The centuries turn their locks

And open under the hill

Their inherited books and doors

- W.S. Graham

They say the truth works two ways

(maybe the truth's not what we need)

- Mumford & Sons

SEOUL, KOREA – five years ago

i.

So remembers—

"You look tired." Wook pours him another cup of tea. "Are you living well?"

What is there to say to that? So is nursing three cracked ribs, and has not been to Daegu in a year. Park Soo-kyung, usually gruff and merciless, has told him to rest. He had not expected Wook to visit; he never expects anyone to visit.

"Is there any news," So asks, avoiding the question, "Of the expansion?"

Wook purses his lips. "Wang Taejo has pushed off the U.S. contract again. He's concerned about the market."

To So's understanding, the market is primed and ready for Korean connections. But he is not Wook, or his father, and his help is never sought on such matters. The real question he has—when will his father write to him again, or call—is not one he will ask Wook.

"I will be in Daegu at New Year's," So says, sipping at the tea. Swallowing is painful. "Will you be at home?"

"That's why I came," Wook says, and for the next half-hour he explains quietly that So had better not come home at all, tensions are running high and it would be wise not to stir the pot. Of course, two months later, Wook scales higher in the management of the company, taking over a position that had been left open by Hwangbo's death two years earlier.

At the time, So is pleased that the position does not get subsumed under his mother's aegis of power. At the time, So presumes that Wook kept him away to spare him familial infighting, not to clear the path for his own advancement.

After all, who would think of promoting So?

"For now, keep your distance," Wook said, when the tea was finished.

It felt like kindness, then.

It feels, now, like a warning.

ii.

The party breaks up to the shriek of ambulance sirens. In a few moments, the news spreads like wildfire: CEO Wang has had a heart attack.

Or a stroke.

Or he is already dead.

What is rumor and what is truth is, of course, hard to divine in a flurry of faces and voices, all of which want to know what this means for themselves as well as for Wang Taejo. Ha Jin's heart is in her throat as she watches her former princes cluster in corners, brows knotted with worry.

Still, she must work and wait.

As the wife of the CEO, Yoo commandeers a microphone and speaks with dulcet calm. "The CEO has had an unexpected health setback," she says, as though her husband was not carried out on a stretcher moments before. Ha Jin wonders if the very publicity of his exit was part of someone's chess-piece plan. Surely a backdoor exists for time such as these.

Yoo tells the guests that the party must end early, but they are welcome to finish drinking and eating. Then she returns to talk with the former Queen Hwangbo, Jung's arm linked through hers.

Ha Jin tries to find So, but she can't. She is pouring another sherry for a lech of a businessman when So practically swoops down on her. His face is set like granite.

"Ya," he says. "We need to talk."

The businessman splutters something about his frazzled nerves, but Ha Jin isn't sorry to be free of his wandering hands. Anyway, So gives him a death-glare that settles him and his nerves.

She half-expects to be shoved into a coat closet, but So leads her, instead, out into the sharp evening chill. The nightlife of Daegu whistles around them. In her scanty dress, Ha Jin shivers.

"Aish," So mutters, and to her surprise, he shoulders off his immaculately fitted jacket and tosses it around her.

"What do you want?" She asks the question softly. It is impossible for her not to speak softly to him.

"Not here," he says, gruff. "Meet me at Baek Ah's. You seem to know the way."

Something else must have happened behind those closed doors. Something that she fears.

"Your father…" she begins, but he has already turned his back, ramrod stiff and resolute.

She may lose her job over this—leaving early—but Ha Jin doesn't care. She only got the job in the first place to win his trust.

She didn't think it would happen so soon.

She arrives at Baek Ah's before So does. She doesn't think there is anyone home until-

"Aigo, what a mess!" Eun, in the most ridiculous tangerine silk pajamas that Ha Jin has ever seen, swans dramatically into the hall. "Wook is wily, I'm telling you. Always has been. And now he's all but killed—"

He sees her and stops short.

"My father always lives," Jung says confidently. "Always. But I've had enough talk of business tonight," Then he sees her too.

She had glimpsed them at the party, before it all fell apart. She had ached, then, over flashes of memory.

The ache has now swelled, and it pounds in her chest like a heart would.

"Who are you?" Eun asks, mouth rounding in surprise. "One of Baek Ah's—"

"Don't be rude," Jung mutters. He is upset, for all his appearance of bravery. Ha Jin wonders how much Jung loves his father in this world, or if his mother is once again his only star. "Miss, are you lost?"

They both loved her in Goryeo. She feels the loss of it as they stare at her, curious and ignorant.

"She's with me."

So's voice rings out behind her and in another moment, he has her by the elbow and is guiding her away from them. Even with the worries for Taejo hanging over everyone's head, that will get the two of them gaping—So bringing a woman home, a woman wearing his jacket. Ha Jin assumes (hopes) that he doesn't have anyone here, and then hates herself for wishing isolation on him.

Hasn't he suffered enough?

I'm here now, she thinks stubbornly. I'm here.

Whatever happens to his father, whatever will not happen with his mother, she is here.

So shuts the door of a chestnut-paneled office behind them. He folds his arms, hands gripping his elbows. He has tattoos on every knuckle. One bears the characters for wolf, another the character of fire.

Some part of him, Ha Jin thinks, must know.

"You knew," he says, and she jumps.

"What?"

"You knew that Wook was planning something. Tell me how."

She doesn't know what Wook did, but she can guess its essence. Can guess that Wook, with surgical precision, shifted the scales against Taejo's life and sanity…and his power. "Your eyes have always been on Yo," she suggests. She hopes, this time, he'll listen to her. "It's as I said. Wook is an enemy too. He wants the company for himself."

"So you said." A muscle in So's jaw twitches. "And it seemed unlikely. But now…"

"I listen and learn," Ha Jin says quickly. "That's why…I can be of value to you. Wook has been taking steps in the dark. When your mother fights for a place for her sons—" she bites her lip, hoping he won't flinch under the knowledge that that doesn't mean all his mother's sons—"He has whispered in others' ears. If you let me, I can…I can get close to him. I can learn what he's plotting next."

She is speaking in vagaries, but mercifully, So seems momentarily convinced. He bites his lip, deep in thought. She knows that this isn't what he wants to do, or be—he hates intrigue and everything that makes men into shadows. He always has.

"It won't be safe," he says sharply. "Nothing in this city is. No one is."

"You don't care about me," Ha Jin reminds him, and feels the thrill of bittersweet satisfaction when he flinches slightly.

He recovers quickly. "Despite what you may believe from Soo-kyung or my snake-tongued family, I am not so hard as that." His fingers whiten, clenched too tightly. "You seem hellbent on helping me. It is not without risk."

"I'll take any risk," Ha Jin says, and she means it.

iii.

So Hwangbo has his vengeance after all.

Justice never enters her mind. His family knew it as a suicide; the media as an unexpected heart attack. Hwangbo's wife bore it with levelheaded grief; his children with silent, moon-faced depression.

Yoo knew it for what it was; arsenic to weaken the system over time, and one final, heavy dose to finish him off.

They are a weak family and they will all die weak.

So she thought.

She stays at the hospital by Taejo's side because it is what a wife is supposed to do—even though she will do it for one night only. She combs her hair in the mirror of a private room, too small for her preference, though more luxurious than any other offering in this wing.

Wook had some fire in his belly after all, even if he didn't realize the irony of causing a real heart attack.

Turn and turnabout. He rose after his father's death—to no great end—and now he wants to rise again.

(Justice never enters her mind.)

Yoo smiles at a cold reflection. It is almost impressive, to be sure, but it will not stop Wook from dying weak.

iv.

"I saw the news," Min Seo says, as soon as he arrives. "They say it's a heart attack?"

"They say any shit they can sell," Yo says wearily. He doesn't love her anymore—perhaps he never truly did—but he can let himself be weary around her. That is more than most. "The old man has to die someday."

She flattens her lips into a line. "Imagine if Kiha said that about you."

Yo glares. But his face softens when the bedroom door opens and Kiha bounds across the room into his arms. "Appa!"

He buries his face in his son's thick hair, because this, no one can see: tenderness.

When Kiha wriggles away, Yo is suitably stern again.

"It's past your bedtime."

"You haven't been here in eleven nights," Kiha accuses him. He waves two fat hands. "That's more than my fingers."

"Appa is busy," Min Seo says caustically. "He has funerals to attend."

"Funerals?" Kiha's round cheeks fall a little.

"No. Aish." Yo drags a hand over his face and glares at Min Seo again. She's clearly pissed at him for not coming around as often as he should. Their arrangement is harder for her, in many ways, than it is for him. Partly because she won't take as much money as he would give her, and partly because she has to live with shame while he only has to live with a secret. The latter is something that money cannot solve.

She could still model, he thinks, eyeing her slender figure. One pregnancy shouldn't finish that. He knows well enough that it did.

Min Seo softens a little over the course of an hour, but by the end of an hour, Yo has to leave. It was foolish of him to come here anyway, with Wook on the prowl for blood. Not to mention his mother.

She wouldn't speak to him, afterwards. She turned her face away with a sliver of the scorn she usually reserves for So, and performed her public duties. A warning, as sure as Wook's coup had been.

He didn't act soon enough. That is the long and short of it, the long and short of Yo's dangerous weakness—that he plans and plots and is endlessly clever, until he drops his guard.

He tightens his arms around Kiha. He has been known to drop his guard.

Mercifully, that is not yet known by his mother—or by Wook.

Yo wonders who between them would pay more for such a chink in his armor.

v.

"The girl," So says, not looking up from his soju, "Is sleeping here tonight."

Baek Ah has to swallow his astonishment, and chase it with a drink of his own. "Jinjjaya?" He half-expected So to be in a tortured state about his father, but the Wangs are never simple. Jung was similarly disaffected. "Did she…convince you?"

"Wook convinced me." So reaches for another bottle. "And she predicted Wook. Voila." He says the word, a French word, with a mocking little glance at Baek Ah, who spent a year in Paris.

There will be no talk of Taejo, then, or Mu. Baek Ah's heart stings for So anyway; for the way that everything in his world must be shaking. Baek Ah knows that Mu depends on So more than either of them let on, and surely it is reciprocal.

Baek Ah hopes that So knows he can depend on him, too, but he is not anyone of import. Not really. Not here.

"She seems sincere," he says, to fill the space of silence. The girl—Ha Jin—looks at So as though she loves him. That is what Baek Ah does not say. "Whatever happened in that room…"

"I told you my father was dying," So returns, unexpectedly. "I came here, knowing that. Everything else is a duel, Baek Ah. A duel for a throne." He drops his head into his battered hands.

Baek Ah puts together the pieces of the puzzle. He asks, very cautiously, "Your throne?"

So lifts his head. When he answers, it is not quite an answer. "I," he says, "Have never asked for it."