At night the palace grows larger.
The corridor that feels narrow by day, crowded with people, has no visible end once the third watch has passed. The king walks it. A eunuch follows three paces behind with a lantern, but the king does not need the lantern. He could walk this path with his eyes closed. His father walked it, and his father before him, and twelve kings before them. Every stone is familiar to the soles of his feet.
At the end of that corridor there is a door. The king stops in front of it.
"Your Majesty."
The eunuch's voice is careful. The king does not answer.
The room is empty. He knows this. He has known it for three months. And still, every night, he walks to the end of this path and stands before the door. He does not touch it. If he touches it, his fingertips will confirm that the room is empty. If he only stands there, then for a moment it is as if someone is inside.
"Your Majesty, the wind is cold."
"The wind is cold."
The king says this and turns. He walks back along the corridor. The lantern follows three paces behind. His shadow stretches out ahead of him, and he walks on it.
He first saw her when he was nineteen and still the crown prince.
Behind Gyeonghoeru pavilion there was a court maid carrying dishes. He watched her drop them. The porcelain shattered on the stone, shards flying out in every direction, and the woman knelt down and began to pick them up. What he saw then was not her face but her hands. She was gathering the pieces in an order. She did not start with the largest. She started with the sharpest — so that the next person would not step on them.
He stood there a long time.
Her name was Yeon-i. She had no father, and her mother had been a government slave in Asan. There is only one way a person like that enters the palace, and the positions she can rise to are already decided. Yeon-i was a woman who would carry dishes until she grew old and was sent away.
The crown prince sent for her that autumn.
"What is your name?"
"Yeon-i, Your Highness."
"Do you know how to read?"
"I do not."
"What can you do?"
She thought for a moment, then answered.
"I carry dishes."
The crown prince laughed. It seemed to be the first time he had laughed since entering the palace.
In the year he became king, he brought Yeon-i into the inner palace.
She was given no title and no rank. The queen dowager knew, and said nothing for a month, and then one morning called him in and asked only this:
"Your Majesty. Is she to be the mother of this nation?"
"She is not."
"Then what is she?"
He did not answer, because there was no answer. She was nothing. Not a queen, not a consort, not anything the records had a line for. She was only the person to whom he said, once a day, the things he could say to no one else.
When the affairs of state were done and night came, he went to that room. Yeon-i was always sitting in the same place. When he told her what had happened that day she only listened. She did not advise him and she did not take sides. But sometimes, very rarely, when he had finished, she would ask:
"What do you think that man was afraid of?"
He loved that question. There were nights when a matter he had debated with his ministers all day looked entirely different after one sentence from her.
Once he said to her:
"I will grant you a title."
She shook her head.
"If I have a name, people will see me."
"And if they see you?"
"What can be seen can be erased."
He laughed it off. At the time, he laughed it off.
Removing a person from the palace does not require a blade.
That spring the rumour began: that a slave's daughter was clouding the king's judgment. It started in the marketplace and climbed to the six ministries, and in the ministries it became a petition, and by the time there were ten petitions it was no longer a rumour but a fact. Written on paper, a thing becomes true. He learned that then.
In summer, Yeon-i fell ill.
The royal physician came. Medicine was brought. On the third night, when the king entered the room, she could no longer speak. Her eyes were open. She was looking at him. When he took her hand it was cold.
"Prepare the medicine again."
The physician pressed his forehead to the floor.
"Your Majesty, it is already—"
"I said prepare it again."
She died at dawn.
The record entered it as death by illness. The Royal Secretariat's diary said the same. She had no title, so there was no funeral. There was only a bier leaving through the palace gate, and following it, two old court maids.
After that the king developed the habit of sitting on the throne for a long time.
When the day's business ended and the ministers withdrew, he did not rise. The eunuch came in to change the lamps and went out, came in again and went out, and still he sat. He was looking at the seat beside him. No one had ever sat there. It was the queen's place, and Yeon-i had not been a queen. And still he looked at it.
In winter it snowed.
He came out to the corridor to watch it. The courtyard turned white, and the roofs, and the walls. He stood there for a long while, and then a strange thought came to him.
Snow covers everything. Why does it not cover that one place?
Of course there was no such place in the courtyard. The snow fell evenly. The place was inside him.
From that winter, he could not sleep.
And then he began to see her.
At first in dreams. In the dreams Yeon-i always had her back turned. When he called her she would begin to turn, and he would wake. Then it was in water. Passing the pond at Gyeonghoeru he saw, beside his own reflection, another face. When he raised his head there was no one.
Word went around among the court maids. At night a light drifted along the edge of the eaves. A dokkaebi fire, they said. One maid said the light had the shape of a person; another said she had heard a woman's voice. None of them could say the name, because there was no name. She was not a deposed queen and she was not quite a ghost. She was a person who had been erased from the records.
The king heard this and said nothing. But from that night he had incense burned before the funerary hall — a funerary hall with no tablet in it. The incense was lit every night, and every morning it had burned down to nothing.
The following spring the king summoned the court historian.
"Bring me the record of that summer."
The historian brought it. The king opened it. Death by illness, it said. There was the physician's name, and the date the medicine was prepared, and the names of the ingredients. The king looked at one of those ingredients for a long time.
"Who brought in this ingredient?"
The historian could not answer.
"Ask the royal pharmacy. Who brought it in, and who paid for it."
Three days later the answer came. It was not the royal pharmacy that had paid. When the paper with that name on it reached the king's hand, he looked at it for a long while, then folded it and put it inside his sleeve.
That evening the king sat on the throne and called for the eunuch.
"Bring a brush and the seal ink."
"For what purpose, Your Majesty?"
"I am going to write a decree."
The eunuch brought the brush, the royal seal and the red ink. The king took the brush. Then he pushed the red ink aside.
"Your Majesty."
The king drew the paper from his sleeve — the one with the name on it. He spread it on the table, and very quietly he said:
"The gentle king is dead."
What came after is written in the annals.
How many were taken, how many households ended, which minister was given poison on which day, which family line was erased across three generations. The historian wrote it down. He was ordered to write, so he wrote. But there were passages the king ordered rewritten, and passages the historian rewrote. So what that record actually says depends on who is reading it.
This part, however, is in no record at all.
On the night it was all finished, when the palace had gone quiet, the king walked that corridor again. No eunuch followed. There was no lantern. He walked to the end of the dark and stood before the door.
This time he touched it.
The door opened. The room was empty.
He sat down inside. Outside, wind moved. Something swayed at the edge of the eaves, and he did not raise his head.
"It is quiet."
The king said.
"Quiet, at last."
A generation later, in a thatched house in a place of exile, a scholar picked up a brush.
What he meant to write was not this story. He did not know this story. He only knew that in the country he lived in, records were often rewritten, and people died on top of the rewritten records, and the names of the dead did not survive.
So he wrote this:
Erase it, and it will be written again.
Burn it, and it will be written again.
That sentence killed him.
And that sentence outlived him by a hundred years.