"Are you all right?"
"Mm, I'm fine."
Hae-gang answered right away, but this time a trace of bewilderment crept into Mok-young's chest. If nothing was wrong at all, then why was he suddenly leaning in so intimately? He'd meant to keep people at a distance. Yet Hae-gang, wholly unaware of Mok-young's inner turmoil, merely tightened his grip on the hand he held. Unlike his own, Mok-young's hand was cool like ice and long-fingered, and it gave Hae-gang a pleasant feeling. It even seemed his weary heart and mind were finding peace.
"Leaning like this, I feel comfortable right away. There's a cool, pleasant scent about you."
Hae-gang had no hesitation in speaking what he felt. He had been thinking it for a while now — that Mok-young's aura was cool and pleasant. This was the yin energy of one who had mastered the Hyeoneum Divine Art; it simply felt good, and that was that.
The gentleness he had felt the moment he seized his arm when they met at the marketplace last year — the reason it had lingered in his mind all this time was that same shared yin energy. Hae-gang thought it felt so good he could embrace him and fall asleep right then.
"Let us stay like this a moment. When we perform the rites, I shall follow the etiquette perfectly, I promise. Before then… may we not rest easy for a bit? It is comforting, being so steadfast."
"I did not know you were so forthcoming by nature?"
"Heh, no. The walls of my heart are surely higher and sturdier than the walls of Cheonun Mountain."
At Hae-gang's composed reply, Mok-young let out another hollow laugh. This fellow truly seemed gifted at sophistry. Thanks to that, a flicker of curiosity rose in him. Until he had seen his face, he had thought of him only as 'one who comes to his death at the end of a wretched fate,' but now that he had actually faced him, a curiosity suddenly reared its head amid it all — how on earth had he grown up to be like this?
"I shall watch how perfectly you follow the etiquette."
"Do be impressed. I am one who has lived twenty-seven years as royalty."
The words "And one like you acts like this?" rose to the tip of his tongue, but Mok-young did not bother to voice them. He merely sighed lightly and turned his head to look out the window.
He predicted their married life — mere form though it be — would be slightly, no, quite eventful.
***
Enfeoffed with a princely title and granted the status of the Emperor's brother, Dan Mok-young's wedding with Go Hae-gang, the prince come from Namwi, was held grandly as a state wedding. Before the grand hall of Hyeonchung Fortress, in the vast courtyard, the rites were conducted under the gaze of the Emperor and all the civil and military officials. Though the procedures were said to be simplified, they lacked nothing in grandeur or solemnity, and above all, the two walked side by side across the courtyard before everyone's eyes…
The two of them, dazzlingly splendid, made the occasion all the more magnificent.
As promised to Mok-young, once the formal rites began at Hyeonchung Fortress, Hae-gang seemed to become a different person. He moved calmly according to the rites, and in his every word and manner, his twenty-seven years of life as royalty showed through without reserve. Not a hair's breadth of deviation, not a single mistake.
And Mok-young, as always, displayed the majesty of Northern Wei's great general to the full. His bearing was such that one might well call him the very incarnation of the Black Tortoise. The young man's ceremonial robes brought out the elegance of his frame to the utmost, lending him an even more mysterious air.
Perhaps it only looked that way because Hae-gang stood beside him. In his red, resplendent robes — worn as if he had been born in them, with such style — Go Hae-gang looked like the incarnation of the Vermilion Bird, and even his war-paint-like ceremonial makeup could not be regarded as ordinary.
The sight of the high official and Dan Mok-young as a pair, walking shoulder to shoulder across the courtyard, was like a vision of harmony in that place.
In that moment, an irreverent thought crossed someone's mind: though the master of Northern Wei, the Emperor himself, sat right before them, in this moment alone Go Hae-gang and Dan Mok-young looked like the masters of the world. The legend that seventeen hundred years ago a pair of gods seized the world's fortune and opened a new, flourishing age — it felt as though it were coming alive before their very eyes.
"By the order of His Majesty the Emperor, we shall now solemnly conduct the sacred wedding rites of the prince of Namwi and the Lord of Northern Wei."
When the two reached the wedding altar, the officiant's cry marked the start of the rites in earnest.
And under the searing sunlight, Hae-gang began his solitary battle to master the yang energy boiling up within him, as if silently enduring a dragon's ascension through his very organs.
'Let the prince Go Hae-gang be made the son of the Empress, raising his status to the legitimate line; let him follow the rites of a legitimate son.'
A year before this day, as last spring drew to a close, Hae-gang was adopted as the Empress's son. It had been quite some years since the Empress's own crown prince had died.
The crown prince had truly been born with a frail body. So when he died young at thirty-three, no one in the court raised a voice. In some corners, quiet suspicions of assassination circulated, but there was no one who would dig into them either.
The crown prince had been the Empress's own son, her only son. And after his death, the crown prince's seat remained vacant for five years, until the Empress declared she would take the second prince, Hae-gang, as her adopted son. The reason given was that among the princes, he was the only one without a living birth mother, and moreover that she pitied his circumstances — suffering from a grave illness — and wished to care for him.
Everyone found it unexpected. The justification sounded plausible, but it remained merely 'plausible'; most did not wholly believe it, and it only deepened the court's outward propriety. Until now he had been a prince of no presence, shut away deep in the palace, doing nothing but secluding himself — and overnight he had risen abruptly as a legitimate son. It was only natural. That Hae-gang, too, was an invalid like the late crown prince was an unexpected point. Moreover, adopting him as a legitimate son was not immediately followed by any sign of pushing him as crown prince, so for now everyone simply watched in silence.
Only, for someone, this might have seemed the time to move. After all, his body was deeply ill to begin with…
What would be so hard about casting him aside and abandoning him?
'Survive, Hae-gang. That is how you repay my grace.'
Last summer, when the blazing sun beat down so fiercely it seemed it would scorch everything on earth, there was a time when it was foretold that Hae-gang, gravely ill, would not live to see this year. And the Empress, for the son newly reborn as her own kin, brought every precious medicine there was, and spared nothing in supporting whatever his body needed to recover. Thus she extended Hae-gang's thread of life once more, and waking from that crisis, she looked at Hae-gang and said those words.
Survive, and repay her grace.
And this spring, talk of a state marriage began. Coincidentally, the second, third, and fourth princes were all already married, so Hae-gang was the only prince of marriageable state. 'Though my body is sick, how could I refuse for the sake of the country' — that was the second prince Go Hae-gang's assertion. It sounded as though he spoke only of his duty as a prince, but to some it looked like nothing but a wish to send Hae-gang off to Northern Wei as quickly as possible. However much it was a state marriage, the other side was giving him to one who was neither prince nor princess — and moreover a general with a record of slaughtering Namwi's soldiers — so there was talk of whether sending a legitimate son was proper, but under the influence of Go Hae-cheon's faction it soon died down.
The trace of pity Mok-young had felt upon seeing Hae-gang — 'are you really coming to such a death ground?' — was no idle coincidence. Someone truly wished for Hae-gang to die in a far foreign land, and had all but pushed him onto this path.
Enduring it was Hae-gang's lot alone. Here, there was now neither Emperor nor Empress. Only… they watched and sought to restrain him, so with no force left to bind him — freedom was given. That freedom was the only weapon Hae-gang possessed.
Hae-gang did not think it fearful. Ever since he lowered himself after his birth mother's death, Hae-gang's life, lived in a palace without any proper backing, had always been a succession of endurance. Hae-gang did not resist what could not be avoided. He silently submitted to fate, and only faced squarely the principle that he must survive.
"We shall now perform the joined-cup rite."
At the officiant's cry, the time finally came for the two grooms to share the nuptial cup.
Standing facing each other, each raising one cup, Hae-gang and Mok-young met each other's gaze. Mok-young's face was as calm as ever, and Hae-gang likewise showed no expression on his face. The boundless passion he had shown before Mok-young before entering the palace seemed like nothing but a dream.
Mok-young could not take his eyes from Hae-gang's face. Not because it was a moment they had to look at each other. Watching him blankly from the distance set by the wedding between them, Hae-gang looked exactly like a convict suffering in a hell whose depths could not be fathomed.
It was a little different from calmness. It was not merely that he looked composed because of the etiquette ingrained in his body; there was something else. It was the lingering trace of a sense of danger — something only Mok-young, whose instincts had been honed to a fine edge crossing countless boundaries between life and death, could feel.
Who was the person who had caused a commotion before the grand hall earlier, who was the person sitting quietly before the intimate table, and who was the person who had approached so affably in the carriage? And…
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