Chapter 1: Prologue
Chapter Text
When Yoon Jongwoo was a boy, his mother often scolded him for daydreaming. “There’s nothing wrong with a little fantasy,” she would say, “But it mustn’t take priority over the real world. You can’t afford to have your head in the clouds when there’s still work to do in the field.”
Jongwoo had taken his mother’s words to heart as deeply as he could; he couldn’t afford not to. When he was six years old, his village was attacked as part of a rebel army's pillaging journey to the capital. Jongwoo and his brother only survived because their widowed mother locked them in a rice chest and pleaded with them to stay quiet, no matter what happened. Then, in the act that truly saved their lives, she fed them milk mixed with enough alcohol to temper any childish, heroic impulses that might arise from her younger son and any involuntary noises that might emerge from the elder. It put both boys to sleep until the chaos was over.
When Jongwoo awoke, his mother was dead, along with anyone else in the village foolish enough to beg for their meager farm to be spared from paying tribute to the man who had already dubbed himself the next ruler of the country. In the face of this attempt at not even resistance, but a petition for leniency, the sanguinary soldiers set fire to fields and cottages at random, enough to send a message that would take a generation to fade from memory. Some peasants fled their blighted land, rejecting the laws that bound them and their families to it for generations, but most, either unwilling or unable to take those risks, pooled their remaining resources and huddled together for a winter that the local soothsayer predicted would be especially harsh.
Her prediction was right, but the elderly augur didn't live to see how much. As the marauding army's leader became king, ending years of civil warfare and ushering in a much-welcome era of peace, a plague spread through the village like a malicious rumor, and the soothsayer was one of the first to go. Jongwoo's brother was one of the last.
When the final snows thawed and the advent of spring made the world feel alive again, the local lord, recently returned from a journey to the capital to convince the new government to keep his family land in his family, took a tour of the squalid section of the countryside that was his (slightly reduced) domain. Between the war and the winter and the other hardships, he hadn't been able to collect all the taxes he was due, and he wanted to see with his own shrewd eyes how much he could expect to collect now that things had calmed down. What he saw cut through to the soft insides of his calloused heart. Even the beggars in the capital weren't as abject as the peasants working his land; the plague had passed the major cities entirely. This village's children looked as hale as they did, an aide told the lord, as they rode past children who didn't look hale at all, because some Buddhist monks from the next province over had managed to make it out on a mission to help the needy.
As he looked down on the children who had survived the winter, his gaze caught, like an overlong sleeve on a branch, on the black eyes of an especially small and emaciated boy. Jongwoo's black eyes stared into his lord's like he didn't have the sense to know who he was staring at. Or like he knew exactly who, the lord mused. The boy unsettled him, but he couldn't look away. He felt like he had heard a noise in the dark forest outside the walls of his estate, the snap of a twig or branch that could mean nothing, but could be the sign of something lurking just beyond the torchlight. Before he could find what he was looking for in Jongwoo's unnerving eyes, they abruptly rolled back, and the boy collapsed in the dirt.
An old man crouched over the unconscious boy, holding him tenderly, and the lord felt guilty for the first time in years. He inquired after the child's family and learned that he had none. The villagers planned to take him to the nearest temple when he was a bit healthier, and when they could spare a man.
The lord sat up taller on his horse, which had eaten better all winter than these wretched people likely had all their lives. "Bring more food to this village from our stores," he told his attendant party, "and to every village like it on my land. When this boy is well enough to travel, bring him and the other orphans to our manor, where they will join my family as servants."
The lord's kindness in that moment probably spared him from a peasant revolt down the line. And though his manor teemed with orphans for a season, most were eventually offloaded to temples or distant relatives. Jongwoo, however, remained in the manor and worked hard to prove his worth. Of the staring contest with his lord, he had no memory. But it remained in the Shin patriarch's thoughts, and he came to feel for the boy an affection akin to what he would feel for a charmingly frisky stray dog. As Jongwoo healed and grew, his natural intelligence became clear, and the lord allowed him to attend lessons with his son. The intention was to develop in Jongwoo the skills for him to become Shin Jaeho's right-hand man once Jaeho took over his father's duties.
If he still lived, Jaeho's father would have been discontented to see that as master of the estate, Jaeho kept Jongwoo at arm's length, though he retained him as a servant and didn't allow him to take the civil service exam. The more gossipy servants whispered, well out of both men’s hearing, that the schism wasn't simply the result of the boys growing into their roles in society's natural hierarchy, but was, like that of so many quarrels between men, over a woman. Shortly before he died, Jaeho's father had blessed Jongwoo's marriage to Jieun, a servant of Jaeho's mother. Jaeho had also fancied Jieun (everyone could see it), but they obviously would have been an inappropriate match. By the time Jongwoo and Jieun wed, Jaeho had already married a lovely woman from another fine family whose hands had never, and would never, till the soil, and she soon bore him an heir.
And so the years passed, with everyone and everything in its rightful place, and the era of peace continued. No one talked about the war and the plague if they could help it, but echoes of that time could still be heard. When one encountered a band of brigands, those unfortunate and vindictive souls once shaken from their land, now roaming in the mountains and along the highways, memories of that time were inevitably unearthed, no matter how deeply they'd been buried.
But brigands appeared less and less often, so on the night he met Seo Moonjo, Jongwoo had no qualms about completing the last leg of his trip to town, the path up the hill through the forest, so close to sunset, though he meant to return earlier. He had lingered too long listening to a poet, whose tale of romance and tragedy he hadn't heard before, when he was supposed to be on the road. As the sun sank, the artist's choicest verses repeated in Jongwoo's head, and he barely registered the path in front of him as he turned them over and over, engrossed in their beauty and the craftsmanship behind it.
Later, Jongwoo wondered whether better heeding his mother’s advice would have prevented his fortunes from taking the turn they did that day. But if anyone could view the young man's life on a grander scale, one beyond the scope of any human, they would see that by the time he met the mysterious stranger in the dark, he had been walking that uncommon path for a long time.
Chapter 2: The Stranger
Chapter Text
At sundown, the woods outside the manor held a beauty few could appreciate. The coming darkness pushed many to scurry the final leg of their journey to the great house, and they arrived outside of the gate on top of the hill with flushed cheeks and announced their presence to the guards through labored breathing. But for Jongwoo, who had trekked the forest path countless times, the advent of twilight didn't speed up his pace, but deepened his reverie. The transient beauty of the sky bleeding out its ephemeral evening shades could only fuel his artistic inclinations.
He didn't think this a foolish tendency. As a longtime servant of the manor, he knew the area well enough to forgo unduly wariness. If there were brigands about, they wouldn't attack until they could fully hide themselves in the night, taking advantage of how the trees' natural canopy blocked much of the moonlight and most of the stars. With this assumption firmly in place, Jongwoo was doubly shocked when a strained, exhausted cry interrupted his musings.
"Fellow traveler! Fellow traveler!" a voice called weakly from the darkness when Jongwoo was halfway up the hill.
Jongwoo stopped and looked for the source of the noise. "Yes? Who calls?"
"A wandering tradesman in need of assistance," the voice said, still feeble but now much brighter.
Jongwoo followed the sound to the left side of the road. In the ditch next to the path lay a tall man whose lower body was drenched with blood, though Jongwoo couldn't make out where the blood was coming from. He knelt to see the stranger better. He couldn't deduce his age, profession, or region of origin, just that he was exceptionally handsome, with uncommon features. “What happened to you, sir?”
“A pair of thieves, I’m afraid,” the man said, a wry smile on his face. “They took me by surprise. I managed to fight them off, but they took my purse and gave me a wound on my leg. I can’t make it far on my own, so I’ve been hiding in case they come back.”
"They attacked you today? Before sundown?"
"Yes, a few hours ago. You understand why I was caught unaware."
The thought of brigands grown bold enough to assault travelers in their forest in broad daylight spurred Jongwoo's heart to gallop. It didn't race solely out of fear, but out of a possessive anger some would dub inappropriate for his station.
“Give me your hand and I’ll help you to the manor,” he said. “If the thieves return, we’ll fight them off together.”
With a grin (which, when Jongwoo considered it later, was a somewhat unsettling one), the man grasped Jongwoo’s outstretched hand and was soon out of the ditch. Jongwoo wasn’t so naive as to not consider that the injured traveler could be a brigand himself, but his concerns were quelled by the closer look at the traveler's injury, which turned out to be a brutal gash on his thigh. The man, lightheaded and short of blood, could only stand on his own for a moment before collapsing against Jongwoo’s shoulder.
Jongwoo might have been too prone to daydreaming, but he knew how to react quickly in situations like this. “Get on my back,” he said. “I’ll carry you the rest of the way.”
The man was too exhausted to hesitate, and soon his arms were around Jongwoo’s neck. Jongwoo started the trudge up the steepest part of the hill. It was a bit awkward carrying someone taller than him, but the other man wasn’t too heavy, and Jongwoo was able to slowly make it up the incline without stopping.
When they were finally level with the house, though not quite out of the woods, the traveler spoke up weakly. “Sir, I apologize for my ingratitude thus far. Your strength and noble spirit have saved my life. I’m in your debt. Name whatever you want as repayment, and I’ll give it to you.”
Jongwoo flushed, and not just because of the exercise. “Please, there’s no need for all that. I’m no ‘sir’ and my spirit isn’t noble; I’m a servant in this house. I just couldn't stand to leave an honest wayfarer wounded and stuck on the side of the road.”
The man sighed, and the heat of his breath made the hairs on the back of Jongwoo’s neck stand up. “If you won’t name your price, my love, I have no choice but to make your deepest wish come true.”
That stopped Jongwoo in his tracks mere paces away from the gate. How was he supposed to respond to that? Was this "tradesman" really a madman - or a prostitute?
“What?” Jongwoo asked sharply. There was no response. “Hey, crazy bastard, what do you mean?” No response again. Jongwoo was about to say something harsher when he processed the pace of the other man’s breathing. The traveler had fainted.
Tightening his grip on the other man's legs, Jongwoo ran the rest of the way to the gate. “Help! Everyone! I have an injured man!”