“…I am sorry.”

I had steeled myself never to crumble under any humiliation, yet here I was, undone without resistance by the mere three syllables of an old lover’s name.

As I hastily righted the wine bottle, gazes thick with vulgar curiosity converged on my face. I did not need to look to know how much pleasure they were taking in watching me flounder in embarrassment.

I lifted my chin with deliberate defiance. Then I curved my eyes into crescent moons and spread a languid smile across my face. So that the frail girl who had trembled like an aspen would vanish, leaving only the face of a seductive courtesan.

“This is the first time I have served a man as a courtesan, and seeing someone as esteemed as you, my lord, I suppose my heart swelled so full that I made a mistake. Please forgive me generously.”

It was a transparent excuse that would fool no one. But perhaps the coquetry I had honed alongside the silver knife at the courtesan house had worked its effect. The Minister of War raked his gaze over me with eyes like a man bewitched by a fox spirit, and instead of putting that name I did not wish to hear back in his mouth, he slowly extended a wrinkled hand toward me.

The hand stained with my father’s blood touched my cheek. A sensation like a snake crawling across skin slid down my face. I wanted to strike that filthy hand away at once, but I quietly offered my cheek, eyes cast demurely downward.

“They say that upright Chief Royal Secretary has been drowning himself in wine and women these past few years without even taking a wife….”

Yet no matter how much I simpered and fawned, I could not escape the name of the man who had crashed into this banquet like an uninvited guest.

“Now I understand why.”

The old man tilted my chin up and made me meet his gaze. The corners of his mouth curled into something sinister beneath his white beard.

“He let a peerless beauty slip right before his eyes. No woman he takes to his bed could ever satisfy him after that. He wanders about like a lost soul, waiting for some enchantress to make him forget.”

A military officer sitting across from him, mouth hanging open without a shred of dignity as he gawked at my face, chimed in eagerly.

“Quite understandable, I’d say. Even the most celebrated courtesans in Hanyang, for all their arrogance, cannot hold a candle to beauty like this.”

The men around the table then took turns appraising me without restraint, treating me the way a merchant might size up a mare he had brought to sell. Shame washed over me, yet I could not stop my ears. The only response left to me was…

“You flatter me too much.”

To go around refilling their cups. At last, every wine bottle on the table ran dry, and the moment I had been quietly waiting for arrived.

“I will have more wine brought out.”

Using that as my excuse, I slipped out of the cage of beasts for a brief moment. I closed the door and drew in the breath I had been holding, when the sound of stockinged feet approached from behind me.

“…Young mistress.”

It was Meoru, my personal maidservant. She must have stood here weeping the entire time I was inside, because her eyelids were so swollen they looked like unripe peaches.

If I acknowledged her tears and asked why she was crying, I feared my own grief would break through. I averted my gaze and gave an order in my usual tone.

“Bring a jug of warmed wine.”

Meoru fetched the wine at once, and I looked around. The long corridor held only the two of us.

Swish.

I quickly slipped my hand inside the front of my jeogori¹The upper garment of the hanbok and drew out the perfume case I had hidden there. I opened it and carefully unfolded the paper inside, and a mound of white powder came into view.

I lifted the lid of the jug and poured every last bit of it in. I pulled out a hairpin and stirred it around, and the white powder dissolved into the steaming wine like snow melting away.

“Young mistress…, this is….”

Meoru had gone pale, realizing what the powder was. I seized her trembling hands.

“Meoru, listen to me carefully.”

Then I pressed a small rolled scroll into her shaking hands.

“Follow the directions drawn here. Commander Jang will be there.”

Jang Hyo, the Military Commander who commanded the forces of Pyongan Province. He was in league with those beasts, so he should by rights have been part of this depraved banquet, yet he was absent.

“Tonight. I will steal you away from their clutches.”

He clearly intended to keep the promise he had insisted on making, though I had never asked it of him.

“If Commander Jang asks why I did not come, give him this letter.”

As I tucked the perfume case back into my br*ast, I pulled out a letter from inside my garment and pushed it deep into the sleeve of Meoru’s robe.

“He will get you out of this place. So take your mother and leave at once.”

Meoru was the daughter of my wet nurse and a servant of our household. When our family was destroyed, she had been dragged all the way here to Pyongan with me. Through years of hardship, that mother and daughter had endured terrible suffering trying to protect me after I lost my parents. I could not let them die caught up in my revenge.

But Meoru did not move her feet despite my urging, and she asked, “W, what about you, young mistress?”

Stop calling me young mistress. I had drilled those words into her ears for the past five years until she must have been sick of hearing them, but today I swallowed them back. After all, today would be the last day that child could ever call me that.

I will grab my enemies by the hair and leap with them into the River of the Dead.

By drinking this poisoned wine together with them and dying by my own hand.

What use was there in surviving? Would the king right my wrongful grievance? Rather than be dragged to the magistrate’s office, have my legs crushed in the press, and die torn apart with the name of murderer branded on me, I intended to end it peacefully by my own hand.

I could not bring myself to say it, so I stayed silent, but Meoru, who had watched my face her whole life, could not have failed to read what was in my heart. I held out a pouch containing jewelry I had received from my enemies as payment for my coming-of-age ceremony, rings of silver and jade hairpins and the like, but she pushed it away again and again, treating it like some cursed thing that would bring disaster.

“I will stay here too. Let’s run away together, young mistress. I’ll stand watch right here and make sure no one comes near while I wait….”

“There is no time for this. Do you mean to get your mother killed too by dawdling? Go. Now.”

I left those harsh words as my farewell and turned away without softening. I pretended not to hear the sound of quiet sobbing behind me as I walked back to the place where I would die.

“I have brought the wine.”

I composed my face and stepped inside. Carrying the jug of wine laced with deadly poison, I walked slowly toward the head of the table, and the men’s stares followed me with a weight I could barely endure. They happened to be in the middle of talking about me.

“Even if she is a government courtesan, she was originally the daughter of a noble family. There is a certain standing to consider. One cannot simply let just anyone perform her coming-of-age ceremony.”

So they were invoking the etiquette of the nobility to debate who would be the one to inflict upon a highborn young woman the agony of having her virtue torn from her.

Since they were speaking of “standing,” those seated at the lower end of the table naturally fell out of contention.

“Indeed, those are very wise words.”

One of them, realizing his own station, quickly began wagging his tail at the man at the head.

“The more precious the bud, the more it needs a skilled hand to coax it open so it blooms fully without being damaged. And who at this gathering could possibly possess both the experience and the refined taste to do so, if not the Minister of War himself?”

In other words, it was flattery urging everyone to yield to the Minister of War the first turn to violate me. The Minister stroked his beard and laughed with a sound of satisfaction.

“Since you all press me so, I suppose I must willingly take on that burden… though they do say that mounting an unbroken wild horse is the most exhausting work of all.”

He wrapped in remarkably elegant language what was, in truth, a monstrous conspiracy to decide who would be the first to defile my body. Not a flicker of expression changed on any of their faces as the conversation flowed so naturally. It was plain that dividing a woman among themselves like animals sharing prey was a game they had always played.

It seemed the Minister of War would be the one to perform my coming-of-age ceremony, but then unexpected words fell from his lips.

“So why should a decrepit old man reach beyond his means? I will yield the pleasure of opening the first path to my son-in-law, who has labored so hard all this while.”

The Minister of War clearly knew just how long his son-in-law, the Governor, had been salivating over me. Was that cunning old snake planning to put his son-in-law in his debt by yielding me to him?

And so the man appointed to take my first night was Park Wonchul, the Pyongan Provincial Governor who had hosted this banquet and paid the price for my body.

No sooner had I returned to the seat beside the Minister of War and set down the wine jug than Park Wonchul’s rough hand snatched my wrist.

“Get up.”

Surely he did not mean to take me right now. The banquet had only just begun, and the night had not yet grown late.

Park Wonchul had been a friend who studied under the same teacher as my late father. But his heart was too base even for a beast to understand the loyalty between friends.

He had lusted after my mother, and when he could not obtain her through honest means, he had her reduced to a government sl*ve and seized her for himself. But what could be done? Before he could even lay a hand on her, that wretched woman took her own life to protect her virtue.

The unsated desire of that rutting dog had nowhere left to go, and so it turned toward me, her daughter. To Park Wonchul, I was not the daughter of his friend. I was nothing more than a substitute for the woman he had never been able to have.