Vol. 1 Chapter 2- Wedding

A decade ago…

It was the day his father returned to Hanyang after a long journey.

Yi had been lying in bed since midday, caught in a summer dust storm that no longer bothered the rest of the village.

She was small at birth and always sick as she grew up.

Despite not having any inherent illnesses, she was always bruised and sick often. If she hadn’t been born the only child of a wealthy, powerful family, she would have died before she could walk, people would whisper.

It wasn’t the kind of thing to say to a twelve-year-old girl, but it wasn’t wrong either.

What’s it like to be a kid who never steps out of the room when his father comes home after a long absence?

‘A child who is not worth half a dime.’

As Yi Seo lay there thinking about it, her nanny, Yeong Sun, came into the room with a medicine bowl.

“Why is Father here?”

A man who served as a provincial official could not leave the province he was assigned to without some sort of emergency.

Perhaps her father had come to the main house in Hanyang once last year, to pay his respects to his great-aunt.

But no one had been sick or had died recently, so she wondered what he was there for.

“You should take your medicine first, honey.”

Yi sat up and took the medicine bowl. As she silently drank down the bland liquid, her nanny spoke up.

“You saw the valley last year, and this year you passed the passage safely, and there are already rumors about what a good time Master is having.”

But what does that have to do with my father’s arrival, I wondered.

“So now that he has the wheel, he’s going to send all the great armies out to fight.”

Yi Seo was very intelligent for a child of her age, even though she was weak from birth and spent most of her time in bed reading books.

As soon as she heard her nanny’s words, she realized why her father had come home.

The only time the district governor could be away was for a wedding. Her father, Kim Su-Mal, had only one child, Yi Seo.

“Am I getting married?”

“Oh, no, you’re not.”

Her Nanny quickly shook her head.

She laid Yi Seo down as if to say, “Don’t think about it. It’s just talk. Madame doesn’t want to hear it. She said that if the royal family is going to be involved, the youngest daughter of your uncle, the old man, would be a good choice.”

And just as Yi Seo’s milk supply was provided by Yeong Sun, so too was her mother in turn provided for her. Yi’s mother often confided in her as if they were siblings.

“But my father wants to marry me off, so that’s why you’re here.”

“Even if he did, how could I break his insistence? There’s nothing in the family that doesn’t go according to his will.”

Yi’s father was a man of strong bones, but he was no match for Yi’s mother, whose father, though not a servant of the king, had been honored by the previous king and served in the army.

From the beginning, the marriage was a one-sided affair, with her running the household and him traveling the countryside.

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