POV: painter
Summary
Painter wakes in Yumi's body and her warm-floored wagon the morning after the night out, eager for once. As Yumi is still yawning into wakefulness he crosses to the door, takes the breakfast tray from Chaeyung and Hwanji with a thank-you and a wink, and shuts them out. He sits cross-legged on her blankets and digs in: rice with the maipon sticks, the small constellation of side dishes the attendants always bring. Yumi gasps, then nearly hyperventilates. He had expected disapproval, not the look of a person who genuinely believes the world might end because the yoki-hijo fed herself.
The door opens on Liyun, maroon-gowned and bag-eyed. She kneels in front of him in a posture whose every micro-angle is a contradiction of the bow it is pretending to be. *You look pale*, she says — perhaps he should rise again and start the day over. Painter does not back down. He asks whether it is the Chosen's prerogative to feed herself; Liyun, whose every sentence is written to be deniable, allows that she only serves and only hopes he is not becoming unfit. He dismisses her for the morning and tells her to leave brush, ink and scroll at the shrine. Yumi tries very hard not to scream.
At the cool spring he sends Chaeyung and Hwanji back up the path and bathes himself, following the soap order he has learned by rote. Yumi eventually peels off her bulky nightgown and slips in after him; they go back-to-back through the ritual. *I decided*, he tells her, *to do as you said* — to embrace his place here. If the spirits really chose him too, the right to make decisions has to be real. She cannot refute the logic. She says she knows he is wrong anyway.
Liyun has done as instructed: at the orchard shrine a scroll, brush, and ink wait beside the rocks. Painter rolls the scroll out, kneels, and begins what is, for him, the closest thing to meditation he has ever managed: a few-stroke sketch, a face captured in three lines — Hwanji by accident, a sharp-eyed Yumi for teasing — then bamboo, his standby, hour after hour. Yumi watches and softens. *You're actually trying*, she says. She admits her own bamboo practice has felt like a kind of meditation too. He had quietly hoped painting might draw a spirit as stacking would; none come, but the hour was nonetheless his.
Out by the place of ritual a large tent has gone up. Inside, arguments. Liyun confides — with rare candour — that she has long known about machines like the scholars'; that bringing one *here* is an affront bordering on blasphemy; that she hates them. Yumi is shocked she knew at all. Painter settles into the stones and works while the scholars bicker behind canvas. After hours he manages a stack of twelve — leaning, lopsided, with a quirk of character — not a Yumi tower, but his own. Yumi warns him quietly that Liyun could refer them upward for *special attention* — what happens to yoki-hijo declared unfit — but he reasons, correctly, that Liyun would have to train another from childhood and is unlikely to want to start over. *Liyun will do what needs to be done*, Yumi says. *She drinks her own poison.* He acknowledges that what he does is, in this body, seen as what *she* does — and tries, by way of apology, to take the afternoon's training seriously.
Back at the wagon, Chaeyung hands over his laundered nightgown and bows away. Hwanji, however, lingers. She bows herself to the ground — small clog under one knee, cloth under the palm to spare it from the hot stone — and asks, please, if Liyun pries, would the Chosen make it clear that none of the new behaviour is *her* fault? Before her last mistress, she explains, she served the yoki-hijo Dwookim, who was vocal in the reform movement.
Painter asks what the reform movement is. Hwanji startles — she had assumed he must already know — and tries to flee; he catches her hand and asks gently for the truth. So she gives it. Of the fourteen current yoki-hijo, by her count, only one other besides Yumi is still orthodox. Almost everyone else has been reformist for centuries. They feed themselves, dress themselves, choose. They take days off. They visit their families. They retire at seventy. Dwookim worked perhaps half the days of the week. The spirits, Hwanji confirms, do not refuse the reformists; they answer plenty of summons. Yumi, whose twelve spirits-per-session average is exceptional — most current yoki-hijo draw five or six, Dwookim managed about ten — is, Hwanji adds shyly, the strongest of them.
Yumi sinks to her knees on the hot stones without noticing the heat. She has been raised, deliberately, in ignorance of a schism two centuries old; her warden has been hiding it from her on purpose for her entire life. Painter thanks Hwanji in a whisper and promises to pretend he learned nothing from her. She nods and glances around her in terror that Liyun might be listening from somewhere.
*It seems*, Yumi whispers, looking up at him with tears in her eyes, *that you were right. Good job.* Painter starts to reach for her shoulder, then stops — it is the wrong time to inflict that on her. She asks him, please, to go inside and go to sleep. She has a distinct and urgent need to be someone else for a while.