The hospital was back in business now that Wonwoo had launched a defensive military campaign. Yewon had to return to the hospital to administer the budget and serve the patients. As Jinye also had nothing to do for the time she was lodging in the palace, Yewon invited her along to help out.

Yewon found that Jinye’s presence had brightened up all of the patients. She was like breath of fresh air to them, a fantasy of a woman coming to life in front of their eyes; she was beautiful, sweet, positive, rich, noble, and at the same time, she was serving them. The patients were always in awe when Jinye was around.

The patients had gotten used to Yewon, and so they were no longer affected by her presence like before. In addition to all of that, she was uglier now because her hair was short, and her job was more about administration as opposed to nursing and interacting with the patients. Naturally, Jinye took over the role of the exotic maiden who nursed them back to health.

Yewon tried not to be jealous of Jinye. The patients were happy, and that was all that really mattered, she told herself. However, it would be a lie to say that it didn’t bother her at all; sometimes Yewon felt the prickle of jealousy in her chest, one that she tried her best to suppress. She wanted to train herself not to be jealous so that there would be no negative feelings when Wonwoo walked down the aisle with her.

Yewon didn’t know what had happened to Jinye and Wonwoo after she encouraged him to marry her. She guessed that they were engaged again, but neither of them said anything, and Yewon felt that it was too intrusive to ask. The two would announce it at their own pace, she thought.

-

Jinye and Yewon took a carriage back to the palace from the hospital. When they arrived, Yewon’s eyes caught someone riding a horse in the distance.

In novels, the male protagonist often rode a horse. She had a heavily romanticized image of horse-riding, and so watching young men ride pleased her greatly. It was so majestic, she thought, so chivalrous and perfect. When the horse drew a little closer, Yewon was doubly pleased to see that it was Seungcheol who was riding the horse.

She never saw him ride before, she realized. Actually, she had not seen him do a lot of things. It was like riding was part of a domain in his life of which Yewon was not a part. She also had never seen him command troops, order people around or make negotiations and all the other stuff that princes usually do. She was confined to only his domestic life and was not really allowed to be part of anything else.

At that point, Yewon noticed that this was a major difference between novels and reality. In novels, to marry would mean being the person’s other half and thus being involved in all of affairs of the spouse’s existence. But as Seungcheol’s wife, that was far from the case; she was not his “other half” or his “soulmate.” Being a wife meant talking on a certain social role within a certain domain; it was not a subversive, ethereal union like novels made it out to be.

Yewon walked towards where Seungcheol was riding. When he noticed her walking towards him, he drew closer to her.

“You look very handsome when you ride,” she complimented boldly when he was close enough to her.

Seungcheol didn’t acknowledge the compliment. He dismounted the horse and held its reins to keep it in place.

“How was the hospital today?” he asked her as fed the horse a vegetable from the bags attached to the saddle.

“Productive. There was this new patient who came from the battle in the west and he told me he heard rumors about you and asked me if they’re true,” she told him as she drew closer to pet the horse’s snout.

“What kind of rumors?” he asked.

“That you cry a lot.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“The truth,” she answered.

“Which is?”

“That I’ve only seen you cry once,” she stated simply with a shrug.

“No you haven’t,” he challenged, narrowing his eyes. “When did I ever cry? I never cry.”

Yewon crossed her arms and frowned at the denial, “yes you have.”

“Then tell me when I cried,” Seungcheol asked. He seemed to have forgotten.

Yewon opened to answer him, but refrained from doing so, realizing that it wasn’t right to bring up the night in which Jeonghan died to prove that he cried. Yewon knew Seungcheol enough to know that bringing up Jeonghan’s death would do nothing but silence him and put a dark cloud over the friendly exchange that they were having.

“Actually, I was thinking of someone else and mistook him for you.” Yewon said quickly, preferring to admit she was wrong. “Sorry.”

Seungcheol narrowed his eyes, finding Yewon’s hasty resignation suspicious. Yewon quickly distracted him from the subject by taking the horse’s reins from Seungcheol’s hands, and stepping on the stirrup and trying to lift herself up onto the horse.

“What are you doing?” Seungcheol asked her.

“Trying to get on the horse,” she replied.

“It’s not proper for a princess to ride…” he told her. “Please come down.”

That encouraged Yewon not to come down. She tried to lift herself onto the horse again, but she struggled and kept falling. Seungcheol, realizing that Yewon was not going to give up, sighed and helped her by lifting her and directing her until she was on the saddle. Her dress was lifted to her waist for her to be able to put both of her legs on either side of the horse, so many of her undergarments were visible. That clearly made Seungcheol uncomfortable with all the people around them turning their heads.

“Can you ride?” he asked her, hesitant to give her the reins.

“No,” Yewon answered honestly. Princesses never learned to ride.

“Then why did you get on a horse?” Seunghcheol asked, directing the horse somewhere father away from the eyes of the guards and passer-bys going into the palace.

“It’s fun,” Yewon said happily, enjoying the feeling of the wind against her face. “I think princesses should learn to ride too. If I ever have a daughter, I’m definitely going to make her learn how to ride. It’s not fair that only boys get everything.”

Seungcheol led the horse farther into the trees so that people didn’t see the princess with her ridden up dress on a horse. When they were deep into the field and far away from other people’s gaze, Yewon let the shawl that was over her head fall over her shoulders and freed her hair. It was windy outside, and as the horse walked, the wind ran through her short hair, and it felt liberating.

“I wish I knew how to ride,” Yewon said sadly. “I want to know how it feels to ride a running horse.” In novels, the women also rode horses, and so Yewon always wanted to learn too. Her father had never allowed her though, and so she was often stuck watching male riders from the balcony and sulking at how sad her life was. She only got a taste of riding horses when Tati snuck her out to the stables in secret, and the stable-worker would help her on a horse and slowly walk it across the field.

Suddenly, Seungcheol stepped onto the stirrup and raised himself onto the saddle behind her. She inched forward to give him space, looking behind her with a curious expression on her face.

“Look forward and keep your back straight,” he instructed. “Put your feet in the stirrups and squeeze the horse with your thighs. If you feel like you’re going to fall, lean back on me.”

The suddenness of this instruction startled her, making her feel slightly nervous as she followed his directions. Seungcheol reached out past her body for the reins, his arms on either side of her. He pulled the reins and the horse began to walk slowly, and gradually, it got faster and faster.

For the first time ever, she felt what it was like to ride a running horse. It was an adrenaline rush of epic proportions, one that made her laugh in delight, close her eyes and hold on tight to the reins in front of her with the widest smile on her face. Seungcheol directed the horse from over her shoulder whilst at the same time using his arms to prevent her from swaying too much to the side.

They rode for many minutes through the wide fields around the palace. They only stopped when they got to the castle graveyard.

Seungcheol dismounted the horse and helped her off it too. She was still disoriented from the new experience of moving in such a speed, and when she was finally on solid ground, she felt dizzy and lost her balance, falling to the ground. Still she was smiling widely, her head in the clouds from how thrilling that ride had been. She had literally never in her life ever moved so fast before. To her, it was like she was experiencing a whole new dimension.

“Thank you,” she thanked Seungcheol as he helped her get up from the ground. Her happy smile brightened up every aspect of her face as she faced him and said: “that was amazing.”

“Really?” Seungcheol asked. “That was only low-medium speed.”

“What? It can go faster?” Yewon asked, her expression filled with curious delight.

“Much faster.”

She let out a sound of delight, a squeal of some sort, one filled with awe and excitement. If low-medium speed felt like that, how would it feel if she went at maximum speed?

Her head was so high in the clouds, that she wasn’t even prepared for what was to come next: Seungcheol smiled.

“You smiled again!!!” she said with surprise, pointing at him accusingly, as if she caught him red-handed.

“I am,” he admitted, “because your reaction entertains me.”

“Can you blame me though? Imagine being a woman and being stuck in the palace learning etiquette and wearing uncomfortable dresses all your life. Meanwhile you men get to ride horses and do all the fun stuff. It’s not fair,” she sulked.

She suddenly felt an itch on her arm and groaned when she saw a mosquito leeching on her skin. Shooing it away, she realized that there were a lot flying around the area.

“Mosquitoes like it here,” Seungcheol explained to her when he saw that she was bitten. “I come here a lot. I’ve had my fair share of annoying itches.”

She scratched the annoying bite with her fingernails as she followed Seungcheol into the gate of the graveyard.

There were hundreds of gravestones standing idly before them, sitting atop dirt which covered bodies that had once been alive. No matter how green the surroundings, how bright the sun shone, how nice the weather was, how the musically the trees rustled, and how sweetly the birds chirped, there was always something eerie about a graveyard.

They walked through the gravestones, waving away the plentiful mosquitoes. Every now and again, Seungcheol would stop at a particular gravestone and tell her about the people he used to know. There was his grandfather, an old nobleman that Seungcheol loved as a child, a cousin who died in the war, even two brothers and a sister who passed at infancy. Yewon felt she was learning a lot more about him as he recalled all of the deceased people buried in the graveyard. His past was becoming clearer to her, and so he was becoming clearer to her as well.

She remembered when she first met him. He had been a blank slate to her; the only thing she could know about him came from her experiences with him. So, all he had ever been to her was this coldhearted, mean prince who treated her horribly. But the more she learned, the more his heart of ice made sense, the more she came to see he was not just cold for the sake of being cold. There were layers of experiences from his past that shaped the person that he was.

Finally, Seungcheol stopped at one grave. Yewon read the name on the gravestone: Solbin.

Seungcheol didn’t say anything, he just shooed away a mosquito that was sitting on Solbin’s name. He stood there and gazed at the gravestone for a long time.

Knowing that she was in the presence of the bones of the unfortunate girl gave Yewon a strange kind of feeling. Solbin’s ghost had been lingering over Yewon’s life ever since she got married, and so it was chilling to be in the same physical space as she was.

“Do you visit her often?” Yewon asked, not standing the eerie silence.

“Not as often as I used to,” he admitted. “I think I’m forgetting her.”

“Don’t say that. She’ll hear you,” Yewon grumbled.

In Galacia, there was the belief that the dead can hear them from their graves. Yewon was taught that from birth, and so whenever Galacians visited graveyards, they would talk to their forefathers and tell them what was happening in the living world.

“She can’t hear me,” Seungcheol replied. “She’s gone.”

Solen did not have such a belief though; Yewon had known it from all the burials she attended. In Solen, the dead no longer had any form of consciousness whatsoever. It was a sad belief, Yewon thought, and she didn’t like that Seungcheol was saying these things.

Yewon turned to the grave and spoke: “Don’t listen to him, Solbin. He hasn’t forgotten you. Oh, I’m Princess Yewon, by the way. I married him, but don’t worry; it’s only for politics. You’re still the one in his heart, and I know that because he speaks about you with so much fondness and love. He hasn’t actually forgotten you; he’s just saying that because of pride. You know men and their pride.”

Seungcheol rolled his eyes, clearly finding her custom of talking to gravestones quite amusing. It didn’t deter Yewon from continuing her talk with Solbin though.

“Also, I wonder what your secret was. Seungcheol is so hard to get through to. It seems like he has this ice around his heart that only the sun can melt.”

“You know, you should really become a writer,” Seungcheol interjected. “You’re very skilled with words,” he complimented.

Yewon blushed slightly at the compliment but cleared and firmly stated: “don’t interrupt my soliloquy to Solbin! Poor girl was probably lonely all these year because no one was talking to her.” She turned back to the gravestone and continued: “The amount of times I’ve seen Seungcheol smile can be counted on my fingers. Also, a question: does he even know how to laugh? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him laugh before. What makes him laugh?”

“Yewon, this is ridiculous,” Seungcheol said. “Why are you asking her questions when you know you won’t get an answer?”

Yewon bit back the smile that was triggered by the fact he said her name. He called her Yewon, and not “princess” or “your highness.” She liked hearing her name from him so much: it felt a lot more personal, and a lot sweeter, like there was no formality barrier between them and their association was beyond just political.

She didn’t draw attention to that though, not wanting to fluster him and make him censor himself later. She just gulped down the smile and answered his question: “we believe that the dead talk back to the living through dreams. So whatever dream I see tonight, it will be the answer to that question.”

“You and your superstitions,” Seungcheol scoffed, reaching out and patting away a mosquito that landed on her shoulder.

“It’s not superstition. When I make you laugh tomorrow, you’ll see.”

“I look forward to seeing you try,” he told her, looking partially amused. “Also, stop scratching. You’re bleeding.”

Yewon noticed that she was still instinctively scratching the bite on her arm. She had scratched it so much, that the skin had been worn and it bled a little. What’s worse is that there was another little bite on her hand that she was tempted to scratch as well.

“Let’s go before the mosquitoes eat you,” he told her as he turned away from Solbin’s grave.

But before they headed back towards where the horse was, Seungcheol made one more stop. Jeonghan’s enlarged, lavish gravestone stood out among all the rest. There were still faded flowers all around him, showing that people were still visiting the angel of Solen even months after his death.

Seungcheol stood in front of the grave for a moment, staring at the gravestone with a thoughtful look on his face. He then turned to Yewon slightly and said: “ever since you brought it up, I’ve been trying to remember when it was that you’ve seen me cry. I remember now. I cried when I found out he was gone…”

“I’m sorry,” she apologized with a quick bow. She felt guilty for bringing it up and having him remember that difficult night; she knew that it was something that he would rather forget.

“When Jeonghan and I were… together,” he said to Yewon as he struggled to find his words, “we never talked about Solbin. She was a forbidden top of discussion between us, because both of us felt extremely guilty about our relationship and what it meant for her and what she would think and feel if she could know about it. But somehow, the more we suppressed her memory, the more her face haunted us. Although I loved him very much, the two of us were never very comfortable with one another at all because of her. She came into our minds whenever we did anything together, and so we could never feel happiness when together as a couple.” He took a deep breath, looking towards Jeonghan’s gravestone with a regretful look in his eye. “But I don’t want to be haunted by my past anymore. I don’t want Jeonghan to be another ghost in my life, so I don’t want him to be a taboo like Solbin had been. Otherwise, I’ll never move on be at peace with another person again…”

Seungcheol turned to face her and continued: “For this reason, I want to make this request from you: please, if Jeonghan comes up in our exchanges again, don’t avoid talking about him for my sake. I want to talk about him and face the fact of his death unlike how I dealt with Solbin’s.”

Yewon always felt nervous and self-conscious whenever Seungcheol began to open up to her, because she was so afraid of saying something that deter him from opening up again. She hesitated as she came up with the proper response to what he told her, but eventually said: “okay, if that’s what you want. Actually, I’m very curious about the two of you, but I never talked about it, because I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable…”

“What are you curious about?” Seungcheol asked her.

She blushed and answered: “How you met him. How you realized that you loved him. Your first kiss with him and your first time sleeping with him. You know, things like that,” Yewon said with reddened cheeks and an embarrassed look on her face. The truth was that she had always been curious about these things. Their love story seemed epic: probably the most forbidden romance in the history of the world. It would make a novel that she most definitely wanted to read.

She had known better than to ask Seungcheol about these details before though, but now that he had made the request, she took the opportunity and asked.

In response to it, Seungcheol actually smiled, which made Yewon smile happily too and feel a little less embarrassed for asking him. He was smiling so much more often than before these days, she realized.

“I will satisfy your curiosity, princess,” Seungcheol told her reaching out to wave yet another mosquito from her shoulder. “But not right now, we should head back before it gets dark and the mosquitoes attack.”

Yewon smiled, feeling excited at the prospect of hearing Seungcheol and Jeonghan’s story. Although she already knew the tragic ending of that story, she could sense that build up would be more than worth it.

Seungcheol was unknotting the rope from the tree to which his horse was tied when Yewon felt an unpleasant itch on her chin. She quickly waved her hand over it to flick away the damned mosquito and groaned when she felt the area that the mosquito had bitten. As if her face was not ugly enough as it was, now there was this big red ugly bump on her chin.

“Did you get bitten again?” Seungcheol asked when he heard her groan and saw her hold her chin.

She removed her hand to show him the bite mark. “It’s ugly, right?” she pouted.

“No, it’s not,” he answered. “Put some salt on it when you get back. It’ll go away in a day.”

That couldn’t cheer her up. She touched it again and felt that it got bigger already and groaned again. “It’s so ugly!” she whined as she began to scratch it.

“It’s not that bad,” he insisted.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not. It’s not even noticeable unless you look closely,” Seungcheol maintained. “And don’t scratch it. It’ll leave a mark and take longer to heal.”

“I can’t. I have to scratch it,” she told him. “I have horrible self-control.” She showed him the bite mark on her arm which was now drizzled with blood and damaged skin.

“Well, you should control yourself for this one,” Seungcheol told her.

She tried, but seconds later, she could not control the temptation to scratch it. When he saw her, he rolled his eyes and grabbed both of her hands with his own.

“Stop,” he disciplined gravely and frowned at her as if she were a child.

“I can’t. I have to scratch it!” she whined trying to free her hand so she could relieve the unpleasant prickle on her chin. Seungcheol held her hands tighter to prevent her. She took that as a challenge and lowered her chin in order to use her shoulder to scratch it, but Seungcheol grabbed her chin before she could.

At first he looked prepared to scold her for being so childish, but his expression quickly softened after he fixedly stared at her.

There was something of a spark in that one moment, a spark that set Yewon’s heart beating fast she could tell from the look in her husband’s eyes that he felt that spark too.

Seungcheol had kissed her many times before, but somehow, to Yewon this felt like their first kiss ever. Before, Seungcheol had only kissed her to soften her up for when they would have to sleep together in order to make the experience less impersonal; but now, there was no to follow, and Seungcheol kissed her with an unfamiliar tenderness, tenderness Yewon had never felt from him before.

A/N: im sorry for the lateness. This chapter was a little difficult to write plus my study abroad program is a lot busier than I expected ;;

Anyways so I’m in Turkey right now and this chapter was actually inspired by things I’ve experienced here lol. There are Ottoman graveyards everywhere, there are horses, and there are loads of mosquitoes (and I have an ugly bite on my chin haha).

also I know zero things about riding a horse so im sorry if the things I wrote here wouldn’t actually work in real life lol XD

anyways my study program ends next week so hopefully I’ll be able to update much quicker!