As soon as the meeting came to a close about two hours later and everything was cleaned and taken care of, Seulhee went to find Sungjong. She had a bit of a break before she had to report for her general afternoon duties, which would then be followed by serving dinner to the council.

She found Sungjong in the stables, talking to a roan mare, petting its forelock gently all the while. When he saw her, he gave the horse a final pat before turning to her. “Why don’t we go somewhere else?” he suggested. She nodded, and they went back to the storage cupboard he had pulled her into the previous day. Once again, he lit it with some muttered word.

“Are you sure no one can hear us?” Seulhee asked quietly, pressing her ear to the door.

“They can’t,” Sungjong assured her. “The spell I cast not only gives us light but creates a barrier around us that absorbs sound. What is it that you have to say?”

“My first report,” she replied. “I served them just now at their meeting.”

“Oh, I see.” The older boy chuckled lightly. “You don’t have to report to me after every one of their meetings. You can put together several meetings’ worth of information into one report and come find me every week or so instead. It will save both of us time, and you won’t always have to make excuses to go places and look suspicious. If we’re seen together too much, that will raise questions too.”

“Not really. If we kept seeing each other like this, people are just going to start running their mouths about untrue things,” she muttered.

“What do you mean?” The older boy tilted his head slightly in confusion.

“Just think about it. We’re a boy and girl. This is a storage room. If we keep popping out of here all the time, people will think we’re…you know…” Seulhee twiddled her thumbs, not wanting to say the word.

“Oh. Oh.” Sungjong’s face turned bright red at the implications of her statement. “I didn’t even think about that…” He trailed off and shut his mouth.

“Anyway, do you want me to save what I found out for later then?”

“If you want to. I have to report back and say that you’re in place and that things are proceeding well, but they aren’t expecting any information as of yet.”

“Now that you mentioned it, why did you join the conspiracy? And what is a stable boy like you doing casting spells left and right?” He didn’t seem a likely candidate for recruitment.

“I suppose I should answer the second question first,” the boy remarked. “I was born gifted with magic.”

Magic was an odd thing. Some, like Sungjong, were born with the talent, which manifested at an early age, and they were usually quite powerful and adept at it once trained. Others—Sungyeol came to mind—didn’t show any signs of being anything other than normal at the beginning, but once they learned, they were capable of doing magic, to varying levels of success. And still others would never be able to do any magic, even if they tried. Seulhee was pretty sure she fell into the final category.

“My magic works best when it comes to animals, but I can do other things as well. I didn’t have much training and mostly had to figure things out for myself. Then the conspiracy heard about me by coincidence, and they came to find me and offered to teach me. I think the fact that I work in the palace helped my case, just a bit.” He laughed. “I was already interested in learning more about magic, but hearing about the cause itself definitely spurred me to volunteer and put forth every effort.”

It felt as if every person Seulhee had met really was trying his very best for the sake of the conspiracy. She didn’t have as much of a personal reason or moral drive to do it. She had come to the capital, lured by a job prospect, only to find out that it was far more than she could have ever imagined. Yet she wasn’t backing out. The reasons boiled down to two things: she needed the money for her family, and she knew so much depended on her that she felt obligated to go along with the plan.

***

The coalition of council members that had seized power met every day, unlike the regular council, which only met a few times per month. Seulhee was not asked to serve at the regular council’s meetings. They would probably have a hard time explaining her condition—though they could have just said they had hired her out of pity. 

It didn’t take very long for Seulhee to figure out that the council coalition kept the important things for their actual meetings. As far as she could tell, their discussions over their meals were almost perfectly mundane, at least for nobles. She wondered if their chatter was representative of their class, or whether it was only the middle-aged men who discussed such things. Her imagination gave her the image of young people stalking about stuffy things like trade and taxes and she couldn’t help but laugh—not out loud, of course—at how ridiculous it seemed. She assumed the younger nobles probably gossiped just like the palace servants, and they spent time flirting and such.

Despite all of the undercover work Seulhee was doing, she didn’t quite feel like a spy. Perhaps it was because nobody suspected her of anything, and she actually didn’t feel much danger. At first she had been nervous that people would see through her ruse, but no one did. People just saw what they expected to see and nothing more.

It meant her life and her task was much easier, but it also meant there was little excitement. Though, on second thought, excitement was not the reason she was risking her life for the conspiracy.

***

The excitement Seulhee was hoping for finally arrived a few weeks later. As that one servant who had caught her on the stairs had predicted, she got assigned to clean the floors on the upper floor for a week. The mystery of the king had bothered her on and off for a while, and now perhaps she would discover the truth for herself.

The palace tailor provided her with the black veil she needed. He apparently had a good number of them in storage back from when the mandatory mourning period for the queen had been instituted, and they had been a required part of all female servants’ uniforms.

Using a ribbon, Seulhee secured the veil to her head. It covered her entire face, and was just translucent enough to see through. The servant hadn’t been joking when she said the king didn’t want to see another woman’s face.

Although barely anyone frequented the upper floors, cleaning them was still a lot of work. Even if nobody left dirt on the floor, dust would gradually accumulate, and that was a perfect pain to get rid of. Seulhee’s nose itched something fierce as she cleaned, so finally she ended up keeping the veil wrapped fairly closely around her face rather than hanging loose so she would have a filter for the dust.

There was nobody to help her, so she was alone for hours at a time when she wasn’t serving the council. She was sorely tempted to hum while she worked, but obviously that wouldn’t do, especially since sound tended to echo long distances in the deserted and drafty hallways.

The only people she encountered were the servants. For the most part they simply dropped food off for the king, and that was it. From what Seulhee could see, the king had one personal servant who attended to him that stayed in a separate room on the bottom-most floor of the king’s quarters.

Despite her hopes, she didn’t get a glimpse of the king. He didn’t seem to leave his room much, if at all. If he was even allowed to. For all she knew, the council forbade it, and he was kept like a prisoner. If he did leave his room, it didn’t happen while she was around. She wondered if he roamed the palace at night, like a ghost, but she dismissed the idea as just her peculiar imagination.

One day, Seulhee finished her cleaning for the evening and, with nothing else better to do, she decided to begin exploring the towers.

She was taking a step onto the first stair when she heard the singing. The sound traveled down the stairs, echoing oddly. It was a man’s voice, silky and mellifluous, but still haunting.

Out of curiosity, she began to climb the stairs. As she did, the lyrics of the songs became distinguishable to her diminished hearing.

You need to be here for it to be paradise
This paradise where I was locked up against my will
A sad paradise where you can’t leave even when you wake up
A paradise where we can be together forever

Although the words made sense to her, Seulhee had the strange and unfounded suspicion that they had been altered in some subtle way. It was an eerie feeling since she didn’t recognize the song or know the words to it.

Disregarding the niggling warning at the back of her mind, she continued climbing up the spiraling stairway, until she got to a landing. Before it even came into view, she could hear the sound of the wind and the singing from outside. The door was open, revealing a balcony. A lone, robed figured stood resting against the railing, his back to her, singing. A breeze ruffled locks of his brown hair, and she could just barely discern a gold circlet sitting upon the man’s head.

As she had suspected, it was the king.
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I swear I didn’t mean to end my update chunk at a cliffhanger…I literally had 49992 words when I finished this part, LOL. The 50k was achieved via the first sentence of the next chapter. xD