Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Naksu stumbles into the tavern, her eyes roving over the people drinking inside. Unfortunately, nearly all of them are men. She would run wild too quickly if she takes one of their forms.

She spots the back of a woman at the closest table and surges forward. She is shorter than Naksu, but options are limited. She can shift again later, once she returns to the Danju.

Naksu grabs the woman by the shoulder, forcibly turns her, and nearly shouts in her disappointment.

Blind and weak.

The body will not be able to hold Naksu’s energy for more than a day. She releases her grip on the other woman’s jaegori, preparing to harshly push her away, when the woman catches Naksu’s own shoulder. Her thumb is a mere inch from where Park Jin’s arrow entered, and Naksu’s body is already tightening, bracing for the pain.

She does not press down on the wound.

“It is not mortal.”

“What?” Naksu asks.

“Your injury. It will not kill you, if you do not let it.”

“Ah Mu-deok! Are you making friends?” yells the man from behind her. The woman—Mu-deok—ignores him.

“However, if you perform the alchemy of souls, your body’s energy will fail and you will die.”

“My body will die—”

“You will die. No one here has the energy to contain Naksu, and the patrols from Songrim will be on alert for you and soul-shifters both. You will die.”

“What are you? Some kind of blind shaman?”

Mu-deok smirks.

“Something like that.”

Naksu sees him in the first hours of her residence at Chwiseonru. She would not call it a meeting, not yet, as they are floors away from each other.

She is practicing in the back courtyard, running through each form of Tansu in the hope that it will somehow transform into the type of sword dance performed by gisaengs.

It is not working. Partially because she does not hold her blade—Mu-deok had hidden that away, wrapped in cloth, in their room—but mostly because Naksu is not built for elegance. Her fluidity had all been leant to stealth, leaving none for the delicacy she sees the women of Chwiseonru move with.

She is halfway through her sixth set—just as inelegant as the last five—when she feels his eyes on her. She glances around, and then up, and spots him standing in the open window. He does not shy away at being caught observing, nor does he make any ribald joke at her expense. He just looks, his gaze too serious, too intent, for the moment.

Naksu straightens, flexing her hand for a sword that is not there, for a power locked away inside of her—and looks back. She worries he is one of the Songrim mages that fought her on Lake Gyeongchangdo, that he recognizes her despite Mu-deok’s assurances that no one would.

“You’re good,” he calls down to her in the stead of any threat.

Naksu relaxes. He does not recognize her. He does not recognize dance talent either.

She is good at killing, at lying, and at surviving. She cannot even be called adequate when it comes to dancing.

She turns to the door and—

“Hey! Are you not going to thank me for the compliment? Will you tell me your name?”

“No,” she replies curtly, not even looking up.

When Naksu steps inside, Mu-deok is waiting for her. She has a dancer with her.

“Eun-ji,” she says, using their agreed upon alias. “This is Hye-sun. She is going to show you the practice room so you can watch today’s rehearsal.”

Mu-deok is like the Danju; she often does not speak her orders aloud, or in full.

Naksu nods in understanding just the same. She will observe, memorize, and perfect whatever routine the dancers of Chwiseonru are practicing today. No one will know she is a beginner; no one can know, if she means to stay here, uncaught.

She pushes the man from the window out of her mind.

It is a week later that she actually meets him.

She is walking through Chwiseonru, trying her best to go unnoticed, despite the extravagant outfit Jun-wol insists she wear. She will deliver the wine—cinnamon, how disgusting—to Ae-Hyang and her guest and bow her way out of the room before anyone can even think to invite her to sit.

Naksu has been cleared to perform, but Ju-wol thinks her too blunt to entertain any guests with conversation. Naksu likes it that way.

“No. I want her,” a man insists. Naksu tilts her head just in time to see the hand reaching out to grab her arm. She sidesteps it easily, but is forced to stop walking when he blocks her way.

It is the man from the window. Naksu looks up as best she can with her still-lowered head. He is taller than she expected—taller than her—and has the petulant mouth of a man who has been spoiled all his life.

He smirks down at her when he catches her looking.

“Surely one of the other girls would be better, young master. You have always favored—”

“No. Her.”

Ju-wol is dithering, unsure if it would be better to offend the man now—by refusing his request—or later—by actually inflicting Naksu’s presence on him. Naksu tries to communicate the benefits of the former through a harsh glare, but Ju-wol does not receive the message.

“Of course,” she concedes to the man. “Eun-ji, show them to the red jade room. And give me the wine.”

She leans in to take the wine from Naksu’s grasp and takes the opportunity to hiss in her ear.

“Do not offend them!” she instructs.

Naksu nods, even as she internally curses Mu-deok, Park Jin, herself, and even the Danju for her current position.

Her shoulder feels entirely healed, though she knows it is not. She still cannot wield her energy, knotted as it is around the wound left by Park Jin’s arrow. Only a month, Mu-deok had assured her, as she scrubbed the tint from Naksu’s brows and took down her long hair. A month for her body to heal, and for them to hide, before Naksu repays Mu-deok for her healing. In a month she will have her energy and her sword and a man at the mercy of both.

Mu-deok had only asked for one life in exchange for her help; Naksu will take it for her. 

“Jang Uk, was that really necessary?” whines the man’s blond companion.

Jang Uk? Jang Gang’s son?

The hair on the back of Naksu’s neck stands at attention, as suddenly tense as the rest of her body.

The man—no, Jang Uk—has not taken his eyes from her.

“Of course it was Park Dang-gu. Do I ever do anything that isn’t necessary?”

Park Dang-gu grumbles something in response, but Naksu does not hear him. Park Jin’s nephew and Jang Gang’s son both stand in front of her, wholly unsuspecting that she is the assassin who has plagued Daeho for the past five years.

Jang Uk raises his eyebrows at Naksu, as if inviting her to agree with him. She sneers in response, turning to take them to the red jade room.

“Ahh, the quiet type, huh?” he says to her back.

Naksu thinks about how easy it would be to kill them, if she had her sword. She does not think she would even need her energy, if she was able to take them by surprise.

She would take at least one head. If not both.

She looks back at the two men following her through the hall. They amble behind her without care—unobservant and unready.

Definitely both.

The red jade room has already been set for them; bottles of wine at the ready, a great crab sitting at the center of the table, surrounded by smaller dishes of steamed skate and grilled mackerel.

Naksu’s mouth waters at the smell, but she ignores it, kneeling to take her place at the table.

She pours a drink for both heirs, and tries to remember Mu-deok’s entreaties for her to be careful and inconspicuous. She tries her best to fade into the background—something she long thought a great skill of hers, and a necessary one for her profession—and let the two men consider her a pretty wine dispenser with nothing between her ears.

“Shell the crab for me,” Jang Uk orders her.

Naksu eyes the creature with trepidation. There were no crabs in Danhyanggok, and she’d never eaten one, let alone a specimen of this size.

“Jang Uk! Why do you keep asking others to shell your crab? Stop being lazy and do it yourself!”

“Why? Why should I? You can do it much more easily than I can? Just use a spell!”

“And is the gisaeng supposed to use a spell?” Park Dang-gu asks sarcastically in return. “Have they closed your gate of intelligence too?”

Naksu ignores them both, picking up the closest leg. She studies it, holding it like a blade as she twists it this way and that.

She traces a line to its joint. It should not be too hard. If Park Dang-gu can solve it with a spell, surely Naksu can solve it with her own two hands.

The leg cracks as she breaks it open, interrupting the argument. Their heads swivel so fast that she almost makes a joke about her name.

Except that is not her name. She is Eun-ji, a simple dancer at Chwiseonru, for the next three weeks.

She nods at them, trying to smile as easily as the other girls do—as easily as even Mu-deok does, despite her past—but she does not think she manages it.

Park Dang-gu’s face looks pinched and pained as he hands over a knife for her to complete the task.

Jang Uk grins at her initiative.

He pours out a cup of wine for her as well, hardly deterred by her sullen rejection of it—an assassin must keep a clear mind.

He continues his conversation with his friend—a cycle of complaints about a series of masters, including Park Jin, who have all refused to open his gate of energy.

Naksu spends the evening shelling crab as she listens. She snaps the legs in half and imagines it is Park Jin’s arrow. She cuts a long line down the shell and imagines it is his nephew’s neck. She peels back the shell, picking the meat out as she imagines doing the same to each family head, after she kills them like they killed her father.

(Jang Uk spends the evening watching her. He watches the strength of her hands as they snap the shell, the sword callouses on her hands that ensure she does not flinch at the rough texture, the easy way she flips the knife, always exacting the correct amount of pressure as she cuts her way to tender flesh.)

“You are good at this too,” he says.

Naksu freezes. Her eyes raise slowly to meet his. She cannot read his gaze.

Does he suspect her? Or does he desire her?

Naksu offers him the hard-won crab meat with one hand as she lifts the other to her lips. She licks each finger in turn, finally tasting the crab she was worked over so diligently.

Jang Uk’s eyes follow this movement just as avidly, and Naksu sees a darkness swirl in their depths.

“Thank you, young master,” she says, an imitation of Ae-Hyang that should fall flat, but doesn’t.

He swallows twice before he blinks and shakes his head.

Park Dang-gu clears his throat.

“I think it is time for me to go…” he says, trailing off awkwardly. Jang Uk scrambles to join him, both thanking her for her hospitality as they back out of the room.

Naksu is supposed to see them to the door, to thank them for their patronage, and to encourage them to come back soon.

She remains where she is; she is not going to let all this food go to waste.

Jang Uk comes back the next day.

It is evening and Naksu is already in her performing outfit. She should not even need to meet him, but one of the other girls comes to find her. She only has a few minutes before their sword dance starts, but she knows Ju-wol would rather she delay the dance than offend an important patron.

The so-called Winter Prince, who had asked specifically to speak with her, was definitely classified as an important patron.

When she opens the door to his dining room, he stands and bows.

Naksu steps in slowly, confused at the sudden show of respect.

He straightens, and she notices the sword at his side. Even sheathed, she can tell it is an impressive blade. The energy of its master hums within it. A master that is not Jang Uk.

“I want you to teach me,” Jang Uk says abruptly.

Naksu blinks.

“Teach you…” She looks down at her performing outfit and the sword at his side. “Teach you to dance?”

“No, to—” Jang Uk stops short. A long moment stretches as Naksu stares at him. Then he nods slowly.

“Yes. I want you to teach me to dance.”

Chapter Text

Mu-deok’s voice dips and soars as it dances between the notes she plucks on the silk strings of the gayageum in her lap.

The courtyard of Chwiseonru is silent. There is no rustle of fabric, no clink of a cup. Even the heavens stop to listen, Naksu thinks, when Mu-deok sings.

It is only her second public performance, but Ju-wol had gleefully shared that she is receiving reservation requests for weeks—even months—in advance from guests who hope to hear the blind gisaeng sing. They had to shut their doors tonight, barring the entrance to keep non-members out, but Naksu knows the streets around Chwiseonru are lined with commoners, all hoping to catch a note.

Even the Four Seasons have taken seats at public tables, to better hear Mu-deok sing.

Naksu looks up at Jang Uk, seated on the bridge above the courtyard, trying to assess his mood.

He had come to their lesson earlier today shaken, for once not testing her with complaints about the courtesan house’s food or suggestions of how much he would enjoy a private performance.

Instead he had told her of a spy caught at Songrim, a soul-shifter, and the Jinyowon artifact used to sniff out the sorcery. His eyes had been imploring as if in warning.

What could Jang Uk be warning her of? The spy? The spirit Sapsali?

Why would he warn a gisaeng of either?

Naksu shakes her head.

It does not matter. She has no plans to perform the alchemy of souls. Her body is healing and soon her energy will return and then—

Her eyes shift to Park Dang-gu, seated close by. Then she will complete the mission given to her by the Danju. Park Jin’s death, though delayed by a month, would surely placate any anger that might linger due to Naksu’s disappearance.

Mu-deok’s song reaches its climax and Naksu closes her eyes. She can almost hear the sound of home in the notes; the birdsong of Danhyanggok, the wind through the valley as she stood atop her tree, the soft burble of the closest stream.

A discordant step breaks her reverie.

A man, a mage of Cheonbugwan by his robes, is approaching the stage. His eyes are locked on Mu-deok, his face slack with awe.

Mu-deok plays her final notes and Naksu knows this mage is going to try and meet her, to ambush the woman at the foot of the steps, prey on her perceived weakness in order to bask in her presence. Or worse.

Mu-deok stands, answered with stunned applause, and the man takes a step forward.

Naksu unsheathes her blade.

It is a performance sword, still at her side from her earlier dance. A flimsy thing, too blunt to do any damage to the man, it offers little threat.

But the mage does not know that, and Naksu holds the sword with clear deadly intent. He stumbles back a step.

“The singer is not entertaining guests tonight,” she says unequivocally.

Mu-deok glides by, unworried though not unaware.

“Wrong!”

Naksu strikes him in the back of the knee with the flat of her sheathed sword.

Jang Uk cringes away, hopping on one foot as he rubs at his bruised leg.

“Ah! Why do you keep hitting me?”

“Your leg is not moving when it should. If it was, I would not hit you.”

Jang Uk curls his lip. He does not think this is a good explanation; she can see that much in his expression.

She gestures back to the starting position, but Jang Uk ignores her. He flops down on the floor, arms and legs spread out to take up as much room as possible.

“I need water,” he groans.

Soon Naksu will be able to pull water from the air once more. She will be able to flood the room with water whenever Jang Uk complains, so he will gasp for peace instead.

Except she will not be here, teaching Jang Uk how to dance, when she regains her energy. She eyes the prostrate man. She thinks she might miss him, the smallest amount, when she leaves. Naksu no longer plans to kill him at any rate—him, or Park Dang-gu. Both had been little more than babies when her father was murdered.

Jin Cho-yeon, on the other hand…

The Jinyowon heiress had earned Naksu’s ire by her own hand, not just her mother’s. If she crossed Naksu again after she regained her energy…

She may not kill her, but she will certainly teach the arrogant girl a lesson.

“Water,” Jang Uk moans again.

Naksu rolls her eyes, walking across the room to set the pitcher of water beside Jang Uk’s head. He does not wait for the accompanying cup, simply lifting the pitcher to dump over his face.

“Get up,” she orders. “Go again.”

Jang Uk waves her away.

“I’m done for today,” he whines. “Leave me alone.”

Naksu nudges him with her foot, wrinkling her nose as her slipper makes contact with his sodden coat. Jang Uk turns his head to look up at her and Naksu rearranges her face into a glare.

“You have no agility and never trained in basic martial arts. If you are lazy as well, you will never learn.”

“I need to feel motivated to learn something and—”

“Why ask me to teach you if you are not motivated?”

“—I tire easily with my closed gate of energy and—”

“You are full of excuses. Is this not disrespectful?”

She prods his side with her foot again, but Jang Uk catches her ankle in a tight hold, stopping her from pulling back or stepping away.

“Tell me the truth, would you rather be something other than my master? What could it be? Would you want to be my wife? Would you still hit me then?”

Naksu wrenches her foot from his grasp. Jang Uk has tried this distraction before. It will not work. She sees how the men who fall for the other courtesans look at them. Jang Uk shares none of the dazed happiness of the successful suitors, nor the hopeless yearning clear on the faces of the rejected.

Their first meal, and that moment with the crab, was an aberration.

“I would rather be a master with an attentive pupil,” she says flatly.

Jang Uk groans again, but sits up.

“This isn’t what I want to learn,” he says. He looks like a sulky child, a pout starting to form on his lips.

“This is what you asked to learn.”

Jang Uk looks up at her, determination in his eyes.

“I want you to teach me what I saw you doing that first day, when you were alone in the courtyard.”

Naksu pales.

Tansu. He wants her to teach him Tansu.

Even without the words, surely he would feel the energy moving through his body, harmonizing with the energy of the ground beneath him and the sky above.

He would know her to be a mage if she did so much as walk through the steps with him.

She thinks of his warning, and his considering look that first day.

Did he already know?

“I cannot teach you that,” she tells him sharply.

“Eun-ji—"

The false name is only another reminder of where she is and what she cannot do.

“You should go,” she interrupts. “You are no longer my pupil.”

She leaves the room. Jang Uk knows his own way out of Chwiseonru.

Eating dinner that night, Naksu picks at her rice, feeling more bereft than the loss of Jang Uk as a student merited. She will need something else to fill her afternoons with now, and she is not exactly eager to know what Ju-wol will suggest.

“Maybe you should have tried to be nicer. Some people need encouragement when they do things well, rather than punishment when they do not.”

Naksu grimaces, though that is more in response to how Mu-deok tears into the duck leg in her hand than the other woman’s advice.  

“I teach how I was taught,” she answers glibly. “It obviously works.”

Mu-deok pulls a face.

“Did you like how you were taught?”

“It was effective. I mastered Jipsu in only five years, and am likely the youngest mage in Daeho that has mastered Chisu.”

“All of that and what did you use it for?”

Naksu bares her teeth.

“I do not want to hear this again. You said you would not discourage me from my revenge.”

In fact, Mu-deok had seemed encouraging when Naksu—fighting for anything to hold onto against the pain as Mu-deok locked her energy around her wound—had shared her goal of vengeance. It was only later, when Naksu listed the targets she had eliminated, and the ones still left, that Mu-deok began to express her doubts.

“I told you that I understand. It is only your master I question.”

“The Danju is not to be questioned.”

“Which is exactly why I do. Someone who never deems to explain his orders, who trained you since girlhood but never shared a thing—”

Mu-deok breaks off with a sigh.

“Let me ask you this, instead. Did he ever give you more than the name and location of the person you were meant to kill? Did he ever give you a reason why he marked them for death?”

“They were mages who supported Songrim, the ones that fostered or sponsored its corruption.”

“And they never protested their innocence? Never suggested that it was someone else inside the skin of the powerful mages you killed?”

The question makes Naksu pause because there was one who had done just that. An old man, so old she did not think he could walk on his own, who stared up at her from his deathbed and pled for her to kill his grandson instead, claiming that was the mage she was truly after.

Naksu had thought it sick, how he threw his family in her path, yet another example of the mage’s cruelty. But Mu-deok’s words…

Her eyes fall to the cabinet in the back of their room. Inside, nestled in a box on the lowest shelf, is the soul ejector she did not use that night.

But how would that mage have a soul ejector if he was the Danju’s enemy? And why, if the Danju had facilitated the mage’s alchemy of souls, would he have her kill the original? Unless…if the shift was unwilling, the other person must be silenced.

…was that all the Shadow Assassin was?

A maid who cleaned up the evidence?

She shakes her head in denial, even as her mind spins with questions.

“He was my master. It does not make sense for him to tell me everything. Even you do not tell me why you want me to kill the man you do.”

“I am not your master, and you are not my dog on a leash. I would like us to be friends. If you ask me a question, I will answer it.”

Naksu wonders if she should ask after Mu-deok’s powers, or who her master was, or even what the woman’s real name is. She could ask why Mu-deok let herself be sold to the courtesan house, or why she healed Naksu, or even why she wants to be friends.

But she considers their conversation, and the dozens of lives she took while assuming that the reasons the Danju called for their deaths were good.

“The price you asked of me, for healing and hiding me…why him?”

Mu-deok folds her hands together tightly. Naksu can see the whites of her knuckles.

“He used me when I was too young to know better, and stole from me when I could do nothing to stop him,” she says. “Then pushed me over the side of a boat and left me for dead, a blind girl in the depths of Lake Gyeongchangdo.”

Naksu reaches across the table hesitantly to lay her hand over Mu-deok’s clasped ones. Her grip relaxes under Naksu’s touch.

“That is reason enough for me to make his death painful,” she says. Mu-deok snorts, the least refined sound Naksu has ever heard her make.

“Then I do not even need to tell you my suspicions that he was part of the plot to kill your father.”

The next day a gift arrives, carried in the hands of a servant of Jang Gang’s house.

The other women giggle over the box as Naksu reads the note. It is unsigned, but the message makes the sender clear enough.

I hope these serve you better than your erstwhile student did.

“Silks, I bet,” Hong-shim says.

“No, a set of fans,” suggests Chae-ryung.

“He’d send her snacks if he saw how she ate at breakfast this morning,” Su-hye teases.

Naksu does not bother to speculate, simply reaching forward and unknotting the fabric wrapped around the long box.

Inside she finds a pair of blades. They are beautiful, the scabbards inset with swirling clouds of mother of pearl. A trio of birds graces them both. Not the delicate lines of an egret or crane, but the bold strokes of birds of prey: an osprey, a kestrel, and an eagle.

When she unsheathes one, the blade gleams in the light, begging to be infused with her energy.

Hye-sun groans in disappointment.

“They’re not blunted. You won’t be able to dance with them.”

“Oh, that can easily be fixed,” Ju-wol says, waving away the dancer’s complaints.

Naksu knows she will not be fixing these anytime soon.

Mu-deok’s hand hovers over the second sword, a slight smile pulling at her lips.

“What is it?” Naksu asks. She half expects her to mutter something mysterious about new swords and new fates, but Mu-deok’s smile only widens.

“Did you read the back?” she asks.

The question gains the blind woman a few wary looks. The courtesans of Chwiseonru are never quite sure how to act, when Mu-deok knows something she shouldn’t be able to.

Naksu reaches for the card.

On the back, in the same neat script as the front it reads:

May I join you for lunch tomorrow?

Chapter Text

Naksu meets Jang Uk on the stone bridge in Chwiseonru’s central garden. He stares at her for a long moment and Naksu thinks he is mustering up the courage to apologize, or maybe to demand an apology from her. 

“You look pretty.”

Naksu blinks. It is not what she had expected. 

“I mean—your dress looks pretty. I mean, you look pretty in that dress because the dress is pretty.”

What? Naksu’s eyes narrow. Is he making fun of her? 

He looks embarrassed enough that she would say he wasn’t, but then Jang Uk straightens up, squaring his shoulders and smiling down at her in a way that makes the spare few inches difference between their heights seem like an entire foot. 

“Did you dress up for me?” he asks, his voice colored with suggestion. 

Naksu scowls. 

“No. I wear this everyday,” she grumbles.

Jang Uk’s smile widens as if he can tell she is lying.

Naksu scowls; her face feels hot.

“Do you want to eat or not?” she asks sharply. She spins on her heel without waiting for a reply, eager to hide her face behind whatever ostentatious meal Jang Uk will order today. 

He is meant to be begging her forgiveness, pleading with her to ignore his poor work ethic so she will take him back as a student, not doing…whatever he is doing now. 

“Wait!” Jang Uk’s hand darts out to grab her and he catches her by the sleeve. Naksu glares at the offending garment. If it did not have so much extra silk he would not have caught her. Naksu yearns to be back in her practical clothes, but Ju-wol would never allow it. Especially considering the number of impractical clothes Ju-wol has now presented her with. 

“I want to walk first,” Jang Uk says. “Will you join me?”

He is gesturing towards Chwiseonru’s main gate and out into the city beyond.

Naksu thinks about walking with him through the streets of the Daeho Fortress, lingering at each stall like the other young couples, as he offered to buy her snacks, or ribbons, or hair pins. 

She imagines looking up from a display of honey cakes to see Park Jin’s eyes staring her down, a burning arrow at the ready.

She shakes her head.

“I must stay here.”

Jang Uk hardly seems deterred.

“Let us explore the gardens then,” he says.

They walk through Ju-wol’s well-manicured garden side by side. 

He does not ask for her to take him back as her student.

He returns the next day and the day after that, but he comes each night too. Mu-deok’s performances must be rationed to promote their exclusivity, but Naksu’s dancing is not nearly so valuable. She and Hye-sun spin through a Geommu during the house's dinner service as the sun sets behind them; a sequence of movements that is half a dance and half a duel.

Naksu feels Jang Uk’s eyes on her with every step.

When the applause fades, he always sends a servant to invite her to take a drink with him at his table. He keeps her there until the bottle is empty, seemingly undisturbed by the sweat on her skin or the wilted flowers in her hair. 

He asks about how she fills her day without him to teach, about what made her decide to forgo eating most meat, about what song of Mu-deok’s she enjoys the most. 

Their walks through the garden have been full of idle chatter, and their lunches barely skim deeper, but under the night’s dark sky he pries deeper. 

Tonight his questions have skirted her past, as Naksu has tried to hedge her way through answers that highlight her ignorance of their country’s recent politics and her inexplicable ability to skin a fish in thirty seconds. 

“What of your family?” he asks.

Naksu stills for a moment, turning in respect before she sips at her drink. 

“Dead,” she says shortly after she swallows. She does not think of her father showing her the astronomic records he so diligently kept, nor the soft hand of her mother as she braided her hair. The brothers she had she knows as little more than blurs of dark clothing now; they were older than her and had little interest in the games of the young girl she had been when they passed.

When they were killed. 

“Ah,” Jang Uk says, a noise of acceptance at the shortness of her answer, and of understanding for a subject she does not wish to linger on. “And what did you do before you came to Chwiseonru to become a gisaeng?” 

Naksu cannot look at him. 

What had she done? Trained and killed and hunted for any word of his father surfacing from his mysterious exile. Laid awake in Danhyanggok fantasizing about killing every Park, Jin, Jang, and Seo in Daeho so they would feel the same emptiness she did. And then attacked the man he respects and resents in equal measure—the closest thing he knows to a father—before staggering into a bar to steal Mu-deok's body.

“Got into debt,” she tells him instead. It is a common enough story at a gisaeng house. “My creditors sold me to Ju-wol to make up my unpaid balance.” 

Jang Uk sets down his cup, ducking his head and forcing her to meet his eyes.

“I know that is not true, Eun-ji. I spoke to Ju-wol about you. Chwiseonru owns Mu-deok, but not you. You just insisted on remaining together, and Ju-wol thought you beautiful enough to stay.”

Naksu flounders. He spoke to Ju-wol about her past? What else did he know? What else had she said? 

“I agree of course. You are beautiful.”

His serious mien is half-shed, revealing the irreverent heir beneath. Yet it is only half -shed. 

Naksu knows what she looks like. She knows that in her fine silk dresses, with her hair in elaborate coiffures and her steps smooth and dainty, heads turn to stare in the street instead of roll on the ground. 

Customers offer compliments as she leaves the stage, or when she passes them in the corridor. But none of them have said it like Jang Uk just has, as if her beauty is a fact as certain as the power in Lake Gyeongchangdo or the sun’s path across the sky.

“You are beautiful,” he says again, “and talented, and free. Why do you stay here? Are you in need of money or shelter? Are you hiding fr—I can—”

Naksu shakes her head and cuts his offer off short.

“I cannot leave Mu-deok.”

They had grown closer, ever since Jin Cho-yeon came to harass them with petty requests and complaints. Naksu had never seen Mu-deok react to someone so, like any additional insult would break her in two. 

Besides, they were allies now, both determined to expose the corruption at the heart of their country. Mu-deok had told her why they were here; Chwiseonru was the gossip center of the fortress, frequented by the four main heirs and the crown prince. Here they were perfectly positioned to hear the political machinations of every actor and faction, and to borrow the spirit plaques necessary to confirm them. 

“We can take her too. I’ll buy out her contract.”

Naksu shakes her head again. In another week she will be gone, fully healed. She doubts Mu-deok will stay much longer. Naksu knows Mu-deok well enough to understand she did not end up at Chwiseonru by accident; the other woman could leave whenever she wished, slave or no.  

But Naksu’s timeline is more definite. She was set to remain a month and there will be no chance of an extended stay. Mu-deok’s repayment is the death of a high profile man. It is unlikely Naksu will be able to kill him without witnesses. 

There will be no chance to separate Naksu from Eun-ji in the aftermath, so it is better to separate Jang Uk from both.

“Do you have a moment, Eun-ji?” 

Naksu sets aside the record of Lake Gyeongchangdo’s water levels in the past three years—surreptitiously copied from Songrim’s archives two nights ago—and nods. Mal-sook would not ask her if she were not desperate; the younger girl is a shy thing, liable to shrink out of Naksu’s way whenever they cross paths. 

“What is it?”

Mal-sook hesitates, biting her lip as she glances back the way she came. Perhaps she is debating whether she really needs Naksu’s assistance after all.

“There…is a guest…a new patron. He…is…”

“Does Ju-wol need me to dance?” Naksu asks impatiently and Mal-sook shakes her head frantically. 

“No, not to dance. He wants to see all the gisaengs in the house. To choose the best he said.”

“And Ju-wol sent for me? ” 

Naksu is not a good gisaeng. The talents that would make her so are outside her skillset. Ju-wol knows this. 

“Well…she is trying to find Ae-hyang. But he’s sent nearly everyone else away already. Ju-wol asked me to find anyone he hasn’t rejected yet.”

Naksu sighs. Who knows how long it will take Ju-wol to find Ae-hyang. 

“I’m sure it will be a short interview,” she says with a wink. Mal-sook blushes at her joke, but smiles hesitantly. 

It is progress. Maybe by the time Naksu leaves the girl will be able to joke back.

Chwiseonru’s new patron has established himself in one of the first floor meeting rooms. The one decorated with cranes in flight. Hye-sun is just exiting as they enter the hall and she rolls her eyes at them both. 

“Pray for Ae-hyang to come soon,” she mutters when they meet in the middle. “She is better at flattering the boors than you or I.” 

“How scandalous,” Naksu replies with a smirk as Mal-sook chirps weakly in protest. Ae-hyang is the best of them all when it comes to flattering arrogant customers. But the fact that the crown prince is counted in their number meant that such a thing was usually left unsaid.

Hye-sun laughs and continues on.

“Ready?” Naksu asks Mal-sook quietly and the girl nods, opening the door to reveal their discerning guest. 

Naksu does not recognize the man, but he seems to recognize her. She is only halfway out of her bow when she hears the quiet shick of a sword being unsheathed. 

Mal-sook does not have time to gasp before Naksu has pushed her from the room. 

“Run!” she orders her, but Mal-sook has collapsed onto her knees and her eyes are wide with fright. 

The other girls inside—Kwan, Su-hye, and Hei-ran—scream as they scramble for the door. They don’t make it; the man stepping into their path, blade held aloft.

“Naksu,” the man says—no, accuses. On the table, she can see a discarded sketch of her own face. Someone had sent him here, sent him to search the gisaeng house for her. 

But who? Park Jin? The Danju? Or someone else—someone who had caught on to Naksu and Mu-deok’s plans and somehow put together the truth of her identity? 

He charges forward and Naksu dodges the first attack. He has left the room open to her, including the open window at its back. She could escape in moments, disappearing into the night. 

But Mal-sook is behind her, cowering in her shadow, and Su-hye is there too, crouched between the wall and the room’s tall cabinet. What would he do to them if she disappeared? 

No, she cannot just vanish. She needs to draw him away from the others, lead him on a merry chase before—hopefully—escaping with her life. 

He lunges again and Naksu moves, slipping past his blade to strike his wrist, his elbow, his shoulder. 

He falters but he does not drop his blade. 

“You’re weak for an assassin, Naksu,” he sneers. This time her name is mocking on his lips. “Have you grown soft in your time bedding men instead of killing them?” 

Naksu shifts to the left, further into the room. His eyes track her movement. 

Good. If he is looking at her than he is not looking at Mal-sook. And if he is not looking at Mal-sook than the girl will have a chance. 

“Who are you?” she asks. “Who sent you here?”

He does not answer with his words, but with a wide swing of his sword. Naksu ducks under his arm, but he turns too quickly for her to attack his back. 

She avoids another slash and another jab before she risks a glance to the door. Kwan is pulling at Mal-sook, trying to pull the girl out of the room with her. 

It is a risk she should not have taken.

He follows her gaze and his face twists into an ugly smile. 

His blade comes down and she dances backwards a second too late. It is only a matter of chance that she avoids being cut. The point of his sword skims over her shoulder, slicing through layers of silk to expose the almost-healed wound left by Park Jin’s arrow. 

“Care about your fellow whores, do you? That does not sound like the Naksu I heard about.” 

Naksu kicks out and he stumbles back, but it is a reprieve of only a moment. She no longer stands between him and the door. She thought it a good thing before, a chance for the others to run, but now she curses their vulnerability. 

“Well I have never heard of you at all,” she taunts and his face flushes with anger. “So I do not think your opinion matters much.” 

He barrels forward in anger and Naksu sneers, eluding the thrust of his sword. His anger and pride make him sloppy, make him weak. 

“Yeong!”

It has been years since Naksu answered to the name, but her attention snaps to Mu-deok nonetheless. It could be no one else; she’d confided the truth only days before. In all of Daeho, it is only Mu-deok and the Danju who know her origins. The latter would never call her Yeong. 

Mu-deok holds a sword in her hand, one of the pair that Jang Uk sent as a gift, and it glows with imbued energy. 

She tosses it across the room, her accuracy unerring despite the blindness of her eyes. Naksu catches it easily, spinning it in her grip to block the man’s next strike.

The feel of the blade in her hand—its handle against her palm, the shift in the air around its cool steel, the energy twisting through the air—is transcendent. She has missed this. 

A part of her—the part that gloried in being called Naksu, who reveled in hearing fearful whispers of her deeds—wants to draw the man into a fight. It would be fun, she knows, to tease her opponent with the thought of victory before she crushes him in defeat. 

But the other part—the one who ate breakfast with Su-hye each morning, and danced with Hye-sun each night, who joked with Mal-sook and confided in Mu-deok and gossiped with Ju-wol, who listened to the laughter and complaints and drunken ramblings of these women every day, that part—refused to risk it. 

She feels the energy on the blade—it is Mu-deok’s she recognizes, familiar but pulsing with a note that was never present in Naksu’s own—and harnesses it. A tiny droplet breaks away from the rest, floating in the air for a single second before Naksu cleaves her sword through it. 

The energy explodes forwards, slicing through the other man before he can even think to raise his sword to block it. 

He gasps and then—

“A soul-shifter!” Kwan exclaims. And she is right.

Naksu had killed him long before the petrification had driven him to run wild but the first signs are there—in the darkness creeping into his veins and the slight smell of petrichor rising from his spilt blood. Naksu uses the tip of her sword to widen the opening of his split jacket. 

The blue sign of the alchemy of souls burns brightly against his dulling skin. 

“We have to send a message to Songrim,” Su-hye says and the others nod. Even Mu-deok. 

Mal-sook entered the crane room with her. Her wide eyes had never turned away—had hardly even blinked—as Naksu fought the soul-shifter. She had heard the man’s accusations to her, had heard exactly what name he called her, and sat in the doorway as Naksu cleaned the lifeblood of the soul-shifter off her sword. 

“I don’t know who it was,” Mal-sook now says. “They were wearing a scarf around their face.”

She glances at Naksu.

“A blue one!” Su-hye adds. 

“Was it a man or a woman?” the Songrim mage asks. It's the handsome one, the one Hong-chim likes to moon after. Lee Sang-ho?

Mu-deok says nothing; none of the mages expect her to provide anything useful. Naksu sits beside her, mouth firmly shut. 

“They were tall,” Kwan says hesitantly. 

“Not that tall!” Su-hye furiously corrects. “We were on the ground. Even the shortest man looks tall when you are looking from the floor.”

She is trying to obfuscate, Naksu is the tallest gisaeng in the house, but her words only make Park Jin nod. 

“You had never seen this person before?”

The question is directed back at Mal-sook, who shakes her head.

“They came through the open window and left the same way.” 

Their interrogator sighs in frustration.

“And the soul-shifter? What about him?”

They all shake their heads. 

“A new guest,” Ju-wol explains. “Though he claimed to be a mage of Cheonbugwan.”

“We will find out the truth of him soon enough,” Park Jin says, laying his hand on the other mage’s shoulder. “As for his mysterious killer…Naksu. It must have been.”

“And why,” asks a sly voice from the doorway, “would the dreaded Shadow Assassin protect a few whores?”

The newcomer is a Cheonbugwan mage, though not one who has ever come to Chwiseonru before. Naksu stares at her lap to hide her bared teeth. Why indeed. As if the gisaengs of Chwiseonru are not a thousand times more worthy of her respect and protection than him and his ilk.

His lip curls at the sight of them. Five bloody and bedraggled women—one blind, two stuck in shocked silence—with a fully-made-up Ju-wol hovering over them like a protective hen. 

“Likely she was hunting the soul-shifter more than protecting the...courtesans,” Park Jin answers. “And we will know more about both once we take his body back to Songrim and identify him.”

“But why would Naksu be hunting a soul-shifter?” Park Dang-gu asks. 

“Many of her victims were—” the leader of Songrim cuts himself off, looking at his audience. 

Naksu holds her breath as his eyes linger over her and Mu-deok. She forces herself to dip her head deferentially. Mu-deok's fingers tighten over her own.

“Let us return to Songrim. Dang-gu, ensure Master Heo has everything he needs to move the body.”

He sweeps from the room and Naksu releases a slow breath.

When she meets Mal-sook’s eye, the girl offers her a shy smile.

“I should have been here,” Jang Uk says the next morning as he fusses over her. He had come earlier than usual, just after breakfast, as if he had rushed to the gisaeng house as soon as he’d heard the news. He squeezes her arms as if he is checking her for bruises. As if Naksu would reveal herself with a flinch at the simple prodding of a bruise. 

Naksu snorts. 

“What good would that have done?” she asks.

Jang Uk, with his closed gate of energy, is even more useless than Naksu, with her knotted wound. She is glad that he was not there to get hurt. It is bad enough that she had to worry for the gisaengs of Chwiseonru, if she’d had to worry for Jang Uk as well —

“Not much,” he says in answer. “For now. But I have been taken up by a new teacher.”

Naksu frowns. She remembered his complaints to Park Dong-gu, and the long list of masters who populated it. Who was left?

“A master has agreed to open your gate of energy?” she asks, half expecting him to explain that the mythical Master Lee has come down from the mountains to teach Jang Uk himself.

“No,” Jang Uk says with barely a wince. “And I did not ask. He is not going to teach me spells at all, but martial arts.”

"What?"

“You were right; I have been lazy and I need to prove myself.”

He stares into her eyes. His hands are still wrapped around her upper arms, his hold sure and tight.

“I have been so focused on my gate of energy that I have neglected other basics. I do not have the stamina for much right now, but when I do unlock my energy, I will have the skill to use it. To become a proper mage.”

He is burning with such determination that Naksu could almost believe his energy already unlocked. 

She imagines herself as his teacher; imagines them in Danhyanggok together as she trains him, using the type of soft orders Mudeok favors, walking him through the steps patiently as no one had ever done for her. She thinks she could make him a prodigy. Better than even his father was.

"I can," he says, as if answering her unspoken thoughts. "I will."