#bts feature

Once upon a time, in a kingdom nestled between green mountains and a sea the color of jade, there was born a princess.

Of course, like any other fairytale, she was not born ordinary. On the night before her birth, a single drop of moonlight was said to have fallen from the sky and rooted itself into the earth, blooming into a flower that glowed gold from root to petal. The palace healers, desperate to save the queen who lay dying in childbed, ground the flower into a tea and poured it past her lips, and by morning the queen lived, and by evening the princess was born with a single lock of hair that shone like sunlight caught in silk.

The kingdom rang bells for three days. The king wept. The people lit lanterns and floated them on the river in thanks to whatever gods had seen fit to spare their queen and gift them a princess who glowed.

But the flower's magic had not vanished when it was boiled into tea. It had simply moved—into the girl. Into her hair, which did not merely shine but healed, which did not merely glow but sang low and golden when the right words were spoken over it, undoing wounds, softening age, drawing sickness out of the body like poison from a wound.

There was a woman in the kingdom—never young, never quite old, a woman the years seemed to slide off of like water off stone—who had known about the flower long before the healers ever found it. She had kept it hidden for a hundred years, using its magic to keep herself exactly as she wished to remain. When it was taken from her and given to a queen and consumed by a birth she had no part of, something in her curdled.

She was called, by then, only Mother.

She came for the princess on a night when the moon was new and the palace slept heavy with relief. She did not take the flower. She took the girl instead, because the girl was the flower now, and she carried her from the palace in the dark and up into the mountains, to a tower with no door, only a single window round as an eye, hidden behind a curtain of waterfall and stone.

She raised the princess as her own. She told her that the world outside was full of people who would tear her apart for the power in her hair, that the tower was the only place she would ever be safe, that Mother's love—sharp-edged and conditional and always, always followed by but you know I only want what's best for you—was the only love the girl would ever need.

The king and queen sent lanterns into the sky every year on their daughter's birthday, thousands of them, gold as the flower that had saved the queen's life, in the small and stubborn hope that somewhere, somehow, their daughter would see them and know she was being waited for.

The girl in the tower saw them. Every year, from her window, she watched the far-off sky fill with floating light and never once knew they were for her.

She only knew that something in her chest ached every time the horizon lit up gold, and she never could explain why.

The king and queen never stopped hoping. Every year, when the lanterns had all burned low and drifted back down to the water, the queen would stand alone at the highest window of the palace a while longer than anyone else, watching the dark where the last of the light had gone, and the king would come find her there, and neither of them would say anything at all, because there was nothing left to say that eighteen years of the same silent vigil hadn't already said a hundred times over. They kept her room exactly as it had been. They never once let themselves call it a memorial, because a memorial was for something that was over, and they had never once let themselves believe it was over.

The kingdom, for its part, grew used to the grief the way kingdoms do—folding it quietly into tradition, into the yearly ritual of light, into a story told to children at bedtime about a princess who might, one day, come home. Most had stopped truly expecting it. The lanterns kept rising anyway. Hope, it turned out, didn't require belief to keep going. It only required someone willing to light the wick one more time.

You had lived eighteen years in that tower, and in that time you had become, out of sheer boredom and stubbornness, extremely accomplished.

You could grind ink and paint mountains that looked like the ones you'd never climbed. You could play the gayageum until your fingers bled and then keep playing anyway. You'd taught yourself to read faster than Mother liked, to argue better than Mother liked, to want more than Mother liked, though you were careful never to let her see the wanting directly. You kept it folded small, tucked behind your ribs, brought out only at night with the shutters closed, when you traced the shapes of mountains you'd painted from imagination and wondered what they smelled like up close.

Kono did not approve of the wanting.

Kono was small, no longer than your forearm, built more like a lizard than the great serpentine dragons painted on temple ceilings, but for the two soft antler-like horns that curled back from his brow and the faint iridescent sheen to his scales that shifted blue to green to gold depending on how the light caught him—the exact shifting, you'd always thought, of oil on water, or of a fish turning in a stream. He had a long tail he liked to wrap possessively around your wrist, small clawed feet that could grip silk without snagging it, and an expression, for a creature with no eyebrows, of near-constant and deeply personal disappointment in you. 

He had been left on your windowsill as a hatchling the summer you turned nine, small and starving and furious about it, and had simply never left, and you had never really asked why a mountain temple's guardian creature had abandoned his post to live with a girl in a tower, and he had never told you.

He was, as far as you'd ever heard, meant to bring luck. You mostly found this funny.

"I'm just saying," you told him, that particular evening, standing at the window with your chin in your hands, watching the light change over the tree line, "that if I have to hear one more story about how the outside world is full of ruffians and cutthroats waiting specifically for me, I might actually go looking for the ruffians and cutthroats just to see if they're more interesting than staying here."

Kono made a small, unimpressed noise and flicked his tail against your neck.

"You're right, you're right. Bad plan." You sighed, and the sigh fogged faintly against the cool evening air. "But it's my birthday in three days, Kono. Eighteen years old, and I've never once stood in actual dirt. Do you know how insane that is?"

He blinked his round eyes at you, which you had long since learned to interpret as yes, obviously, I have been here the entire time, why are you telling me this like it's news.

You didn't get to finish making your case, because that was the exact moment something enormous and irritable and coated in mud came flying over the tree line, followed at some distance by two men on horseback who were shouting in a way that suggested this was not a friendly race.

You watched, chin still in your hands, as the fleeing shape—a horse, you realized, a truly furious-looking horse with no rider—thundered off in one direction, and the men gave up the chase and doubled back toward the waterfall instead, toward the tower, toward the one place in this entire kingdom that was not supposed to be findable.

Kono went rigid against your shoulder.

You, if you were being fully honest with yourself, felt something in your chest that was not quite fear. It sat right alongside the fear, close enough to be mistaken for it, but it wasn't fear.

It was closer to finally.

His name, you would learn—though not for several more extremely tense minutes—was Martin Edwards, and he arrived through your window the way a cat arrives through a window: badly, loudly, and with absolutely no acknowledgment that he might be intruding.

He tumbled onto your floor in a graceless heap of limbs, dragging a satchel that clinked with something metal, and had approximately one and a half seconds to register that the tower he'd chosen at complete random to hide in was, in fact, occupied, before you brought the singing bowl down over his head with every ounce of strength eighteen years of restless boredom had built into your arms.

The bowl rang out, low and resonant, an actual musical note hanging in the air over the sound of him crumpling sideways into your dried-flower arrangement.

You stood over him, bowl still raised, breathing hard, and felt, for the first time in your entire life, genuinely and thoroughly alive.

He groaned. He was, you noted with some irritation, extremely tall even lying down, all long limbs folded wrong across your floor, and even unconscious his face had the specific, punchable quality of someone who had never once in his life doubted that he was the most charming person in any room he walked into.

Kono skittered down your arm to the floor and approached the stranger with the deep suspicion of a creature sizing up a rival. He sniffed once at Martin's outstretched hand, apparently found it lacking, and turned his back on it with as much dignity as a small dragon draped in mud-splattered iridescent scales could manage.

You dragged the intruder—with considerable effort, and a truly staggering amount of complaining directed at Kono, who offered zero help—into your wardrobe, and shut the door, and sat down hard on your bed with your heart going like a struck drum.

Ruffians and cutthroats, you thought, a little hysterically. Right on schedule.

He woke up loud, which you supposed made sense, given everything else about him so far.

"—okay, okay, I'm awake, I'm awake, get the—" He kicked the wardrobe door open with a force that sent your good winter coats sliding off their hooks and staggered out into the room with both hands raised, blinking against the lamplight, and then his eyes landed on you, standing across the room with the singing bowl held out in front of you like a shield, and something in his face actually, genuinely, lit up.

"Oh," he hummed. "Hello."

"Don't move," you said.

"I'm not moving." He did not stop moving. His eyes were doing a slow, assessing sweep of the room—the window, the wardrobe, you, the bowl, back to you—that you didn't love the feeling of. "Nice place. Very—cozy. Homey. Round. You don't get a lot of round rooms."

"I said don't move."

"I'm being extremely still." He took a single, deliberate step sideways, testing you, and you swung the bowl an inch closer to his skull, and he froze with both hands up again, and something that might have been the beginning of respect crossed his face. "Okay. Fair. Noted."

Up close, in better light, he was infuriatingly good-looking in a way you resented on principle. Tall—taller than anyone had a right to be in a low-ceilinged tower room. This ruffian was blond in a country where you'd never once seen hair that color (not that you’d really seen any other existing humans).

He had this odd and loose, careless confidence that suggested he'd never had to work particularly hard for anything, including, apparently, avoiding capture, since two very large men had chased him halfway across a mountain and he still looked more amused than afraid.

"Who are you," you snarled, "and how did you find this tower?"

"Martin Edwards." He said it like it should mean something to you. When your expression didn't change, an emotion flickered across his face—annoyance, maybe, or the specific wound of a man whose name usually did land. "You've truly never heard of me."

"I've never heard of anyone. I live in a tower."

"Right. Yes. Fair point, very fair, I did notice the—tower situation." He gestured vaguely at the room, the window, the general concept of your entire life. "Look, I didn't find this place, I was being chased, I saw a hole in a wall of rock, I went through the hole. This was not a planned visit. I have no interest in your—tower. Your life. Any of it. I just need to lay low for a bit and then I will be very happy to climb right back out that window and never think about any of this again."

You considered him. You considered the satchel, which he'd dropped by the wardrobe door, and which had made a very specific metallic clinking sound when he fell.

"What's in the bag?"

His whole body changed—just slightly, just for a second, a flicker of genuine alarm before the easy charm slid back over it like a curtain. "Nothing that concerns you."

"It's in my room."

"It's in my possession."

"You're in my tower."

"Okay, fine, guess that’s—actually a decent point." He exhaled through his nose, glanced at the window, seemed to calculate something, and then said, with the air of a man laying down a very reasonable trump card: "Tell you what. You let me leave, quietly, no fuss, and I forget this entire evening ever happened. Bag included. Everyone wins."

You should have said yes. Later—much later, with the wind in your hair and your heart still going too fast in your chest—you would think about how easy it would have been to say yes, to open the window, to let him climb back out into the night and never know what you'd almost missed.

Instead you looked past him, out your one round window, at the darkening sky, and you thought about lanterns you'd never seen up close and mountains you'd only ever painted from guesswork, and you heard yourself say, "No."

He blinked. "No?"

"You're going to take me somewhere."

"I am not."

"There's a light show. Lanterns. Every year, on the—" you almost said my birthday, and swallowed it, some old instinct telling you not to hand a stranger that particular thread to pull. "There's a light in the sky, every year, from the direction of the kingdom. I want to see it up close. You're going to take me, and then you can have your little… bag back."

"You don't have my bag."

"I know where you left it," you said, which was true, and gestured with your chin at Kono, who had, in the general chaos, quietly and with great personal satisfaction dragged the satchel across the floor and was now sitting on top of it with the smug posture of a creature who understood exactly what leverage was.

Martin looked at the dragon. The dragon looked at Martin. Something passed between them that you didn't fully understand yet but would come, over the following days, to recognize as the opening shot of a genuinely long and deeply petty war.

"That thing is sitting on my satchel," Martin gasped, in the tone of a man who could not quite believe the indignity of his current situation.

"His name is Kono."

"I don't care what his name is, he is sitting on my—"

"He's very protective," you said, not entirely truthfully, since Kono's motives had far more to do with spite than protection, but you weren't about to admit that. "So. Lanterns. Then your bag. Then you go wherever it is men with bags full of clinking things go."

Martin looked at you for a long moment. He truly looked, in a way that made you resist the urge to fold your arms over your chest, and then rubbed both hands down his face and groaned like a man who'd already lost an argument he hadn't realized he was having.

"You," he chuckled in what you assume to be sarcasm, "are going to be a problem."

"Probably," you agreed, and found, to your own surprise, that you were smiling.

"For the record," he added, already turning to inspect the window, testing the give of the shutter with one hand, "I don't actually do this. Escort duty. Tour guide. Whatever this is."

"You don't have much choice."

"I have plenty of choice, lady. I'm choosing to be gracious about a bad situation, there's a difference." He glanced back at you, something assessing in the look, like he was recalculating you from scratch now that the singing bowl had been lowered. "How far is this light show, anyway?"

"I don't actually know."

"You don't—" He closed his eyes briefly, the particular patience of a man doing math he didn't want to do. "You dragged me into a hostage negotiation for a destination you don't know the distance to."

"It's in the direction of the kingdom. I've watched it every year from the window. It can't be that far."

"'Can't be that far' has gotten men killed, you know."

"You'll live," you said, with far more confidence than you actually possessed, and went to go retrieve your good travelling shoes, leaving him standing by the window looking like a man reconsidering every choice that had led him to this particular evening.

You changed, too, while he waited—out of the loose sleeping robes you'd been in when he'd fallen through your window and into the good hanbok you'd been saving, the one Mother had commissioned for a birthday you weren't allowed to leave the tower to celebrate.

Pale jeogori embroidered along the collar with thread the color of new leaves, the chima falling in soft, heavy folds you'd never actually walked any real distance in, sash tied the way you'd practiced a hundred times alone in front of a mirror with no one to see it.

It felt strange, dressing for a world you'd never been allowed into. It felt stranger still, catching your own reflection in the dark window glass, to think that you might actually look like you belonged there.

Were you… scared? No. Surely not. You wanted this. It’s practically your life’s purpose. But what about Mother? She had kept you safe and protected from the evils of that world for all your life and wouldn’t this be taking that protection for granted? 

"You're stalling," Martin called, from somewhere near the window.

"I'm preparing."

"You've re-tied that sash three times."

"It has to sit correctly or it'll come loose on the climb down."

"It's a piece of fabric, not a structural pillar—"

"Do you want my help escaping or not?"

That, at least, bought you the silence you needed to finish, smoothing the last fold flat with hands that weren't quite steady, and when you finally turned around he'd gone quiet in a different way, something briefly, helplessly caught in his expression before he covered it with a cough and a very deliberate glance toward the window.

"Ready?" he asked.

"Ready," you said, and meant it more than you expected to.

Getting out of the tower took considerably longer than getting in, mostly because you insisted on doing it via the long braided rope of your own hair—which made Martin's expression do something complicated and slightly ill when you explained the general mechanics of your situation—and partly because you stopped four separate times on the way down to look at things. A bird. The particular texture of the moss on the tower's stone base. Your own hands, dirt-smudged for the first time in your life, which you held up in the fading light like they belonged to someone else.

"You're doing something weird with your face," Martin said, from where he was waiting with visibly diminishing patience at the base of the waterfall.

"What thing."

"The—" he gestured at your entire self, "—wide-eyed newborn puppy thing. It's very slow."

"I've never touched a river before."

"You've touched water before."

"Not river water. It's cold. It's moving. Did you know it does that? Just—moves, constantly, going somewhere—"

"Incredible information. Truly a marvel of the natural world. Can we—"

"Give me one more minute."

You did not give him one more minute. You gave him closer to ten, crouched at the edge of the water with your skirts hiked up and your bare feet in the current, laughing—actually laughing, a real sound you weren't sure you'd made before, not like this, not from somewhere this deep—while Martin stood a respectful distance away with his arms crossed and an expression that was trying very hard to stay annoyed and mostly failing.

"You know," he said, eventually, watching you, "for a girl who apparently thinks the entire world is trying to eat her alive, you're taking this remarkably well."

"I never said the world was trying to eat me."

"You have the exact energy of someone who was told that, yes."

You didn't answer that, because it was uncomfortably accurate, and instead climbed back up onto the bank and reached for the little cloth bag Mother had never let you leave without, purely out of habit—and then remembered you'd left the tower entirely, that Mother was three days out at her own errand, that there was no one to sneak anything past anymore, and the freedom of that thought hit you somewhere just under your ribs hard enough that you had to sit with it a second.

Martin was watching your face do something complicated.

"You okay, Princess?"

You blinked at him. "What did you call me?"

"Princess." He shrugged easily, like he'd been waiting for an excuse. "Means gongju. You know. Lost girl, hidden tower, guarded like she's made of something precious—you have to admit it tracks."

"I'm not a princess."

"I didn't say you were. I said it tracks." He was grinning now, delighted with himself in a way that made you want to throw something at him. "There's an actual missing princess, you know. Whole kingdom's been mourning her for eighteen years. Lanterns every year on her birthday, the whole thing. I’m guessing that’s what you’re trying to see. Funny coincidence, a girl locked in a tower wanting to see the exact same lanterns."

"Coincidences happen."

"Sure they do." He fell into step beside you, hands tucked behind his head, entirely too pleased with the theory he was clearly not going to let go of. "Or, alternatively, I could just call you 'princess.' Would you prefer that? Since you don't know what it means. I mean, I'm sure a sheltered young lady like yourself, freshly escaped from an entire lifetime in a stone tower, wouldn't be familiar with a word like that. It’s English. Very obscure. Very advanced."

"I know what it means, I was born here, same as you."

"Do you though? Prove it."

"I'm not proving anything to you."

"Because you can't."

"Because it's beneath me."

"There it is," he said, snapping his fingers, delighted. "Gongju behavior if I've ever seen it."

"I will push you into the river."

"You're welcome to try, princess."

"You know what's funny," Martin said, a little while later, once you'd both fallen into an easier walking rhythm and the sun had dropped low enough to gild the tops of the trees. "You never actually told me your name."

You hesitated. It wasn't that you didn't have one—Mother had given you one, early, though she'd used it so rarely, always preferring darling or sweet girl or, when she was displeased, no name at all, just a long and pointed silence—it was that saying it out loud to a stranger on your first night outside a tower felt like handing over something you weren't sure yet was safe to hand over.

"I'm not telling you."

"Why not?"

"Because you'll use it against me somehow. You seem like the type."

"I am offended." He didn't sound offended. He sounded thrilled, the way he sounded about most things that gave him new material to work with. "Fine. Keep your mystery. I'll just keep calling you gongju, then, and everyone we meet is going to assume you actually are the missing princess, and it'll be your fault when the whole kingdom starts a rumor."

"Nobody's going to believe that."

"You'd be surprised what people believe about a girl who climbs out of a tower on a rope made of her own hair."

You didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because it was, again, unfairly accurate, and you settled instead for shoving him lightly with your shoulder, which did nothing except make him laugh.

"Say it, then," you said. "Princess. If that's what you're going to call me, I want to actually hear you say the real word, not just the joke version."

He said it—properly this time, no mockery in it, the vowels landing soft and familiar in a way that startled you a little, like hearing a song you hadn't realized you knew the words to.

"There," he said. "Happy?"

"You're still not calling me that."

"I'm absolutely calling you that. It's efficient. It's accurate, probably. And frankly," he added, glancing sideways at you with something almost gentle underneath the usual smugness, "it suits you better than whatever your actual name is going to turn out to be."

"You don't even know my actual name."

"I don't need to. I've got a working theory and I like it. A sheltered young lady," he said, drawing the words out with exaggerated care, "freshly liberated from a tower, apparently unfamiliar with basic Korean vocabulary—really, it all fits."

"I am not unfamiliar with basic—"

"Prove it. What's gongju mean, then, if you know it so well?"

"It means princess, and you know I know that, you're just being insufferable on purpose."

"On purpose and very successfully," he agreed, entirely too pleased with himself, and you gave up trying to win the argument and let yourself, instead, enjoy the specific, unfamiliar pleasure of being teased by someone who clearly wasn't trying to hurt you with it.

You did not push him into the river, mostly because you were fairly sure you'd fall in with him, but you thought about it, hard, the entire rest of the walk, while he hummed something tuneless and infuriating under his breath and Kono rode along in the fold of your sleeve making small disapproving noises every time Martin so much as glanced in your direction.

You noticed, though you weren't going to say it out loud, that he never actually stopped. Princess. Not once, the rest of that day, or the day after, or any of the days that came after that. It stuck the way nicknames only stick when the person using them has decided, somewhere below the joking, that they mean it.

The wanted poster was nailed to a tree at the first crossroads you came to, curling slightly at the corners from weather, and you might have walked right past it if Martin hadn't gone abruptly, suspiciously quiet beside you.

You looked. Then you looked again, closer, and had to physically bite down on the inside of your cheek to keep from laughing.

It was, unmistakably, him—same jaw, same insufferable eyebrows, same general air of a man who thought quite highly of himself—except that whoever had drawn it had rendered his mouth as a row of crooked, gap-toothed, wildly uneven teeth, snaggled in every direction like a fence that had lost a fight with a storm.

"That is not accurate," Martin yelled, very fast, snatching the poster down off the tree before you could get a proper look.

"That is—that is artistic license, that is a hack sketch artist with a grudge and no talent, my teeth are—" he actually opened his mouth to demonstrate, tilting his head back, and you had to admit, unwillingly, that his teeth were in fact very straight, surprisingly white, entirely unremarkable in the best possible way. "See? Perfect. Immaculate. I have never once in my life had a complaint about my teeth, I get compliments on my teeth—"

"From who?"

"From—people. Women. Discerning women with excellent taste who appreciate a good—"

"It says here you're a wanted thief," you hummed, reading over his shoulder now that he'd lowered the poster in his outrage, "with a reward of—" you did the math and had to stop and reread it, "—that is a genuinely enormous amount of money."

"It's inflated. That's a—that's a gross exaggeration of my worth, I'm not worth that much, this is clearly a—"

"You're arguing that you're worth less than a wanted poster says?"

"I'm arguing that the number is inaccurate, there's a difference, the number is clearly designed to encourage overzealous bounty hunting, it's a scare tactic—"

"So you agree you're worth stealing."

"That is not—that is not what I said, you're twisting my words, this is exactly the kind of thing I was worried about when you insisted on coming along, you're going to misquote me to guards at some point and get us both—"

"I'm just reading what's written."

He scoffed and kicked a rock. "You're reading it with inflection."

"I'm reading it with my normal voice."

"You said 'genuinely enormous amount of money' like it was a personal insult to me specifically."

"You seem more upset about the teeth than the wanted part."

"Because the wanted part is accurate," he said, with the flat honesty of a man too distracted by dental slander to bother lying. "I am wanted. I did steal something. The teeth, though. The teeth are slander."

"What did you steal?"

He hesitated—and it was the first genuinely unguarded pause you'd seen from him all day—and then folded the poster into quarters and shoved it into his satchel with a little more force than necessary. "Doesn't matter. Ancient history. Water under the bridge."

"You stole it approximately six hours ago."

"Extremely ancient, in relative terms." He set off walking again, faster than before, and you had to jog a few steps to catch up, Kono digging tiny claws into your shoulder to keep his balance.

"You're not going to tell me."

"I am not."

"Is it the crown," you guessed, because you'd caught the edge of gold in the satchel earlier, glinting when Kono had dragged it across the floor, and you watched his shoulders go very slightly, very deliberately stiff.

"No," he said, in a tone that meant yes, and you decided, generously, to let him have it, mostly because you were far more interested in the actual horse that had just come thundering around the bend in the road, nostrils flaring, eyes locked on Martin with an expression of pure, personal, long-simmering rage.

"Oh, no," Martin said.

"Is that—"

"That is Woojoo, yes, that is my horse, that is a long, complicated relationship—"

Woojoo did not stop for pleasantries. He came at Martin like a man settling a debt, and the next several minutes dissolved into a genuinely spectacular chase around a small clearing that involved Martin climbing a tree, Woojoo standing guard at the base of said tree with the patient menace of a creature who had all the time in the world, and you sitting on a fallen log with Kono, watching, thoroughly entertained.

"He's not usually like this," Martin called down, from somewhere in the upper branches.

"He seems very consistent, actually."

"Okay, he's exactly like this, every time, it's—we have history, this horse and I, it's complicated—"

"He's a horse."

"He's vindictive, is what he is, he's been trying to get me arrested for two years, that's not normal horse behavior, that's a personal vendetta—"

Kono made a small, delighted chattering noise beside you, which you were beginning to understand meant something close to finally, someone gets it, and when you glanced down at him he was watching Woojoo with what could only be described as newfound professional respect.

"What exactly did you do to him," you called up, watching Woojoo pace a slow, deliberate circle around the base of the tree, occasionally rearing to paw at the lowest branch just to remind Martin he had options.

"I didn't do anything, he's just been like this since I acquired him."

"You stole him."

"I acquired him. There's a nuance."

"From who?"

"From a royal stable, technically, but in my defense he was clearly unhappy there, high-strung, difficult, the stablemaster hated him—I did him a favor, honestly, and this is the thanks I get, two years of relentless, targeted footwear-based revenge—"

Woojoo, as if personally offended by the retelling, reared up again with a furious whinny and got one hoof solidly against the trunk hard enough to shake the branch Martin was gripping, sending down a small shower of leaves and one extremely undignified yelp.

"He understood that," you gasped and shook your head. "He understood every word of that and he took offense."

"Horses don't understand language."

"This one might."

"This one is a menace, is what he is," Martin said, adjusting his grip with the particular caution of a man who had recently reconsidered his life choices, "a genuine menace who has decided, for reasons known only to himself, that his sole purpose on this earth is making my life difficult—"

You decided, watching the standoff continue with no signs of resolving itself, that this was likely to go on for some time if left entirely to the two of them, and so you climbed down off your log, brushed off your skirts, and walked directly up to Woojoo with far more confidence than you actually felt.

He swung his great head toward you, ears pinned, nostrils flaring, and for a moment you thought you'd badly misjudged the situation—and then, slowly, his ears came up, and he leaned his head down toward you with something almost curious, blowing a warm breath across your palm when you held it out.

"There," you murmured. "See? I'm not the one who stole an apple from your feed bag."

"You heard about the apple thing—" Martin's voice, muffled and betrayed, from somewhere above.

Woojoo made a low, satisfied sort of noise, nudging his nose against your shoulder, and you had the distinct impression, ridiculous as it was, that you had just been recruited onto a very specific and very committed team.

It took another twenty minutes, a great deal of undignified negotiating, and—eventually—you stepping in to physically stand between horse and man with your hands raised in a gesture of peace, before Woojoo agreed, with visible reluctance, to a temporary truce, on the condition—as far as you could interpret from a horse's expression—that he got to walk close enough to occasionally, "accidentally," step on the back of Martin's boot.

"This is humiliating," Martin muttered, as you all set off again, horse and dragon flanking either side of you like a pair of extremely judgmental honor guards.

"I think it's going great," you said, and meant it.

The hanok appeared out of the trees just as the light was going properly gray, low and wide-roofed in the old style, warm lantern-light spilling from its paper windows, smoke curling from a chimney with the smell of something roasting.

"Absolutely not," Martin said, the second he clocked it. "No. We're walking past this. This is a place I have specifically, personally, at great cost, learned to walk past."

"Why?"

"Because it's full of the single worst collection of degenerates in this entire kingdom, and every single one of them would sell me out for a fraction of that reward money without blinking."

"So we're not going in."

"We are absolutely not going in."

You went in.

In your defense, you hadn't fully decided to defy him so much as your feet had simply kept walking while your brain was still weighing the pros and cons, and by the time Martin caught up to grab your sleeve you were already three steps through the door. Into a low, smoke-hazed room packed with the strangest assembly of people you had ever seen in your entire—admittedly very limited—experience of people.

There was a man built like a small mountain, missing most of his teeth, gently carving what appeared to be a delicate wooden hairpin. There was someone in the corner whose face you genuinely could not parse in the low light—too many angles, somehow, like looking at a person through cracked glass—quietly mending a fan.

There were twin brothers arm-wrestling with murderous focus over what turned out, on closer inspection, to be a single dumpling. Someone had a pet weasel draped around their neck like a scarf. Someone else appeared to be knitting something with visibly too many needles. The whole room smelled like woodsmoke and old rice wine and something underneath that you couldn't place and didn't especially want to.

Every single head in the room turned when the door swung shut behind you.

"We're leaving," Martin said, very quietly, into your ear.

"Is that Martin Edwards?" said the mountain-sized man with the hairpin, in a voice that dropped the temperature of the room several degrees.

"No," Martin said.

"That's definitely him," said someone else.

"That is not—okay, fine, hi, yes, hello everyone, lovely establishment, we're just passing through—"

What followed was, by your private accounting, one of the strangest and best evenings of your entire life.

It started with the reward money—someone in the back producing a slightly more accurate wanted poster, teeth and all, and passing it around with escalating commentary, the twins, apparently named Seonghyeon and Juhoon, abandoning their dumpling war entirely to lean over and study Martin's face against the drawing with academic seriousness—and slid, somehow, without your ever quite catching the exact moment it happened, into a full-throated, half-drunk, wildly enthusiastic taunting song, the whole room joining in verse by verse, about every humiliating thing anyone in the establishment had ever heard about Martin Edwards.

The man with the weasel started it, banging a wooden cup against the table for rhythm, and it snowballed from there the way these things always seemed to in a room full of people who'd clearly been waiting years for an excuse.

Oh, the boy who came from nowhere, with his smile and his fine clothes—thinks he's someone, thinks he's special, thinks the whole wide kingdom knows,

sang the man with the weasel, and the twins picked it up without missing a beat, still slightly out of breath from the dumpling war,

but we remember when he begged us for a bowl of rice, a place to sleep—now he struts around in silk scraps calling himself something deep!

"That is one time," Martin said, to no one in particular, to the entire room, to the universe. "That was one specific winter,that is not a fair representative sample of my—"

Nobody was listening. The person with too many needles had abandoned her knitting entirely to conduct the room like an orchestra, and Namjoon's booming baritone came in over the top of everyone else's,

Oh, his teeth are crooked as a fence line, oh, his hair's a rooster's crest, and the last time that he tried to smolder a fisherman's wife laughed so hard she fell in the river and had to be fished out herself —

which was, you gathered, not even remotely true and possibly the single funniest thing anyone had said all evening, judging by the way Martin's whole face went scarlet and the room dissolved into fresh, delighted chaos.

"That last one isn't even true—" Martin tried, over the singing, and got roundly ignored, and you watched, absolutely delighted, from your seat on an overturned barrel, as an entire room of strangers dismantled him verse by gleeful verse, and did not, notably, join in—not because you weren't tempted, but because you found it far funnier to simply watch his face while it happened, the specific, put-upon suffering of a man who could not decide whether to laugh or storm out and kept landing, over and over, on some helpless combination of both.

There was something underneath the teasing, too, that you only half caught—a warmth in it, the particular rough affection of people who'd known someone a long time and had earned the right to be cruel to him in a way that was really just another word for fond.

Namjoon clapped Martin on the shoulder hard enough to stagger him mid-verse and called him boy in a voice gone suddenly soft under all the noise.

You found yourself wondering, not for the first time that night, exactly how long ago it had been that a much younger Martin Edwards had first shown up in a place like this with nowhere else to go, and exactly what had happened to him before that, that a room full of thieves and degenerates had ended up feeling, to him, like the closest thing to family he had.

You filed the thought away to ask about later. You had a feeling it wasn't a question he'd answer easily, or sober, or with an audience.

"You're not even going to defend me," he said to you, mid-chorus, over the noise.

"I'm having a wonderful time."

"That is betrayal, that's what that is—"

"They're not even wrong about the teeth thing."

"They are entirely wrong about the teeth thing, my teeth are fine—"

Somewhere around the fourth verse, the man with the hairpin—whose name, you'd gathered, was something like Namjoon, though it was hard to be sure over the singing—leaned across the table toward you with the particular intensity of someone who had decided you were the most interesting thing in the room.

"You," he pointed. "You have good energy. You've never danced on a table before, have you?"

"I've never been in a room before," you said, honestly, which seemed to delight him even further.

"Well," he said, standing, extending a huge, hairpin-carving hand toward you with genuine ceremony, "there's a first time."

You should have said no. You thought, distantly, of Mother's voice, of every warning about the danger and filth of the outside world, and then you thought about how good it had felt, hours ago, to have your bare feet in a river for the first time in your life, and you took the enormous man's hand and let him haul you, laughing, up onto the low wooden table.

It turned out you were, against every expectation, a genuinely excellent dancer—eighteen years of solitary practice in a round tower room had to be good for something—and the room roared its approval as you spun, skirts of your hanbok flaring out around your ankles, hair flowing, laughing so hard your ribs ached.

Martin stood below the table with an expression that had stopped being annoyed several minutes ago and had settled into something else entirely, something he was clearly trying very hard not to let show on his face and failing at almost completely.

The twins abandoned all pretense of arm-wrestling entirely to bang out a rhythm on the tabletop with the flats of their hands, and the man with the weasel produced, from some hidden pocket, a small reed flute he turned out to play with startling skill, weaving a quick, bright melody underneath the room's continued heckling of Martin, who had by now given up defending his teeth entirely and switched to a full, aggrieved commentary on the general injustice of his evening.

"This is not what I agreed to when I climbed through that window," he called up at you, though he was smiling despite himself, that same helpless, undone expression creeping further across his face with every spin you took. "I signed up for hiding. Quietly. In a tower. Not—this. Not a full musical indictment of my character followed by you personally providing the evening's entertainment."

"You're welcome to join me," you called back, breathless, delighted, and watched with enormous satisfaction as his face went briefly, thoroughly panicked.

"Absolutely not."

"Coward."

"Strategist. There's a meaningful difference between the two—"

Namjoon, still clapping along from below, tipped his head back and roared with laughter loud enough to rattle the paper windows, and even Kono, perched safely on a high shelf out of the way of the chaos, seemed to have relaxed enough to bob his small head faintly along with the flute's rhythm, which you filed away as further evidence, alongside the nose-attack yet to come, that his feelings about Martin were considerably more complicated than his usual sniffing disdain let on.

It was, of course, at that exact moment—you spinning, laughing, glowing in the lanternlight, framed perfectly in the hanok's single paper window—that the door burst open.

Mother stood in the frame, still dressed for travel, face utterly, terribly still, and every single sound in the room died at once.

You would replay the next thirty seconds for years afterward and never fully be able to piece together the order they happened in.

Mother's eyes found yours across the room and something in them cracked open—not relief, you understood, even in the moment, even through the roaring in your ears. Not relief. Fury, dressed up as fear, the way it always was.

"You," Mother said, and her voice, even pitched low, even across a room gone suddenly silent, carried the way it always had, carved out of something colder than the room's actual temperature. She didn't shout. She never shouted; shouting would have meant losing something, and Mother did not lose things, she simply took them back. "Get down from there. Now."

You didn't move. You were aware, distantly, of how strange it was—that a woman who had raised you for eighteen years, whose voice had shaped nearly every rule you'd ever lived by, could stand in a doorway and still make your whole body want to obey before your mind had caught up to deciding whether it should.

"I was just—"

"I don't care what you were just. Look at you. Look at what he's done to you already." Mother's eyes flicked, briefly, murderously, to Martin, standing frozen below the table. "This is exactly what I warned you about. Exactly. One night outside that tower and already you're—" she gestured, sharp and contemptuous, at the whole scene, the hanok, the strangers, your loosened hair, "— this."

"This is the most fun I've had in my entire life," you said, and heard your own voice shake only slightly.

Something in Mother's face did something complicated—not softened, not exactly, but shifted, the fury underneath it briefly, dangerously exposed. "That tower kept you safe."

"That tower kept me contained."

"There she is," said someone—one of the guards behind Mother, you realized, a whole detail of them, come looking for the man on the wanted poster and finding, instead, considerably more than they'd bargained for.

The room dissolved into chaos.

Later, you would understand that half the hanok's patrons had their own reasons to want no part of a run-in with royal guards, and so what happened next was less an act of loyalty to you or Martin specifically and more a matter of shared, practical self-interest—but in the moment it felt like nothing short of a miracle.

The mountain of a man with the hairpin suddenly hauling a table sideways to block the door, the twins scattering rice wine across the floor to send the first guard through it skidding, the person with too many needles somehow managing to tangle an entire coil of yarn around someone's ankles.

"Move, move—" Martin had you by the wrist, hauling you off the table and through a low doorway at the back of the hanok you hadn't even noticed, past a stack of firewood that Namjoon shoved aside with one huge hand to reveal a narrow black gap in the wall, barely wide enough for the two of you, sloping down into the dark.

"In, go, go—" and then you were falling, more than climbing, into a tunnel that smelled of packed earth and old stone, Martin's hand fused to your wrist. Kono was a frantic weight against your collarbone, the sound of shouting and splintering wood fading fast above you as the two of you half-ran, half-stumbled through absolute blackness.

The tunnel was narrower than it had looked from the mouth of it—low enough in places that Martin had to duck, cursing under his breath every time his shoulder caught stone, and twice the passage forked without warning, no light to guide the choice, nothing but Martin's hand tightening around yours and a muttered "left, I think, left—" that you had no way of verifying and every reason to simply trust.

Somewhere behind you, muffled through packed earth, you heard the unmistakable scrape of the firewood being shoved aside a second time, and a voice—not Mother's, one of the guards, sharp and close in a way that made your stomach drop—calling that they'd found the passage.

"Faster," Martin breathed, and you didn't need telling twice, your bare palm scraping stone as you half-felt your way forward, heart slamming so hard you could feel it in your throat. The darkness pressed close enough on every side that for one disorienting stretch you lost all sense of which way was even forward anymore, trusting nothing but the grip of his hand and the sound of his breathing just ahead of you.

A light bobbed somewhere behind—torchlight, catching the tunnel wall in a brief orange smear before you rounded another bend and lost it again—and you thought, with a clarity that cut cleanly through the panic, they're going to catch us, and then, right on its heels, absurdly, I don't even care, this is the most alive I have ever felt in my entire life.

You should have been terrified.

Some distant, sensible part of you understood that you were, technically, terrified—Mother's face, the guards, the very real danger of the last thirty seconds—and yet underneath the fear was something so bright and enormous it eclipsed nearly everything else, something that had been building all day, all evening, every single moment since your feet first touched river water, and it broke open now in the pitch dark of that tunnel as something you could only describe as pure, uncut joy.

You were laughing. You realized it somewhere in the second minute of running, blind, hand in hand with a wanted thief, chased by your own mother's guards, and you were laughing so hard you could barely breathe, and Martin—somewhere ahead of you in the dark, breathless himself—started laughing too, and the two of you burst out of the far end of the tunnel into open moonlit air still half-doubled over, gasping, giddy, alive in a way you didn't have words for yet.

You collapsed against a fallen log at the tunnel's mouth, chest heaving, hair a wild mess around your shoulders, and looked up at the stars—more of them than you'd ever seen from your tower window, spilled out edge to edge across the whole enormous sky—and thought, with a clarity that startled you: this. This is what I wanted.

"You," Martin said, still catching his breath beside you, staring at you like he was seeing something for the first time, "are a genuinely terrifying person."

"I danced on a table."

"You incited a riot."

"I think that was mostly you."

"No, that was—okay, that was a little me, but you—" he gestured at you, helplessly, at your wrecked hair and your flushed face and the grin you couldn't have wiped off if you tried, "—you're supposed to be the sheltered one. The tower girl. And instead you're out here dancing on tables and outrunning royal guards on your first day of freedom like you were made for it."

"Maybe I was."

Something shifted in his face when you said that—quick, unguarded, gone almost before you could catch it—and for a second neither of you said anything at all, just sat there in the moonlight with your shoulders nearly touching, breathing hard, the tunnel's dark mouth still gaping open behind you.

"Princess," he said, quieter now, no teasing in it at all.

"That's not my name."

"I know." He was still looking at you. "Doesn't mean it's not true."

You let the silence sit for a moment, the two of you still catching your breath, the tunnel's dark mouth gaping open behind you like something that had swallowed the version of yourself who'd walked into that hanok an hour ago and spat out someone slightly different.

"Can I ask you something," you said, eventually.

"You're going to anyway."

"That man. Namjoon. He called you boy like he'd known you a long time."

Something in Martin's face shuttered, just slightly, the easy grin dimming a few degrees without fully disappearing. "Long time's a strong way to put it."

"How long?"

He was quiet long enough that you thought he wasn't going to answer at all, picking at a loose thread on his sleeve with more focus than the thread deserved.

"I grew up in an orphanage," he said finally, not looking at you. "Not a nice one. The kind that stops feeding you the second you're old enough to feed yourself, more or less. I left when I was about twelve, lived rough for a while, and that place—that hanok, all those people you just watched sing an entire ballad about my teeth—that was the first place that ever fed me without asking anything back the first time I walked in half-starved and half my current size. So. Long time. Longer than I usually admit to strangers who hit me with singing bowls."

"I'm not a stranger anymore."

"No," he agreed, glancing at you sideways, something almost surprised in it, like he was only just now noticing that fact himself. "I suppose you're not."

"Is that why you steal things? Because nobody ever gave you anything, so you decided to just take it instead?"

"That's very poetic. Did you rehearse that."

"I'm asking a real question."

He exhaled, long, and looked back up at the stars instead of at you. "Something like that, probably. I used to tell myself it was about the money. One good score, enough to disappear somewhere nobody's ever heard the name Martin Edwards, buy myself an island, live like a king who answers to nobody."

He shrugged, and the shrug didn't quite land the way he probably wanted it to. "Lately I've started to suspect it was never really about the money at all. Might've just been about proving I could have something. Anything. That nobody could take away from me the way everything got taken when I was a kid."

You didn't say anything right away. You thought about eighteen years in a round tower, about a woman who called your safety love and meant, underneath it, control, about how you'd never once had anything that was fully, unquestionably yours either—not your name, not your time, not even, until tonight, your own two feet standing wherever they wanted to stand.

"I think," you said slowly, "we might have more in common than you'd expect from a lost girl and a thief."

"You admit it, then. Princess."

"I admit nothing. I'm making an observation about orphaned longing, don't twist it into something else."

He laughed at that—a real laugh, surprised out of him—and some of the tightness went out of his shoulders. "Orphaned longing. You really did rehearse that."

"I did not."

"You absolutely did, you've been sitting on that phrase since the tunnel."

"I have never sat on a phrase in my life," you said, with as much dignity as you could manage, and he laughed again, and the two of you sat there a while longer in the moonlight, not saying much else, letting the quiet settle into something that felt less like the awkward silence of strangers and more like the comfortable kind that came, usually, from people who'd known each other a great deal longer than one very strange day.

The next two days passed the way you imagined a fever might—bright and disorienting and slightly unreal, every hour crowded with more new things than you'd experienced in the previous eighteen years combined.

You learned that Martin snored, faintly, when he slept sitting up against a tree, and that Woojoo had apparently made it his personal mission to step on his boots at every possible opportunity for the rest of what you assumed would be their entire acquaintance.

You learned that Kono had strong opinions about which berries were safe to eat and communicated them via a truly impressive range of disapproving noises. You learned the names of three separate mountain ranges, none of which matched the ones you'd painted from imagination, and found—to your surprise—that you liked the real ones better.

You found a stream on the first afternoon, cold and clear and shallow enough to wade into without fear, and spent nearly an hour there simply standing in it, letting the current pull at the hem of your hanbok, while Martin sat on the bank pretending not to watch you and failing at it almost entirely.

When you splashed him—deliberately, gleefully, without an ounce of remorse—he retaliated with such wounded overcommitment that the two of you ended up soaked through within minutes, both of you laughing too hard to properly aim, Kono shrieking indignantly from a dry rock where he'd wisely relocated at the first sign of hostilities, and Woojoo watching the entire spectacle from the treeline with what you could only describe as profound equine disappointment in both of you.

You learned, too, in quieter moments, the shape of things Martin didn't say out loud.

The way he went very still and unusually gentle whenever you flinched at a loud noise, some old tower-bred instinct you hadn't fully shaken; the way he always, without seeming to think about it, put himself slightly between you and the road whenever another traveler passed.

The way he never once, not even once, asked why a girl who'd apparently never left a tower before knew so much about anatomy or herbs or the exact temperature at which honey turned to poison in the wrong hands, information you'd absorbed purely from Mother's paranoid insistence on preparing you for dangers that had never once, until this week, actually arrived.

You also learned, gradually, and against your own better judgment, that you liked Martin Edwards considerably more than you'd planned to.

He tried the smolder on the second evening, apropos of nothing, while you were both crouched by a small campfire waiting for a rabbit he'd insisted, with wild overconfidence, that he knew how to properly cook.

You caught him doing it out of the corner of your eye first—a slow, deliberate turn of his head toward you, chin dropping slightly, eyes going half-lidded and soft in a way that was clearly meant to be devastating, one eyebrow lifting with the practiced precision of a man who had, you suspected, spent real time perfecting this exact expression in the reflection of still water.

You stared at him.

He held the look.

You kept staring.

He held it a little longer, jaw set, the corner of his mouth doing something you assumed was supposed to read as rakish,and you watched, fascinated, as the muscles around his eye began, very slightly, to twitch with the effort of maintaining it.

"What are you doing," you said finally.

The smolder collapsed instantly, entirely, like a tent losing its center pole. "Nothing."

"You were doing something with your face."

"I was not doing anything with my face, that's just my face, that's how my face looks—"

"Your face looked like you were having some kind of episode."

"That," Martin said, with wounded dignity, turning very deliberately back to the fire, "is called charisma, and it has worked on every single—you know what, never mind. Forget it. Rabbit's probably done."

"Try it again."

He looked at you, suspicious. "Why."

"I want to see if it's worse the second time or if that was just a fluke."

"It is not going to be worse, it is going to be exactly as devastating as the first time, I simply chose not to fully commit to it because I was distracted by the rabbit—"

"Prove it."

He set his jaw, visibly gathering himself, and tried again—chin dropping, eyes half-lidding, that same eyebrow rising with what was clearly meant to be effortless, smoldering confidence—and made it a full three seconds before a piece of ash popped from the fire close enough to his knee that he flinched, hard, breaking the whole expression apart into a startled yelp that had absolutely nothing rakish about it whatsoever.

You laughed so hard you had to set down the stick you'd been roasting your portion of rabbit on, doubling over, and Martin sat there looking deeply, personally betrayed by an ember.

"That doesn't count," he said, with the flat, aggrieved certainty of a man who knew perfectly well that it counted completely. "That was an unrelated incident. The face itself was flawless right up until the interruption."

"I've genuinely never seen anything less flawless in my life."

"You've been alive for four days outside a tower, your knowledge is extremely limited—"

"I've seen Woojoo make a more convincing case for himself."

"Now you're just being cruel."

"I'm being honest," you said, wiping at your eyes, and he huffed, and threw a small twig at you that you batted easily out of the air, and the two of you settled back into an easy quiet, the fire popping softly between you, Woojoo a dark, watchful shape at the edge of the clearing, apparently satisfied enough with the evening's proceedings to have stopped glaring, for once.

The rabbit was not, in fact, done, nor would it ever really achieve a state you could confidently call cooked, and you ate it anyway, sitting close enough to the fire that your shoulders kept brushing, and somewhere in the space of that meal—burnt, underdone, genuinely one of the worst things you'd ever eaten and yet somehow, impossibly, one of your favorite meals of your entire life—you caught yourself watching the firelight move across his face and thinking, with a lurch you weren't at all prepared for, oh. Oh, no.

Kono, curled in your lap, looked up at you with an expression you were beginning to read with alarming fluency, and it said, quite clearly: I saw that. We are going to discuss this later.

"Shut up," you told him, out loud, and Martin glanced over.

"I didn't say anything."

"Not you." You nodded down at Kono, who flicked his tail smugly. "Him."

"That thing has never liked me."

"He doesn't like anyone."

"He likes you."

"I raised him from an egg, that's different."

"Sure." Martin was smiling now, small and real, none of the practiced charm from earlier, just something quieter underneath it. "He's very protective. It's actually a little sweet. In a—weirdly feral, judgmental sort of way."

"Don't call my dragon feral."

"I would never," he said, entirely unconvincingly, and you laughed, and Kono made a noise of deep personal offense, and somewhere above you the first stars were coming out over a sky that would, tomorrow night, on the night of your birthday, fill entirely with gold.

The village you passed through the next morning was small and half-asleep, a scatter of tile-roofed houses along a single dusty road, a well at the center where two old women stood gossiping over their buckets, a market just beginning to set up its stalls in the cool early light—and you stood at the edge of it for a long moment, just looking, before Martin had to physically steer you forward by the shoulder.

"You're doing the thing again."

"I've never seen a market before."

"You've never seen anything before, that's becoming a running theme of this trip." But he said it gently, none of his usual bite in it, and let you drift from stall to stall at your own pace—a woman selling dried persimmons strung on twine, a man with a cart of polished wooden combs, a girl not much younger than you hawking little clay bells that chimed high and sweet when you touched them.

You bought nothing, because you had no money, a fact that seemed to strike Martin as personally intolerable the moment he noticed you eyeing a small painted fan for the third time.

"Here," he said, and before you could stop him he'd produced a string of coins from somewhere inside his jacket—you didn't ask where, and strongly suspected you didn't want to know—and pressed them into the fan-seller's hand with the easy, practiced charm of a man who did this sort of thing often, emerging a moment later to hand you the fan with a small, exaggerated bow. "For the gongju."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know I don't have to. I'm choosing to. There's a difference, I keep telling you this."

You turned the fan over in your hands—painted with a scene of cranes over a lake, delicate, nothing like the practical, sturdy things Mother had ever allowed you—and felt something in your chest go warm and a little overwhelmed, the specific ache of being given something small and unnecessary and entirely, purely kind.

"Thank you," you said, and meant it more than the words could really carry.

"Don't get used to it," Martin said, though his ears had gone faintly pink again, the way they did whenever you caught him being sincere. "I have a reputation to maintain. Ruthless. Self-interested. Very hard to impress."

"You just bought a stranger a fan."

"I bought you a fan, that's different, you're not—" he seemed to catch himself, some thought crossing his face he clearly hadn't meant to say out loud, and cleared his throat instead. "Anyway. We should keep moving. Overlook's still a few hours off, and I'd like to actually get you there with enough daylight to see the view properly."

You let him change the subject, mostly because you weren't sure you were ready either to examine what he'd almost said, but you tucked the fan carefully into your sleeve, next to Kono, who eyed it with mild suspicion before apparently deciding it posed no threat to his position and settling back down.

The two of you left the village with Woojoo laden down, somewhat improbably, with a small sack of persimmons Martin had also bought—"for the horse," he'd said, unconvincingly, though you both knew perfectly well who was going to end up eating most of them—and walked the rest of the morning in an easy, comfortable quiet, broken only occasionally by Martin pointing out landmarks, or you asking questions about the world that he answered, more and more, without any of the teasing he'd led with the day before.

"Can I ask you something," you said, somewhere around midday, watching the road unspool ahead of you toward hills that were, slowly, beginning to look less like mountains and more like the gentler rise of land near a coast.

"You keep asking me that like I have a choice."

"Why haven't you left? You could've, a dozen times by now. You've got your satchel, you've got a truce with Woojoo, you could've slipped off in the night and I'd never have caught you."

He was quiet for a moment, watching the road rather than you. "I've thought about it."

"And?"

"And I keep not doing it," he said, simply, like the answer surprised him as much as it seemed to surprise you. "Which is new. Historically I'm very good at leaving. It's sort of my whole thing. Get in, get what I need, get out before anyone gets attached, especially me." He glanced sideways at you, something wry and a little helpless in it. "You're making that considerably more difficult than usual, gongju."

You didn't have a response for that—not one you trusted yourself to say out loud, anyway—so you reached over instead and took his hand, the way you had at the tunnel's mouth, easy and instinctive, and he let you, lacing his fingers through yours without missing a step, and the two of you walked the rest of the afternoon that way, hands linked, saying nothing else about it at all.

You reached the overlook above the harbor just as the sun was beginning its long slide toward the water, the whole kingdom spread out below you in a way you'd only ever seen painted, and painted badly, from your own imagination—the palace roofs catching the last light, the sea beyond the harbor gone molten copper, boats coming in for evening with their sails full and orange.

"There it is," Martin said, quieter than you'd heard him yet, standing close beside you at the edge of the outlook. "Home of your mysterious lantern people."

You didn't answer right away. You were looking at the palace—the actual palace, not the vague shape you'd always imagined from your tower window, but real, close enough now to make out individual roof tiles, individual windows catching fire in the sunset—and something in your chest was doing something you didn't entirely have language for. A pull. An ache, low and old, like a bruise you hadn't known was there until someone pressed it.

"You okay?" Martin asked.

"I don't know," you said, honestly. "It feels like—" you struggled for it, and gave up trying to find the exact shape of the feeling, settling instead for the closest true thing you had. "It feels like coming home to a place I've never been."

He was quiet for a moment, watching you rather than the view.

"In all honesty," he said, "I think you're going to like it there. Whatever it turns out to be, wherever it turns out you're from. I think the whole world's better with you loose in it, gongju. Bowl and all."

You looked at him with the last of the sunset gold across his face, that ridiculous, sincere, unguarded expression he clearly hadn't meant to let you see—and you thought about tunnels and rivers and burnt rabbit and a hanok full of strangers singing about his teeth, and you thought, with the same clarity you'd had at the mouth of that tunnel two nights ago: this. I want this. Whatever this is turning into, I want it.

"Come on," you said instead, because you weren't brave enough yet to say the other thing, and reached for his hand, lacing your fingers through his like it was the easiest, most obvious motion in the world. "There's a boat down there with our name on it. I have a light show to see."

Below you, the first lanterns of the evening were already beginning to lift off the water, small and gold and multiplying, rising slow and steady into a sky gone the deep, glowing blue of early dark—and somewhere out past the harbor, thousands more were waiting to join them, waiting, though you didn't know it yet, for you.

Martin's hand tightened around yours.

"After you, princess," he said, and the two of you started down the hill together, toward the water, toward the light.

The boat Martin found—borrowed, he insisted, with a straight face that fooled absolutely no one, from a dock crowded with a dozen identical little wooden craft, all of them clearly rented out for exactly this evening, exactly this purpose—was small and low and smelled faintly of fish, and rocked alarmingly when you first climbed in, enough that you grabbed for his arm and he grabbed for the side of the boat and Kono, riding in your collar, made a noise of profound and specific betrayal at being jostled.

"Careful," Martin said, steadying you with a hand at your waist that lingered maybe half a second longer than strictly necessary, and you were fairly sure, from the way his ears had gone slightly pink, that he'd noticed it too.

Woojoo, denied entry to the boat on account of being an entire horse, watched the proceedings from the dock with an expression of deep personal injury, and had to be bribed with the promise of an extra ration of feed before he'd agree to wait, tail swishing, ears pinned, radiating the specific fury of a creature left behind on the one night that mattered.

"He'll forgive you eventually," you said, as Martin pushed off from the dock with a long oar, the little boat gliding out onto water gone glassy and still with the coming dark.

"He has never forgiven me for anything in his entire life. I stole an apple from his feed bag once, two years ago, and I am fairly sure he still brings it up in whatever passes for a horse's internal monologue."

"Poetic justice."

"You're supposed to be on my side."

"I'm on Kono's side. And apparently Woojoo's. You seem to have accumulated a great many enemies for one man."

"They're not enemies," Martin said, settling the oar and letting the boat drift, "they're—creatures with very high standards who happen to have chosen me as their personal project. It's a compliment, really, if you think about it correctly."

"I don't think that's what a compliment is."

"You'll come around."

The kingdom had gone properly dark behind you now, the palace a black shape against a sky just beginning to prickle with stars, and the harbor water held every scattered lantern-light in perfect, trembling reflection, so that it felt, floating there, like you were suspended between two skies—one above, one below, and you in the exact still center of both.

"It's almost time," you said, quiet, watching the palace. Something in your chest had gone tight and expectant, the same old ache from the overlook, except closer now, close enough that you thought you might be able to name it if you sat with it a little longer.

Martin didn't say anything. He'd gone still too, watching you rather than the palace, in a way you were becoming increasingly, helplessly aware of.

And then the first note sounded—a low horn, from somewhere within the palace walls, carrying clean and mournful across the water—and the sky above the towers began, all at once, to fill with gold.

all those days, watching from the windows

You had watched this exact sight, every year of your life, from a single round window a mile up a mountainside, small and distant and never once close enough to feel the heat of the paper or hear the soft rush of a thousand wicks catching flame at once. You had painted it, badly, from memory, over and over, never quite able to get the specific quality of the light right, the way it wasn't quite gold and wasn't quite orange but some living color in between, restless, warm, endlessly multiplying.

Nothing you had ever painted came close.

now i'm here, blinking in the starlight now i'm here, suddenly i see standing here

The lanterns rose in waves, not all at once but in long, cascading pulses—a hundred, then another hundred, then more than you could count, drifting up from courtyards and rooftops and the decks of boats all across the harbor, joining together into a slow, vast river of light climbing the dark sky. The water around your little boat filled with their reflections until it was impossible to say, looking down, where the true lanterns ended and the false ones began—gold above you, gold below you, and you sitting in the very middle of it with your breath caught somewhere behind your ribs.

"Oh," you said, which was not remotely adequate to the size of what you were feeling, but was all you had.

"Yeah," Martin said, softly, and when you looked over at him he wasn't watching the lanterns at all. He was watching you, your face lit gold and trembling with reflected light, your eyes wide and wet in a way you hadn't quite noticed until you felt the first tear slip free and had to laugh, embarrassed, wiping at it with the back of your wrist.

"I've waited my whole life for this."

"I know."

"I didn't even know what I was waiting for. I just knew that every year, this light showed up in the sky, and something in me hurt, every time, and I never understood why, and now I'm sitting here and I still don't fully understand why except that it feels like—" you struggled for it again, the same struggle as the overlook, except this time you didn't let yourself give up on finding the words.

and the world has somehow shifted.

"It feels like they were waiting for someone. And some enormous, stupid, hopeful part of me has always believed, without any evidence at all, that the someone was me."

Martin was quiet for a long moment, and when you glanced at him his expression had gone soft and unguarded in a way you'd only caught glimpses of before—at the campfire, at the mouth of the tunnel, never allowed to sit still on his face long enough for you to really look at it.

"For what it's worth," he said, "I think it probably was."

all at once, everything looks different... now that i see you.

Reaching into his satchel, he drew out two lanterns—small, folded flat, clearly purchased at some point during the walk down from the overlook, though you hadn't noticed him buying them, too absorbed in the view—and passed one across to you, along with a little punk of glowing incense to light the wick.

"I got us our own," he said, almost shy about it, which did not suit him at all and which you found, helplessly, endearing anyway. "Figured you shouldn't have to just watch other people's."

Your hands weren't quite steady as you unfolded the paper frame and touched the flame to the wick, the lantern blooming gold between your palms, warm and alive, straining gently upward the way they all did, wanting badly to join the great river of light rising above you.

"Make a wish," Martin said. "Isn't that the tradition? Birthday girl gets a wish."

You looked at him, sharp. "I never told you it was my birthday."

He had the grace, at least, to look faintly caught out. "You didn't have to. Lost princess, mysterious lantern obsession, refuses to give her real name, gets misty over a light show that happens on one specific night of the year—I put it together somewhere around the singing-bowl incident, honestly."

"You've known this whole time."

"I've suspected this whole time. There's a difference. I was being polite about it."

"You've been calling me gongju for two days as a joke."

"I've been calling you gongju for two days because I was fairly confident, and also because it made you make that specific face you're making right now, which I happen to enjoy a great deal." He nodded down at the lantern cupped in your hands, steering neatly away from the moment before you could examine it too closely. "Make your wish, princess. Before it burns your fingers."

You held the lantern a moment longer, warm light spilling up between your hands onto your face, and thought—not about the kingdom below, not even about the parents you didn't yet know you had, waiting somewhere in that dark palace with a hope they'd never once let themselves fully abandon. But about the man sitting across from you in a stolen boat, teeth genuinely, infuriatingly perfect, watching you like you were the only light on the entire water worth looking at.

You didn't say the wish out loud. But you let it go anyway, watched it rise and catch the current of wind that carried it up to join the thousands of others, and when you looked back down, Martin was still watching you, close enough now that you could count, if you'd wanted to, every one of his eyelashes.

"Your turn," you said, a little breathless.

He lit his own lantern, let it rise, and didn't look away from you while he did it—no smolder this time, none of the careful, practiced charm from the campfire that had made you laugh at him. Just him, looking at you, plain and raw and slightly disbelieving of his own luck Like a man who'd broken into a random tower to hide from two very angry brothers and found, instead of an empty room, the entire rest of his life.

"I'm not going to tell you what I wished for," he said, "but I will say it involves considerably less running from armed men than my last several wishes."

"That's a low bar."

"I'm a man of variety."

You laughed—you couldn't help it, the sound coming out watery and warm—and somewhere in the laugh, without either of you quite deciding to, the space between you closed, his hand finding yours again in the bottom of the boat, and you found yourself leaning in, slow, the way the whole evening had been slow and inevitable since the moment he tumbled through your window, and he leaned in too, and for one full suspended second, gold light drifting down all around you like something out of a legend, you thought—this. This is the thing I've been aching for every single year I watched it from too far away.

Kono chose that exact moment to launch himself, with great personal indignation, off your shoulder and directly onto the bridge of Martin's nose.

"Ow—" Martin reeled back, more startled than hurt, batting uselessly at the small dragon now clinging to his face with all four clawed feet and radiating profound betrayal. "Your dragon just—he attacked me, did you see that, he full-on—"

"He's protective," you said, laughing so hard you had to hold the sides of the boat to keep from tipping, tears mixing with the ones already on your face, watching Kono glare down at Martin from the very tip of his nose like a small, furious guardian spirit who had absolutely no intention of allowing anything interesting to happen without express supervision.

"He is feral, is what he is—"

"He likes you," you said, wiping your eyes, still laughing. "This is how he shows it. Trust me. If he actually hated you, you'd know."

"This does not feel like liking, this feels like an assassination attempt—"

Kono flicked his tail, unbothered, and settled himself with great satisfaction directly between the two of you on the boat's narrow bench, clearly intending to remain there for the foreseeable future, a small, smug, iridescent chaperone against a sky still falling gold, lantern light rippling gently across the water in every direction, thousands of tiny floating wishes drifting home at last to a girl who'd spent eighteen years wondering, in the quiet dark of a tower window, whether anyone out there was waiting for her.

They had been. All along. And now, impossibly, so was he.

You looked at Martin over the top of Kono's indignant, iridescent head, both of you still laughing, both of you still close enough to feel the warmth radiating off each other in the cooling night air, and you thought that whatever happened next. Whatever the palace held, whatever answers waited for you at the bottom of that harbor, whatever Mother would do when she finally caught up to you, because you had no illusions that she wouldn't—this part, right here, the boat and the gold light and the ridiculous, wounded dragon and the ridiculous, wonderful man across from you, was a part you were never, ever going to forget.

"Happy birthday, gongju," Martin said, quiet, over the top of a still-hissing Kono, and you thought, looking at him, that for the first time in your entire life, you actually believed it.

Later—much later, after the last of the lanterns had burned low and drifted, spent, back down toward the water, after Woojoo had forgiven you both just enough to let Martin scratch behind his ears without incident, after Kono had finally abandoned his post between you to curl up, smug and victorious, in the fold of your sleeve—you rowed the little boat back toward shore in a silence that wasn't empty at all. It was full instead of everything neither of you had quite said yet, the two of you sitting close enough that your knees kept knocking together with every small motion of the water.

You didn't know yet what waited for you at the top of that hill—what the palace would say when a girl with hair like sunlight walked through its gates for the first time in eighteen years, what Mother would do when she finally caught up to the two of you, what it would cost, in the end, to keep any of this. You only knew that you didn't want the night to be over, that some small, stubborn, hopeful part of you had already decided, somewhere between the singing bowl and the lantern light, that whatever came next, you wanted to face it with your hand in his.

"What happens now?" you asked, quiet, as the shore came slowly closer, torchlight from the docks beginning to flicker gold across the water to meet you.

Martin was quiet for a moment, considering the question with more weight than his usual answers ever carried.

"I don't know," he admitted, finally. "I've never actually planned past the running-away part before. Usually there isn't a now. There's just the next place to be, and the next, and I never stick around long enough to find out what comes after."

"And this time?"

He looked at you, truly and deeply gazed. It was the way he had at the overlook, at the tunnel's mouth, at every unguarded moment he'd let slip through the cracks of his own careful charm over the past four days—and something in his face settled, like a decision he'd already made without quite admitting it to himself.

"This time," he hummed, "I think I'd like to find out."

The boat bumped gently against the dock, and somewhere above you, one last, late lantern rose alone into the dark, gold and small and stubborn, chasing after all the others that had gone before it—and you thought, watching it go, that it looked exactly like hope.

Morning came in gray and soft, mist lying low over the harbor the way it did most mornings this close to the water, and you woke tucked against the base of a fishing boat with Kono curled warm against your throat and Martin already awake beside you, satchel across his shoulder, watching the fog with an expression you didn't much care for.

"You're making a weird face," you said, sitting up, voice still thick with sleep. "This like... stiff, deciding-something face."

"I don't have a stiff, deciding-something face."

"You absolutely do. You had it right before you climbed through my window and you have it right now."

He exhaled, and some of the careful blankness dropped away, replaced by something more honest—nervous, almost, in a way that didn't suit him nearly as well as the sarcasm usually did. "I want to do this properly. Whatever this is turning into." He nodded down at the satchel, at the unmistakable shape of the crown inside it. "I know people who'll take this off my hands for real money, enough that neither of us has to run from anything ever again. I want to trade it, clean, and come back for you, and then—I don't know. Figure out the rest. Together, if you'll have me."

"You could just give it back."

"I could," he agreed, "and normally I'd have laughed you out of the harbor for suggesting it. But I'm finding, lately, that a lot of things that used to make sense don't anymore, and a lot of things I never used to consider are starting to sound like exactly what I want." He reached out, tucked a loose strand of hair back from your face, unbearably gentle about it. "Wait for me here. I won't be long."

"You'd better not be."

"Princess." He said it soft, like a promise rather than a joke, and pressed one quick, warm kiss to your forehead before you could think of anything clever enough to say back. "I'll be back before the fog burns off. I swear it."

You watched him go, satchel bouncing against his hip, Woojoo trailing reluctantly after him with the particular resigned loyalty of a creature who'd decided, against every instinct, to trust his rider one more time—and you sat there on the damp dock with Kono in your lap, watching the mist swallow him up, and told yourself, firmly, that the ache in your chest was nothing. Just morning cold. Just nerves. Nothing at all like fear.

The fog thickened instead of burning off, and the longer you waited the worse the ache in your chest got, until you couldn't sit still any longer and started pacing the dock's edge, Kono clinging tight to your shoulder, both of you straining to hear anything at all beyond the slow slap of water against the pilings.

You heard voices first. They were low and harsh, more than one man, coming from somewhere off along the tree line past the last of the boats—and against every ounce of good sense you had left, you went toward them instead of away.

You found the clearing just past the fog's thickest bank, and what you found there stopped your heart cold: Martin on his knees in the mud, satchel gone, two enormous men standing over him—one you'd recognize instantly from the way Martin had gone rigid at the mere mention of them days ago, though you'd never learned their names until this moment.

Sunghoon. Jay. Buff, scarred, furious, and entirely unbothered by the fact that Martin was bleeding from a split lip and still trying, uselessly, to talk his way out.

"You cut us out," Sunghoon was saying, low and dangerous. "Two years of work, and you cut us out for a girl."

"It wasn't like that—"

"Save it." Jay's boot connected with Martin's ribs, and you had to bite down hard on your own hand to keep from crying out. "We'll take the crown. And we'll take the reward for you too. Two birds."

And then, from somewhere behind them, a voice you knew better than your own heartbeat, cool and pleasant and utterly without mercy.

"Gentlemen," Mother said, stepping out of the mist like she'd been waiting there all along, "I believe I can make this considerably more profitable for everyone involved."

You didn't understand, in the moment, what you were watching—only that Mother produced a small purse of coin, that Sunghoon and Jay's fury seemed to shift, calculating, weighing a better offer, that Martin's face went from pained to something close to horrified the second he understood what was happening.

"Don't," he said, to Mother, voice raw. "Whatever you're planning—leave her out of it. She doesn't have to be part of this."

"She has always been part of this," Mother said, almost gently, crouching down to his level with the particular tenderness she'd once reserved, you realized with a sick lurch, entirely for you. "You simply made the mistake of thinking you'd earned a say in it."

You didn't see exactly what happened next—a scuffle, Martin shouting your name once, sharp and desperate, before something struck him and the sound cut off—because Mother had already turned, unerringly, toward the tree line where you stood frozen, and her eyes found yours through the fog with a precision that told you she'd known exactly where you were the entire time.

"There you are," she said, soft, and something about the softness was so much worse than the fury from the hanok. "Come along, darling. I think it's well past time we had a talk."

You ran. You didn't get far.

By the time the fog burned off, you were sitting in the belly of a small, windowless room that smelled of salt and old rope—not the tower, you understood dimly, some hidden place along the coast Mother had clearly kept in reserve for exactly this kind of contingency—wrists bound loosely, more out of formality than real restraint, because Mother had never needed rope to keep you where she wanted you. She'd only ever needed your own heart, turned carefully against itself.

"He left, you know," she said, arranging herself on the room's single stool with the composure of a woman discussing the weather. "The moment those men offered him a way out, he took it. The crown. The reward money for turning you in besides, I'd imagine—a tidy sum for very little effort." She sighed, and it might almost have sounded sympathetic, if you hadn't spent eighteen years learning exactly how much genuine feeling lived underneath that particular sigh. "I saw the ship myself. Sailing out with the morning tide. I'm so sorry, darling. I did try to warn you what the world was like."

"You're lying."

"Am I?" She tilted her head, and something flickered behind her eyes—not doubt, never doubt, but the faint, familiar satisfaction of a woman watching a plan click neatly into place. "You've known him four days. I've kept you safe for eighteen years. Which of us, do you truly think, has earned your trust?"

You wanted, badly, to believe it was a lie—every instinct in your chest screamed that it was—and yet some old, deep, tower-shaped part of you, the part that had spent a lifetime being told the world was cruel and that Mother alone could be counted on, curled up small and aching and terribly, terribly willing to believe her anyway. That was the cruelest part of it. Not the lie itself, but how easily, after everything, it still found purchase.

"I want to go home," Mother said, standing, brushing invisible dust from her skirts. "Not the tower—somewhere new, somewhere he'll never think to look, somewhere I can keep you properly this time. You'll thank me for it, eventually. You always do."

You didn't answer. You sat very still in the dim, salt-smelling dark, and thought about a boat full of lantern light, and a man who'd bought you a fan for no reason at all, and a dragon who'd bitten his nose out of pure, ridiculous devotion—and something in you, quiet but absolutely unshakeable, refused, even now, even with the doubt gnawing at your ribs, to fully believe the story Mother was selling.

Martin woke in a cell.

His head throbbed, his ribs ached with every breath, and it took him several long, disoriented minutes to piece together that the last thing he remembered—Mother's voice, your name torn out of his throat, the world going dark—had apparently ended with him here, iron bars, straw floor, and a guard outside who addressed him, with unmistakable relish, by the exact reward figure printed on his wanted poster.

"They're saying you kidnapped a girl," the guard said, almost cheerful about it. "Some noble's daughter. Word is the hanging's set for sundown. Shame about the teeth, by the way—heard the sketch was more flattering than the real thing."

"I did not kidnap anyone," Martin gritted, with the flat, exhausted fury of a man repeating himself for the fifth time, "and my teeth are fine—" and then stopped, because none of that mattered even slightly next to the one thought currently eclipsing everything else in his skull: she thinks I left her.

He didn't remember much of what happened after that—only that somewhere past midnight, a small, furious, iridescent shape came skittering through the cell's single high window, having tracked him across half the coastline on nothing but sheer stubborn will. Not long after, the cell door groaned open from the outside to reveal Namjoon's enormous, grinning face, flanked by the twins, the man with the weasel, and, filling the corridor behind them with visible, righteous indignation, one extremely large, extremely unimpressed horse.

"Heard you got yourself in trouble," Namjoon said. "Figured we'd come see if the rumors about your teeth were the only thing worth breaking you out for."

"I could kiss every single one of you," Martin said, already moving.

"Please don't," said one of the twins, Juhoon. "We heard about the fisherman's wife."

He found you by the coast road at dusk, Mother's carriage rattling ahead through the last of the fading light, and there was no time for a plan, no time for anything except Woojoo breaking into a dead run with Martin bent low over his neck and Kono clinging, white-knuckled, to his collar, the whole ragged, impossible rescue party thundering after a carriage carrying away the only thing that had ever made the running feel like it was going somewhere.

He caught them at the cliff road, where the trees gave way to open sky and the sea spread out gray and endless below, and Mother, seeing him, didn't so much as flinch.

"Persistent," she said, stepping down from the carriage alone, something cold and final settling into her face. "I did wonder if you'd manage it."

"Let her go."

"She's not yours to demand things about." Mother's eyes flicked past him, to where you'd appeared in the carriage doorway. His wrists finally free, staring at Martin like you couldn't quite trust the sight of him—bruised, breathless, undeniably, impossibly there. "Tell him, darling. Tell him what you told me. That you understand now. That the world outside only ever takes."

"I told you I didn't believe you," you said, voice shaking but clear, stepping down onto the road. "I still don't."

Something in Mother's composure cracked, just slightly, just enough. "You would choose him. After everything I've given you. Everything I've sacrificed."

"You didn't give me anything," you said, and the words came out steadier than you felt, eighteen years of swallowed truth finally finding air. "You took me. There's a difference. I've only just learned it, but I've learned it completely."

What happened next happened fast, and badly, the way real danger always does—Mother lunging, a blade you hadn't seen catching the last of the light, Martin throwing himself between the two of you with no more thought than he'd given anything else reckless and right over the past four days, and then the sharp, terrible sound of metal finding flesh, and Martin going down hard onto the cliff road with blood already spreading dark across his side.

"Martin—"

"I'm fine," he said, which was so obviously, catastrophically untrue that you didn't even bother arguing, dropping to your knees beside him, hands already pressing hard against the wound, some old instinct screaming at you to sing, sing the old words, the ones Mother used every time she needed the magic, and you opened your mouth to do exactly that—

"Don't," Martin said, gripping your wrist with what strength he had left, eyes finding yours through the pain with a clarity that cut straight through everything else. "If you do that—if you use it now—she'll never let either of us go. Not really. Not ever. She'll just keep finding a reason to need you broken enough to fix."

"I can't just let you—"

"You can," he said, "trust me, princess, please—" and reached, with the last of his strength, for the small blade at his own belt, the one he'd used to fillet fish and cut rope and once, memorably, threaten a very rude tax collector, and before you fully understood what he meant to do, he'd taken hold of your long braid and cut, clean through, several feet of gold-shot hair falling away into the dirt at once, severed for good.

The change was immediate and terrible. The cut length dulled from gold to something ordinary and plain even as it fell, and Mother—mid-motion, reaching for you, for the hair, for the magic she'd spent a hundred years stealing—made a sound you would never, for the rest of your life, be able to fully forget.

Her hands went first, skin creasing and thinning before your eyes, decades collapsing into her all at once, unstoppable now that the last thread keeping her young had been severed for good.

She staggered back toward the cliff's edge, aged a hundred years in the space of ten seconds, and the wind off the sea did the rest, catching what was left of her and scattering it, gray and weightless, out over the water until there was nothing left standing on the road at all.

You didn't watch it finish. You were already turned back to Martin, hands shaking, pressing uselessly against a wound that wasn't healing, that had no reason left to heal, because the magic that could have done it lay scattered in cut hair and ash somewhere behind you.

"Hey," Martin said, voice going thin, "hey—don't do that face, the face you're doing—"

"Don't you dare," you said, furious and breaking all at once. "Don't you dare talk to me about faces right now—"

"I'd do it again," he said, eyes already starting to lose their focus, "every time, exactly the same, I just want you to know that, in case I don't get to—"

"You're not finishing that sentence."

He smiled anyway, small and lopsided, teeth perfectly, infuriatingly straight even now, and his eyes slid shut.

You didn't remember deciding to cry. You only remembered the tears coming, hot and helpless, one falling from your cheek straight onto the wound at his side—and the low, golden hum that followed, faint but unmistakable, the last living echo of magic that had never fully left you even with the hair gone, because it had never really lived in the hair at all. It had always been in you.

The wound closed. Color came back into his face all at once, like a held breath finally released, and his eyes opened, blinking up at you in dazed, disbelieving confusion.

"You're supposed to be dead," you told him, half laughing, half sobbing, hands still shaking as you cradled his face.

"Rude," he said, voice cracked but unmistakably, wonderfully himself, "extremely rude, waking a man up just to insult him—"

You didn't let him finish that sentence.

You kissed him before you'd fully decided to, both hands still fisted in the collar of his shirt where you'd been holding him together only seconds before, and it wasn't gentle — you didn't have gentle left in you, not after watching the color drain out of his face, not after the terrible, endless second where you'd genuinely believed you were about to lose him on a cliff road with the sea crashing below and no way left to fix it. It was too much all at once, everything you hadn't let yourself say out loud over four impossible days crashing out through your mouth against his instead — the fear, still shaking through your hands where they'd found his jaw; the relief, hot and overwhelming, closing your throat; the something else underneath both of those that you'd been carefully not naming since the moment he tumbled through your window and hadn't stopped, apparently, not even once, not even now.

Martin made a low, startled sound against your mouth — surprise, mostly, and then something that wasn't surprise at all — and his hand came up to cradle the back of your head, careful even now, even freshly healed and half out of his mind with everything that had just happened, fingers threading into what was left of your hair like he needed the proof of it, needed to know you were real and warm and still here under his hands. You felt him breathe out, shaky, against you, felt the last of the tension bleed out of his shoulders the way it never quite had, not fully, not once in the entire time you'd known him.

"You scared me," you said, when you finally, barely, pulled back far enough to speak, forehead pressed to his, both of you still breathing like you'd run the whole cliff road twice over. "You scared me, don't you dare ever do that again—"

"No promises," he murmured, and you could feel him smiling against your mouth, that same infuriating, undimmed confidence creeping back in even now, even bloodied, even seconds from death and back again. "Apparently I throw myself in front of knives for you now. New personality trait. Very inconvenient."

"Martin."

"I mean it, though." His thumb traced along your jaw, slow, and when you met his eyes there was nothing left of the joke in them at all, just something steady and stripped bare, more honest than anything he'd let you see across four days of careful, practiced charm. "I'd do it again. Every single time, exactly the same, no hesitation, and I need you to actually hear that, not just — not just as something I say to be dramatic on a cliff. I mean it."

"I heard you the first time. Right before you nearly died proving it."

"Poor timing, historically my specialty," he agreed, and kissed you again before you could argue, slower this time, both of you steadier now, no longer shaking quite so hard, just close and warm and unwilling, for a long moment, to be anything but exactly where you were—his hand still tangled in your hair, yours still fisted in his ruined, blood-stained shirt, the whole world narrowed down to the small distance between your mouths and the specific, dizzying fact that he was alive to kiss you back.

Somewhere nearby, Kono shrieked with pure, unrestrained delight, launching himself in a small iridescent blur to land on Martin's shoulder and chirp something that sounded, for the first time in their entire acquaintance, like approval rather than threat.

Woojoo, standing a few respectful paces off, huffed out a long breath through his nose and, for once in his entire life, looked almost pleased about something Martin had done—ears forward, head tossed once as if in reluctant, grudging blessing, the closest thing to a truce he'd ever offered.

You laughed, breathless and wet-eyed, breaking the kiss just far enough to rest your forehead against his again. "Even Kono's happy. Do you understand how significant that is? He's never once been happy about you."

"I earned it," Martin said, hoarse, still smiling like he couldn't quite stop. "Nearly dying for you apparently buys a man some goodwill, even from a judgmental little dragon who's hated me since the moment I fell through a window."

"Don't get used to it."

"Too late," he said, and pulled you back in before you could answer, no urgency left in it now, just something slow and certain and entirely unhurried, the two of you kissing on a cliff road at dawn like you had all the time in the world left to spend exactly like this.

The palace gates opened at dawn to a girl with short, plain, ordinary hair and a face the king recognized, the moment he saw it. With a certainty that needed no proof at all—some things a parent simply knows, in the body, before the mind has caught up to explaining why.

The queen reached you first, running down the palace steps in a way queens were certainly not supposed to run, and you didn't need eighteen years of stolen memory to understand, the instant her arms closed around you, exactly what you'd been missing every single night you'd watched those lanterns from too far away.

There was a great deal to explain, after—a kingdom's worth of grief to untangle. A name to relearn that had been yours all along, a wanted man's record to quietly, thoroughly clear, which the king accomplished within the hour with the particular efficiency of a father who had just gotten his daughter back and had no patience left for bureaucratic nonsense.

Martin stood through most of it looking deeply, uncharacteristically nervous, hands shoved in his pockets, until the king finally turned to him and said, simply, "You brought her home," and something in Martin's whole posture eased for what looked like the first time in his entire life.

Kono took up permanent residence on the windowsill of your new rooms, deeply unimpressed by the palace's excessive number of servants and considerably more impressed by the quality of the kitchen scraps. Woojoo was given, over Martin's strenuous objections, an official post as a royal guard's mount, a position he apparently found so satisfying that his campaign of vengeful boot-stepping slowed, within a few months, to something almost like fondness.

Namjoon and the rest of the hanok's strange, loyal patrons were invited, formally, to the palace for the next year's lantern festival, and caused, by every account, an enormous and thoroughly enjoyable scandal.

And every year after that, on the anniversary of the night a stranger fell through a tower window and a girl hit him with a singing bowl, the two of you took a small boat out onto the harbor when the lanterns rose. They were gold and endless, filling the sky the way they always had—except now, for the first time in either of your lives, you watched them from exactly where you were always meant to be.

"Happy anniversary, my gongju," Martin said, every single year, and every single year, you believed him a little more.

if she's here it's crystal clear i'm where i'm meant to go