Naturally, strange people running around the back parts of the palace at night could not pass unnoticed. All the more so because the captain of Seobu, the West Guard of Wangwisa, had returned to his duties only two days earlier. After the battle at the port, where he had lost all his men and survived himself by a miracle, Chong Sang-uk regarded any suspicious figures sneaking around the palace under cover of darkness with heightened suspicion.

  “Name yourself!” he demanded, stepping in front of the stranger and threatening him with his sword.

  The man froze.

  His fingers twitched in a familiar way, searching for a sword hilt.

  For a long moment they simply stood, looking into each other’s eyes and calculating the possible moves of the opponent. And both understood more and more clearly that the fight would not be simple.

  “What are you doing, guard? This is Prince Seojin!” cried the maid, who had been creeping after that man at some distance.

  The stranger blinked, and the brittle moment shattered.

  Chong Sang-uk had indeed heard that there were now more princes, but had not yet met any of them. Except for the one he had protected that night in Incheon. This one was clearly another, noticeably older, but with the same confident gait, straight back, and proudly held head.

  Perhaps the maid was not lying.

  “I am in a hurry,” the man said. His voice turned out to be quite pleasant, but lacking both the cloying drawl customary at court and the arrogance characteristic of many nobles. “We are following someone, and we must not lose her. Captain, join us. A sword may be useful.”

  “If the two of you have deceived me…” Chong Sang-uk gave them both a suspicious look and lowered his weapon.

  “Then we shall settle the score later,” the one called Prince Seojin nodded. “Let us go.”

  It soon became clear that they truly were following someone. Chong Sang-uk was simply not sure whom. Judging by the figure, she seemed to be a woman, but moved far too smoothly, not like a person but like a duck on a lake. And her hair was loose, something court ladies would never allow themselves.

  “She is a ghost,” the maid whispered to him, eyes round.

  “They do not exist,” Chong Sang-uk snorted quietly.

  “I think we should try to find the body where she leads us,” the prince, or whoever he was, remarked.

  “The body?” Chong Sang-uk frowned. Mysterious corpses in the palace were the last thing he needed.

  “Ghosts usually appear after a person dies,” the man who pretended to be a prince explained. “And this one has a knife in her chest. It looks like a murder. Take a closer look when she turns.”

  In the meantime, the strange girl drifted toward a rotting door in one of the neglected corners of the palace. The captain had never been there before and, judging by the weeds that had overgrown the courtyard inside, it was not visited often in recent years. The half-collapsed pavilion with cracked paint also confirmed that this place had long gone unused.

  Chong Sang-uk was the first to push the door (the strange girl passed straight through it, and at this point he had to admit that this truly was not a human being), the maid went in after him, while the prince for some reason hesitated on the threshold.

  “Your Highness?” the maid called to him. Prince Seojin shook his head.

  “This was once Concubine Mi’s residence,” he said. Chong Sang-uk had never heard of such a concubine. “She used to have a very fierce dog… I suppose it is gone now, is it not?”

  “There is not a soul here.” Chong Sang-uk peered into the darkness but could make out nothing but uneven outlines of branches. A pity they had not brought a lantern. “It looks as if this place has been forgotten.”

  “All right,” the prince grunted and at last bowed his head to step through the semicircular stone arch into the courtyard. “Let us hope no nasty ghost of that dog is left. What can we use for light?”

  “Shall I go for a lantern?” the maid asked in a trembling voice that clearly betrayed how frightened she was to go anywhere alone.

  “No.” The prince looked around, then strode straight toward the pavilion, repeating the curves of an invisible path hidden under the grass. “There should be something left. Do not fall behind.”

  In a dusty, cobwebbed room, among open cupboards and rotted curtains, they did indeed find a pair of old floor lanterns. The paper was torn in places, but they managed to light them, and all three cheered up at once.

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  “Imagine you are in love with a court lady, Captain,” the prince looked straight at him. Now, in the light, the captain could see the silver embroidery on his clothes. He did indeed look like the king’s elder son, and therefore should be addressed more politely, and somehow the first impression of their meeting ought to be smoothed over. The captain did not think that, after Incheon, Commander Yeong would get rid of him over a simple misunderstanding, but crossing a prince was probably unwise. “You had been meeting her in secret in this abandoned pavilion, you had quarreled, and in a fit of anger you killed her. Where would you hide the body?”

  “Um…” Chong Sang-uk scratched the back of his head, accidentally hitting his jeonrip with its round brim, and began to straighten it. “In the garden?”

  “This pavilion is abandoned but not forgotten,” the maid interjected. “I am sure many know that one can hide here from the senior court lady or wait out the rain. If the body were simply left in the garden or the room, it would be found quickly. And she said the place was secret.”

  “Besides, there are a lot of cobwebs here. No one has moved the panels,” the prince agreed.

  “Let me have a look,” Chong Sang-uk bent down for one of the lanterns, his barely healed side pulled, and he winced. “So, I have killed her and need to get rid of the body? There is only this room on stilts, the veranda around it, the roof, and an overgrown little garden. I shall look among the stilts.”

  He went down the short wooden stairs and crawled under the floor of the pavilion on all fours. He found old pipes for heating the floor, the long-dried corpse of a cat, and a lot of sand. Nothing of value, in short.

  “Unless our ghost is the soul of a resentful cat, there is nothing here, Your Highness!” he called from below.

  “No, we are looking for a girl in a junior court lady’s clothes,” the prince replied. “And a pair of white socks.”

  An odd clarification.

  Chong Sang-uk cast the light at his feet, found the remains of a paved path, and decided to follow it through the overgrown bushes. In some places the branches were crushed. Evidently, couples did sometimes meet here to exchange forbidden kisses and share embraces. There was no sign of a court lady’s corpse or white socks. He reached the far wall, went around the courtyard in a circle, found a service door and a mossy doghouse, but no traces of a struggle or murder. Perhaps he imagined this whole ghost story, and he was about to wake up?

  “There is no pavilion or perhaps an old woodpile there?” the prince clarified after hearing his report.

  Chong Sang-uk shook his head, making the shadows dance on the pavilion’s time-greyed walls.

  “Is the doghouse large?” the maid said thoughtfully. The three of them exchanged glances and rushed outside headlong.

  The killer had probably had to remove and then nail the wooden roof back on in order to fit a curled-up body with a knife in its chest inside. Chong Sang-uk peered in through the dog’s entrance and swore.

  “I shall guard the body,” the prince said, generously offering a way to resolve the dilemma. “You two run for the guards. Try not to raise an alarm just yet. If the killer is a eunuch, we must not scare him off.”

  Chong Sang-uk gave a short nod, and he and the maid hurried out. They were lucky: Commander Yeong had not yet gone home and was still working through some records at the Wangwisa headquarters. When he heard about the body, he took four guards on duty and went to the crime scene in person. The maid also went with them, this time carrying a good bright lantern on a long pole. Since she had been the first to notice that something was wrong, she insisted on seeing how it ended. They all agreed not to mention the ghost, as the commander would never have believed in it. They blamed it on a cat in the bushes that the curious girl had decided to chase. The fact that a prince had also taken part in the chase somehow did not come up.

  When they ran into the abandoned garden, Prince Seojin was not by the doghouse.

  For a moment the captain tensed — what if the prince had decided for some reason to get rid of the corpse after sending all the witnesses away? But the twisted body in the court maid’s clothes was still lying inside the doghouse.

  The soldiers pried off the roof, using their spears as levers, and recoiled at what they saw. At that moment the bushes rustled. The captain and the commander turned, grabbing their swords.

  Prince Seojin emerged from the thicket, pushing a struggling young eunuch ahead of him. At the sight of the guards, the eunuch let out a high-pitched scream. Commander Yeong, without even thinking of putting away his sword, stepped toward them.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he growled menacingly.

  “I believe I have helped you to catch the murderer,” the prince replied. “Good evening, Commander. When I sent these two away, I hid to see who would come to check what they had found. And this youth did indeed soon run in through the side door. Very nimble — I barely caught him.”

  “You were with the prince?” Commander Yeong turned to Chong Sang-uk, his eyes narrowing dangerously.

  “Yes, Commander, I did not have time to report…” he nodded, but Commander Yeong had already turned away, rammed his sword back into its scabbard, and glared at the prince from under his brows.

  “Do you know who this is, Your Highness?” he said in a suddenly low voice. “This is Captain Chong. He commanded the West Guard of the Royal Guard that was wiped out in Incheon. He was gravely wounded but survived, the only one. I do not want you dragging him into your affairs.”

  “I understand,” Prince Seojin answered after a pause. Chong Sang-uk expected him to start shouting, but instead the prince kicked the eunuch toward one of the guards and suddenly bowed to the captain. The prince bowed. “Thank you for protecting my younger brother from the assassins, Captain Chong.”

  “I was only doing my duty,” Chong Sang-uk muttered, flushing.

  “That is enough,” Commander Yeong cut their courtesies short. “What about the murder?”

  “I think she is one of the queen’s maids,” Prince Seojin straightened again, his face taking on an unreadable expression. “This fellow will tell you why he killed her. It seems this is not politics but a lovers’ quarrel. But since in this palace there is no escaping politics, I must ask you to keep silent about my involvement in this matter. I only happened, by chance, to help Captain Chong discover the body.”

  “I must report everything as it is,” Commander Yeong was still radiating obvious hostility.

  “To His Majesty — certainly,” the prince agreed cooperatively. “To the ministers… Do you truly wish to tell them that a eunuch of one of the concubines killed a court maid of the queen, and the elder prince dragged this dirty business into the light? That would make a fine piece of gossip. And the queen’s name has already fallen as low as it can.”

  “I shall act as His Majesty decides,” Commander Yeong replied. The prince nodded.

  It was then that Yi Yun thought that the queen, all in all, was also an influential figure, even if disgraced. And if his grandfather, Councilor Kim, had decided to make him the son of a dead queen, then he could very well arrange things so that Hyun would turn out to be the son of a queen still living.