They decided to leave that winter.
It took Su-gyeom seventeen days to copy it out. Where the salt had eaten the paper he left the space blank. There were twenty-three blank spaces, and eleven of them were where a name had been.
Bae-swe asked. What do we do about the blanks.
"We take them as they are."
"A blank isn't evidence."
"A blank is evidence too. Evidence that someone erased it."
Bae-swe did not understand that, but he did not ask again.
They decided to leave the original behind, chest and all. One copy is evidence and one copy is a life, so the two must not travel in the same boat. That was Bae-swe's reasoning — the arithmetic of a man who had smuggled all his life — and no one argued.
The night they raised the sail was clear.
Bae-swe brought out white cloth. A sail he had not dyed black. The first time in his life.
"Won't they see us?"
"I'm raising it so they will."
The Big Dipper hung low. Every other star turns, but those seven never change their place. That is why sailors trust only them.
Gap-su boarded too. No one tried to stop him. Everyone knew why he was going.
And then Ok-i came.
No one had asked her to. She climbed aboard on her own. They were the hands that had brought the documents up, so she probably wanted to see it through. That is what they all thought.
They rowed for half a day.
The island was going down below the horizon. That was when Ok-i stood up.
She stood at the bow and was looking not forward but back. She was watching the island go away.
Su-gyeom asked. What is it.
Ok-i answered, smiling.
"When I get to the mainland, what am I?"
"A woman with no letters and no name."
"Here I am the master. There I would have to lower my head."
No one could argue. It was true.
"Your fight is a fight of the land."
"I have already finished mine. I met the bones and I brought up the names."
"My part ends here."
She set down the float. She left the iron pick behind. Like a person with nothing to take.
She retied the ties of her jacket and looked at each of the three of them once.
To the old fisherman she bowed her head. Because she was the one who knew his son's name.
To the scholar she said nothing. Because everything there was to say was already written down.
And then she went into the water.
It made no sound.
A long while later, far off, one breath-whistle was heard.
It meant: alive.
The three of them took up the oars again.
Where they came ashore was a small harbour.
From there they walked. Three days of walking, and then into the mountains.
Somewhere on Songni Mountain there was a hermitage, they were told. The woman who had stood before the palace with a torch strikes a wooden bell there now, they were told. Bae-swe heard the story in a tavern, and Su-gyeom realised it was the latter half of a story he already knew.
Three men stood before the temple gate.
They were men who smelled of the sea.
Jeong-an did not bring them inside. She laid out a mat in the yard.
Su-gyeom took the copy from inside his coat and set it on the table.
Jeong-an turned one page. Then a second.
And her hand stopped.
"Do you know this name?"
Jeong-an raised her head.
"Know it? Of course."
"That is the hand that took my father."
That night Jeong-an went down the names one by one.
"This one stood beside the queen dowager."
"This one came to my father's funeral."
"This one held my hand and wept."
Su-gyeom asked. How can you know that.
"They are all faces I saw in the palace as a child."
And then Jeong-an said:
"Who wrote it, I don't know. But who ordered it — that I know."
"The ledger has only names. Inside me there are faces."
That was when Bae-swe spoke for the first time.
"Will you come with us?"
Jeong-an was silent for a long time. They were asking a woman who had lived ten years on a mountain to come down again.
At dawn Jeong-an answered.
"When I was young I carried a torch."
"With that fire I saved nothing. I burned it all and came back with empty hands."
"That was when I learned — anger does not last."
"But memory lasts."
And then she said:
"I am no longer fire. I am a witness."
Whether that meant she would come with them, the three of them could not tell.
They came down the mountain at dawn. Looking back, the hermitage door stood open.
There was no one inside.
What happened after that, this story does not know.
Whether they reached the capital, who they put that ledger in front of, whether the names were spoken or erased again — it is in no record.
Only this is in the record: that winter, the northern border was breached.
The Jurchen crossed the river, three fortresses fell in three days, and the state pardoned its criminals.
And around that time, in a harbour in the south, there was briefly a story about a boat with a white sail that unloaded its cargo and was left with no one aboard.
Whether it was that boat, no one ever confirmed.
On the island, the woman kept going into the water.
At the dawn tide she walked in with the float in her arms, and came out in the evening. She harvested abalone and dried seaweed. It was the same as before.
Only one thing had changed.
Sometimes she went down to the northern shoal. Not to harvest. She sat for a while inside the split hull and then came up.
She had memorised all twelve names. They were names that were not in the government's documents. They were names their mothers had known.
Under the water she called them, one at a time. There was no sound. Underwater you cannot open your mouth.
She called them anyway.
On clear nights the northern horizon was red.
Whether it was a beacon or the sunset, she did not know.
Whether they had arrived, she did not know either.
The sea does not tell. It knows everything and does not tell.
So she decided that she would tell.
Rowing out, she sang the song her mother used to sing. Ieodo sana, ieodo sana. The name of an island you go to and do not come back from.
Into that song she put names. The twelve. And also the names of people she had never met.
The man who set down his brush and walked to the execution ground. The man who threw away his mask and walked the roads. The woman who took up a torch and came down from the mountain. And the child who found the writing beneath the floorboards.
She had never seen them. But their story had come as far as this island.
As there was a seed beneath the ash,
there were names beneath the water.
The sea still did not tell.
She decided she would wait here.