The next morning one of the girls shook Seulhee awake. It was an odd experience for her. She was so used to hearing her mother yell her name from the next room. All of a sudden, she felt a bout of homesickness. Then, quickly, she pushed it away. There was no way she could go home until she finished what she had been sent to do, and who knew when this would all end?

For her morning chores, Seulhee was assigned to work in the kitchen. She had helped her mother prepare meals, but this was something else entirely. Instead of the calm but steady pace she was used to at home, it was an intense frenzy of people striving for culinary perfection under tight time constraints. Aside from the cooks, there were also other servants carrying out other tasks.

Seulhee found herself among this lot, and she wasn’t actually allowed to handle the food, pretty much, only the cooking utensils and bowls and plates and silverware. She was set to scrubbing and polishing spoons, forks, and knives until they gleamed to the satisfaction of her overseer, and after that she had to clean up parts of the kitchen. This kept her busy almost up until she had to go wait on the council.

She had to hurry back to the room to change into another borrowed uniform, for the one she was wearing had been dirtied from her cleaning work. After a bit of fumbling, she got herself into a presentable state and rushed off to the kitchen to acquire the tray and pitcher and other things she would need. With those objects in her possession, she went to locate the room the man had shown her the previous day, walking as fast she possibly could without causing the tray and its contents to go flying out of her hands and shatter all over the pale gray flagstones.

She arrived a bit short on breath, but a few seconds allowed her to calm herself a bit and prepare to enter. Balancing the tray against her hip with one hand, she knocked on the door.

Someone, apparently expecting her, opened it for her. She walked in, set the tray down on a stand that had been placed in the corner of the room. It hadn’t been there the day before, and Seulhee mentally thanked whoever had put it there.

Some people had already served the council members their food. Seulhee’s task was to handle the beverages, as well as do whatever they asked of her during the meal and meeting. Although it wasn’t a terribly difficult task, one person waiting on more than twenty could be a bit of a burden. Hopefully they wouldn’t be summoning her to their sides left and right.

With Seulhee’s entrance, a few of the council members began to have side conversations. Based on what she could hear from her position, their discussions were about her and her “condition.” As she poured a cup of tea for one of the council members, her eye happened to catch some mouthed words about how she was “not a beauty, but pretty enough to take to bed,” and it took all of her effort remain unaffected rather than stroll over and upend the contents of her pitcher onto the speaker’s head.

Comments about her aside, Seulhee thought the composition of the council members quite interesting. She had fully expected the large part of them to be ancient, long-bearded men, but in fact only a few of them looked over than sixty or seventy. More of them were around her father’s age and a bit older. Then there were at least three of the two dozen members who were around the age of thirty.

She supposed that once people hit a certain age, they would be less motivated to plot to take over a kingdom since they would be nearing their deaths. It wouldn’t benefit them all that greatly, and it would take more effort than they might care to expend. Those who plotted would be old enough to have dissatisfactions with their lives’ directions and young enough to still have ambitions.

Once she was finished making her way around the table, she placed the pitcher on the tray and remained in her corner, making herself as inconspicuous as possible. It seemed her novelty to the council had worn off, and they began ignoring her from this point.

Much to Seulhee’s surprise, the council actually did not spend that much time talking about important matters. They did briefly discuss what was happening in Hwasung. Troop movements near the borders, farmers being forced to produce more, areas being cleared for construction of weapons and such, but that wasn’t really of relevance to what Seulhee was looking for.

She realized that the likely reason they weren’t discussing important matters was because they were eating, and they would save official business for later. In that case, she would have to wait through their small talk and hope they ate quickly, though the likelihood of that was low. They were nobles, they didn’t have much of a job to do, so they could take their time.

A few times Seulhee was summoned with the wave of a hand to refill someone’s cup or fetch some sort of dessert from the kitchen, but aside from that, she mostly stood in the corner like a statue, watching the council members eat and talk.

After a while, she decided to observe the council members closely, to see who had grudges against whom and who was friendly with whom. She sincerely doubted they were all friends. More likely they tolerated one another because they were working toward the same goal. After all, the only thing that had united them before was their position under the king, nothing more. In fact, they probably had been rivals back in the day, jockeying for influence and the king’s favor.

No one had really taught her how to read people. It was something she had naturally picked up. More so after Sungyeol had broken off their friendship. She had realized that she needed to understand people better, so she had begun to make a study of the people of the village, and she realized that by looking and listening to people interact over time, there was so much she could unearth about people that they didn’t state directly.

Although she had never explicitly been told to do any of this analysis, Seulhee did it anyway. Concrete information was what the conspiracy aimed to collect, but knowledge of the interrelationships of the council members would no doubt also prove useful. It could be taken and manipulated so that one man another, weakening the structure of the circle, undermining their power.

Soon enough, the council finished its noonday meal, and they got up to leave. They were heading over to the library on the same floor for a break before the actual meeting, and in the meantime, Seulhee was left to deal with their mess. She went to enlist some help with the clean-up and removal, and, aided by three kitchen boys, they had the room in pristine condition once again within the next forty minutes, along with a fresh supply of tea and wine.

With that accomplished, Seulhee once again stood in the corner and waited. Soon enough the council members filed back in. Apparently they knew how long the cleanup lasted and timed their break accordingly. It would make sense since they always met in this fashion.

Seulhee considered studying their habits as well. The more information she gathered on the enemy, no matter how trivial, the better. It would be easier to predict their behavior and know who or what to use against whom.

After forming this thought, she suddenly realized how manipulative she sounded in her own mind. Was this what the council members did all the time? Think about who or what they could use to achieve their end goals? Was every person merely a pawn in their devious plots?

It made Seulhee wonder if she might end up like that. The people in the conspiracy were good people overall, but most likely they were willing to sacrifice much to oppose these people, and that probably meant thinking like the enemy, perhaps even lowering themselves to their level at times. She hoped she wouldn’t become corrupted by this work. Of course, she would have to make it through to the end alive first before she worried about that.

Her thoughts were interrupted by one of the older nobles at the head of the table clearing his voice. The meeting was about to begin.