The garden didn’t bow—it recoiled. Even nature braced when women like her entered at high summer.
She did not bow to Haneul. Did not even greet him properly.
"Funny," she murmured, voice honey-laced venom. "The Fire King’s pet sleeps late and eats with his hands. How quaint."
Haneul didn’t turn. He dropped a larger piece of rice cake to a particularly aggressive koi. "Go away."
Danbi laughed, a ringing sound, but there was nothing sweet in it. She perched beside him, not too close, not far enough. "Is that how they teach manners in the north? Or just in the kennels where they breed you?"
A pause. Haneul’s fingers curled around the stone. He still didn’t look at her. "No kennels. Just wolves."
She studied him, head cocked, gold pins flashing in her hair. "You don’t look like much. Too skinny, too pale, too wild. Not a man, not a woman, not even a proper shaman. But somehow you’ve bewitched him."
He shrugged. "He bewitched himself."
A sharper smile from Danbi, the kind that cut. "You know what they’re saying? That you’re the reason the king won’t take his other consorts anymore. That you’re a curse, a—"
Haneul turned, at last, and met her eyes. "You talk too much."
Shefroze. Something in his gaze—wolfish, unflinching, far older than nineteen—silenced her.
He tilted his head, smile sharp as broken glass. "If you want to sleep with the king, you should ask. Not whine. We are not lovers or nothing like that."
Danbi’s lips parted. Her hand twitched, as if reaching for a knife that wasn’t there.
"You little—"
Haneul stood, brushing crumbs from his lap. His robe was askew, his braid half-undone, but his posture was flawless. "Is this the part where you try to seduce me too? Or just insult me until I leave?"
A beat. Danbi, off-balance, tried to recover her dignity. "You wouldn’t last a night in my place. You don’t know what it means to keep a king’s attention."
He grinned, all fangs. "I don’t keep his attention. I burn it. And I don’t need to last the night. I only need to be real."
Danbi’s composure cracked—just a flash. She rose, gathering her silks, voice dropping to a whisper, dangerous and intimate. "Careful, boy. The palace eats wild things."
Haneul leaned close, sunlight catching on the tiny frost blooming at his fingertips. "Good thing I eat palaces."
A hush. The koi darted in the water, the tokens in his braid clinked once, like a warning bell.
Danbi glided away, the garden swallowing her up, but her shadow lingered. Haneul crouched again by the pond, letting the anger burn through him, feeding the fish, staring at his own reflection—half-wild, half-myth, wholly unbroken.
Then, with a flick of his wrist, he pulled something from his sleeve—a small carved bead, half-shaped, its ridges uneven, not yet strung. Fire-colored stone. Not his style. Not meant for his braid.
He rolled it between his fingers once. Then dropped it into the koi pond.
The splash was tiny. The ripple lingered.
Behind the hedge, two servants watched, eyes wide, gossip already spreading like wildfire.
??????
The garden showdown faded, but it left a mark—a ripple in palace gossip, a spark in the halls. Haneul’s tokens chimed whenever he passed. Some whispered protection, others spelled warning. “He’s a curse,” said the courtiers who’d never been burned; “He’s a god,” whispered the kitchen girls, watching him scatter rice cakes for koi in the moonlight.
Late spring came and went in a blur of blood and thaw—mud giving way to heat, green shoots overtaken by flowering vines that curled like gossip around every stone. By the time the koi pond turned sour with too much sun and not enough rain, the season had fully changed.
Summer had come to the Fire Palace—thick and watching, daring every secret to ripen or rot. Haneul became an accidental fixture: a rumor, then a legend, then a living nuisance. He sparred in the yard with soldiers twice his size, shattered a dueling pole with a single headbutt, and left Seungho’s court in a state of constant high alert.
He ruined two ceremonial carpets with muddy feet, once spent an afternoon arguing with a fox spirit in the willow grove (no one was sure if the fox was real, but the footprints lasted fordays), and nearly drowned a senior advisor by “accidentally” freezing the bathwater mid-soak.
