An Unexpected Gift

“At times like this, my lord, you seem more the merchant than even my own father.”

Jeon I-an whispered it once the people of the Jegal Clan had carried Jegal Do-won off and gone.

“As a rule, the head of a body of men cannot be forever good and nothing else. There are times when he must be cold, times when he must be hard, and times when he must chase after profit like a merchant.”

“That is a leader one can believe in.”

She understood her husband when he was like this.

“In any case, our youngest has grown so dependable. And in no time at all.”

“The body grows by the day, and the heart matures along with it.”

He said it with his eyes on Scholar Cheon.

“But there were a great many people here today — can you stop every one of their mouths? I worry that you have made a promise hard to keep.”

“They know that as well as I do. Talk behind our backs cannot be helped; what they mean is that we are not to make an official matter of it.”

“Hmm. Then it hardly matters how thick the talk grows.”

Namgung Hak looked at his wife, who had a whiff of the schemer about her, and tightened his grip on her hand.

The Demon-Repelling Garden, which had been in disarray, was slowly being put back to rights. The onlookers drifted away, each of them setting the flowers of talk blooming, and there was no telling how far the scent of those flowers would carry.

I was about to slip out of the garden myself when two women came up to me.

“Master Scholar.”

It was Cheong Yo, the performing courtesan Jegal Do-won had invited.

“Yes, Miss Cheong.”

“Might we ask you to visit our tower some time? I should like the performing courtesans of our house to hear Master Scholar Cheon’s music. To hear Master Scholar Cheon’s playing once would, I think, teach them more than any textbook could. We shall of course see you compensated.”

“How could I sully the ears of the performing courtesans of the Cheonsangnak Tower, who boast the finest music in all Anhui?”

“What musician in all the world can call butterflies down with his music? You are too modest.”

The invitation held no appeal for me, and I was just about to decline when Namgung Mu-baek came up and laughed heartily.

“Hahaha! You have the right of it, Miss Cheong. There is nothing under heaven our Master Scholar Cheon does not know. I shall attend Master Scholar Cheon and bring him to visit one of these days.”

“Then this girl shall wait upon it gladly. I do hope the two of you will visit and light up our tower.”

Cheong Yo was a performing courtesan so rare that even Namgung Mu-baek had never heard her play, and the Cheonsangnak Tower was not a place even he could come and go from easily.

Only a prize fool turns down a chance as rare as this.

Song-ran spoke up, haltingly.

“If you would come, and I could hear Master Scholar’s music just once more, I should want for nothing else.”

Her eyes were shut, and even so I could feel that she spoke with them alight. Against sincerity like that I could refuse no further.

“Well, who am I to keep refusing? Invite me on a day that suits your schedule and I shall come.”

“I shall certainly come as well. Attending Master Scholar Cheon. I ought to go along as his escort.”

He cast about for a reason he had to go along and blurted out something quite absurd.

“Seeing you today, Young Master Namgung, you are very different from the rumors I had heard. Rumors are not worth taking to heart after all.”

Cheong Yo said it with a smile, and Namgung Mu-baek’s face went red.

“Hahaha, rumors are put about by people eaten up with envy, so it is nothing but ill words.”

“Today I have understood that very clearly.”

Pleased, perhaps, to be praised by so beautiful a woman, Namgung Mu-baek laughed until his shoulders shook. There was nothing of the hellion in it, and the maidservants and menservants around them tilted their heads.

Once Cheong Yo and Song-ran had gone, Namgung Mu-baek asked abruptly.

“Master Scholar, how was I?”

The question came with something expectant in his eyes, and Cheon Tae-san looked steadily back. He still had the look of a child hungry for praise.

“Ah, come now. When I broke Jegal Do-won’s wooden sword in two, I mean. That was the fourth move of the Boundless Azure Sky Sword Technique, I tell you.”

He had the face of a man dying to boast, and Cheon Tae-san’s indifference turned it peevish.

“It was good. Skyflash Parting the Sea is lightning flashing here and there and appearing from every side — the people of the murim call footwork like that shifting form and changing place, do they not? It was exactly so.”

“Truly?”

Namgung Mu-baek broke into a broad smile at that, then hurriedly straightened his face.

“What is the matter?”

Namgung Mu-baek spun away from Cheon Tae-san.

Turned away, Namgung Mu-baek wore a look of utter bewilderment.

Why the hell am I carrying on like this, wanting praise out of Scholar Cheon? Why me? If I want praise, I could get it from my father and be done with it.

Even to his own mind it was a preposterous way to behave.

“Why did I do that?”

Unable to make sense of his own behavior, Namgung Mu-baek muttered it under his breath. His father and mother were smiling brightly at him, and still short of praise, it seemed, he walked over to them. He had never known that the walk to meet his parents could be as light as this; without his unfolding a single lightness skill, his body felt as though it might lift off the ground.

Having had to deal with Namgung Mu-baek on top of everything else, I was worn out. Since awakening the Heavenly Martial Sacred Body my stamina had grown past anything a scholar could imagine; I could go three nights without sleep and feel nothing of it, and from what I had heard, that put me on a level with a martial artist of high internal force. For me to tire even so, the music contest and the rest of it must have taken a fair toll.

I was aching for a rest when Jegal Bang-hak came over to me.

What a very long day this is.

Their manner said they had something to say to me about the Jegal Do-won business. I received them with a placid air and waited in silence, and Jegal Bang-hak clicked their tongue.

“Truly, you are no scholar to be kept in a martial house. What say you? Would you not care to unfold your learning to the full at the Jegal Clan?”

The words brimmed with pride in the Jegal Clan.

“I am grateful for the offer, but there is work still left for me to do, and I must ask your indulgence for not answering readily.”

“Ho ho. Well now. Let me speak plainly. Have you no thought of coming to our clan and doing a little teaching? We have several of our own who want making human beings of. The pay, of course, will be reckoned higher than anywhere else. Ours is a house that knows how to treat a scholar properly. You know it. We are the Jegal Clan.”

I smiled at Jegal Bang-hak’s swaggering talk. I did not draw a line, because to draw a line was to draw a line across the breadth of my own life.

“You rate me so highly that I hardly know where to put myself. Should the chance arise, I trust there will come a day when I visit.”

I left them that much room, and a heavy voice rang out from behind.

“Scholar Cheon has a good deal left to do at our Namgung Clan yet.”

Namgung Hak of all people had appeared, and at his words Jegal Bang-hak’s brow creased slightly. He had been talking with his youngest son, and had come over at once the moment Jegal Bang-hak approached Scholar Cheon.

“It is not a matter that will be finished in a year or two, and it may well be a thing that takes a very long while.”

He put it vaguely, but I could feel what he really meant.

“Is that Scholar Cheon’s thinking as well?”

Rather than answer Namgung Hak, Jegal Bang-hak asked what I myself intended.

“They say the man who means to do a thing finds a way, and the man who does not finds an excuse.”

“Your answer is well received.”

Jegal Bang-hak left me a meaningful look, made their salutation to Namgung Hak, and went. Displeased by it, perhaps, Namgung Hak glared steadily at the place where they had gone.

“People who know nothing whatever about Scholar Cheon, and all they do is covet him.”

He found it pitiable that they had no idea what price he had paid to bring Scholar Cheon to the Namgung Clan.

“Today, in a good many ways, I am grateful to you, Scholar Cheon.”

Namgung Hak said it in an affectionate voice.

“Not at all.”

“I know it is all Scholar Cheon’s doing that our boy has come to play the part of a human being like this.”

“The young master’s true nature was good from the beginning; it was only that his circumstances did not follow suit, and he wandered off for a little while. It is no doing of mine.”

“Be that as it may, I shall not forget what I owe to Scholar Cheon.”

“From this point on, at least, I would ask you to praise the young master often. The young master is one who must be hammered with praise before he will turn to steel.”

“Ho ho ho. I shall take it to heart.”

Thinking it over, Namgung Hak called to mind how sparing he had always been with praise for his youngest. The three children above him were so outstanding that the youngest, who lagged a little behind, had never satisfied him at all.

That the boy turned out this way is in large part my own fault.

Had no one pointed it out to him, the bond between himself and his youngest son might have become one that could never be mended. And even Jegal Bang-hak had an eye on Scholar Cheon now; he must make the man one of his own as soon as ever he could.

“Scholar Cheon, take your morning meal tomorrow and then come to my quarters. There is something I would say to you.”

“Very well.”

Cheon Tae-san saw Namgung Hak wearing the pleased smile of a man with a present to hand over, and smiled back.

“But what was it that scholar said just now?”

Jegal Bang-hak stopped walking. The one who had asked was their escort.

“You are asking what he meant?”

“Yes. It seemed to me he gave a wholly beside-the-point answer to your question, Elder.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

Jegal Bang-hak clicked their tongue.

“With the Namgung clan head standing right there, how was he to answer that he would? So he said it roundabout.”

“So then — does he mean he will come if we invite him? Or that he is refusing?”

“Was there ever such a fellow! Why are the Jegal Clan’s martial artists in this state these days?”

The Jegal Clan martial artist who had been asking shut his mouth.

“Do not go about using the name Jegal anywhere. Since the Namgung clan head will not let him go, he means for us to build a justification even the man cannot block, and to invite him on that.”

“Those words carried all that? It did not sound like that to me.”

Jegal Bang-hak let out a sigh. Starting in on the explanation, they flared up in irritation instead.

“Enough! A man of the Jegal Clan who has to have a thing like this explained clause by clause! Surely the Jegal Clan is not made up of nothing but fellows like this?”

“Elder, at my level a man gets praised for being clever in the Jegal Clan.”

“If that is true, then our house has the mark of ruin on it — and if it is not, then you, wretch, have more studying to do.”

“Eh? I am a graduate of the Sleeping Dragon Hall¹. And the master of the Sleeping Dragon Hall was yourself, Elder.”

At the escort’s words the elder’s chest felt fit to burst.

“From now on I shall have to lengthen the term at the Sleeping Dragon Hall from three years to five. Seeing the level of you, wretch.”

“But back then the Elder praised me a great deal for being clever.”

They had not the strength left to be angry at the wretch of an escort muttering to himself.

“Good grief. Ruin, that is what it is, ruin. No wonder Jegal Do-won is in the state he is.”

With every step Jegal Bang-hak took, their shadow limped along as though it were sighing.

On the way back, Cheong Yo spoke to Song-ran, who kept turning her head toward where the Namgung Clan lay.

“Why? Still stuck in your head?”

“Yes, Sister Cheong Yo. In all my time at the Cheonsangnak Tower, dancing the sword dance and listening to a great deal of music, I never once heard a melody like Master Scholar’s. How shall I put it — as though it had been branded into my mind with a hot iron and left there. It was as though I myself had become a single butterfly.”

“Hoo. I have not come out of the feeling of it myself yet, so for you, with an ear as sensitive as yours, it must be more so.”

“I should like to dance the sword dance to Master Scholar’s melody once. Do you suppose there will be a chance of it?”

“Whatever else I cannot do, for you, Ran, I shall be sure to arrange such an occasion.”

As she walked on talking to Song-ran, Cheong Yo caught sight of a group of women looking across at the Cheongsim Teahouse and talking among themselves. A chill energy came pouring off them, and she quietly widened the distance. She knew perfectly well that women who gave off an energy like that were people of the murim, for it was the energy the murim called a keen martial edge.

“Are they of the murim?”

Song-ran had felt the keen martial edge too, it seemed, and asked Cheong Yo about it.

“It seems so. Every one of them a heroine.²”

Song-ran gave a shudder, and then spoke.

“Sister Cheong Yo, pay them no mind and let us just go. It has given me the chills.”

Whenever Song-ran felt the keen martial edge of martial artists, the chills took her without fail.

Ran must have some bad memory of the people of the murim.

Which was why she worried about what would happen when Song-ran’s memory came back.

Once Cheong Yo and Song-ran had gone, the woman who had been watching the Cheongsim Teahouse spoke.

“So this is the Young Palace Lord’s hiding place?”

“Yes, Elder. The Third Protector, Hwa-yeong, is playing the proprietress.”

“Tsk, tsk. A woman who is Third Protector of the North Sea Ice Palace, and she is a shop proprietress. Well, really — it makes my face burn. To think our Palace has fallen this low.”

“Then is the Ice Sacred Body here?”

“We are looking into it, but there are several other places besides this one that the Young Palace Lord has made her retreats. She runs a clinic as well, and she has gathered up underworld men and runs a small faction too.”

“In any case I do not like it. Why is everything she does so beneath her station? Search it out to the last corner. We must secure the Ice Sacred Body ourselves. And since it seems they do not know we have come here, keep the watch on them thorough.”

“Yes, Elder.”

Their talk finished, the women were gone without a trace before anyone knew it.

Jong So-bin stood at the summit of the mountain together with Hwa-yeong, the proprietress of the Cheongsim Teahouse, in a wind strong enough to turn their skirts inside out.

“What is the trouble?”

Hwa-yeong answered her.

“You will know when you see it.”

They went into the mountain stronghold at the summit and pushed aside a wooden bed frame, and a tunnel leading underground came into view. Hwa-yeong climbed down into it and set a torch alight.

Against the wall inside the tunnel stood a great rectangular block of ice. Inside that ice the shape of a person with long hair showed faintly. The limbs were slender, the shape of a young child.

“The Ice Sacred Body has melted a little. As you know, this ice crystal does not melt however hot it grows — and it has melted away like this, which is why I am reporting it to the Young Palace Lord.”

“Only the Palace Lord and I possess the energy that melts the ice crystal. There is no one else who could melt it.”

“Which is precisely why I say it is strange.”

Jong So-bin thought for a moment before she answered.

“I cannot see the reason for it either. Increase the number stationed at the stronghold and keep it under observation. If anything strikes you as strange, report it at once.”

“Very well. But if the Ice Sacred Body truly wakes, will we be able to take back the Ice Palace?”

“Of course. The Ice Sacred Body has powers far beyond anything the Third Protector knows of.”

In those words Hwa-yeong caught a glimpse of hope. The Ice Palace had been taken from them by the Elder Faction’s rebellion, and at the thought that they might return to it if only the Ice Sacred Body woke, warmth ran through her body.