him not to die before she did.
Buried beneath that fierce wish, she understood her own heart at last. Ah. I... She liked Yu Hajin. Love, between a man and a woman — something that had always felt so far away, and she had fallen into it long ago. The moment she knew it, her chest hurt worse.
"Ah..."
That parched voice seemed to tear her heart a thousand ways, and then a thousand more. Only now. She had only just understood. He could not leave before she had even told him. He could not.
"Y-you really are all right, aren't—"
Yu Hajin drew the girl, eyes brimming, hard against him.
Warmth spread through her. She felt it failing like a lamp in the wind, sinking little by little as if it might go out at any moment, and she quieted the tangle in her chest. Yes. He would be all right. He was strong. So he could endure it.
"...I'm sorry. I should have settled it on my own."
Something surged up in her at those words.
"No — what are you saying? I was the one who insisted we fight in the first place!"
She did not want him blaming himself anymore. That was all she had meant.
"...Thank... you..."
With that, his body went slack, and Lee Seol-ah's heart plunged all over again. Had her voice been too loud? Had she failed to hold him properly, so the shock went through him? The wish that he not blame himself rang hollow. She blamed herself more than anyone, and gathered him into her arms.
"Hic... sob.... Don't go.... Don't leave me... don't leave me behind..."
Crying like that, she felt it. Fainter — plainly fainter — and still a heartbeat, passing from his chest into hers.
"Ah...! Thank goodness. Thank goodness..."
The corner of her mouth lifted as she wept, clear tears she could not have named as joy or as sorrow.
He would never hear it. She said it anyway, climbing the mountain. To return to the village they would have had to pass through the back alleys. That was why.
Looking back, she could not have said how the time had gone. She only remembered fretting as she drew on what she knew, made a place to rest somewhere safe, and laid him down.
"Please. Please..."
She pressed her trembling hands together and prayed to every god she had never even believed in, and now and then she checked the sound of his breath, sick with worry. That was all she remembered.
When he woke, relief washed over her. When he praised her, she was happy. When he held her, her heart fluttered. And when he said they should live together, she was flustered — but her heart pounded harder than it ever had.
The problem was Yu Hajin himself. He did not see her as a woman.
But that was different now. They were living together!
While Yu Hajin went off to fell trees, set on building a hut in the mountains, Lee Seol-ah flushed crimson and laughed without a shred of restraint.
A man and a woman of marriageable age — if one counted by the age of the mind, Yu Hajin did not qualify, though that was hardly the point — living alone beneath a single roof. What else could come of it? They were bound to fall for each other. And was she not pretty? He was the one who had said so. He had even said she was cute, and kind.
Even now they slept in each other's arms, and when they walked or sat they drifted close and all but stuck. With so little distance left between them, if she closed it little by little, could Yu Hajin really hold out without coming to love her?
She cupped both cheeks in her hands and laughed a sly, wicked little laugh. First the two of them would enjoy being newlyweds for a while. When the time was right, they would have children. How many would be good? Childbirth would probably hurt, but she was not afraid. She thought the happiness would outweigh the pain. A baby who takes after Hajin-oppa... A son would be better, surely. No. No, that was not right. Nothing said she could have only one, so a daughter as well...
"Kyaaa...!"
Having gone so far as to invent names for her grandchildren, Lee Seol-ah was suddenly mortified, and she hid her burning face in both hands. She was the sort who thought of everything first, and only afterward remembered how to be embarrassed.
And then, inevitably, Yu Hajin's voice came from behind her.
"...? What are you doing?"
"H-hyaak?!"
The sound that escaped her was ridiculous, and she had no choice but to launch herself straight into the air.