ground, only to be met with a blade pointed at his throat.
“You were dying long before tonight,” Shim whispered. “If we meet again in the afterlife, do not blame me for your death.”
Inspector Han kept his chin raised, and the moonlight gleamed off the blade, casting a white slash across his face and twinkling against the silver pin of his topknot.
“But…,” Shim added. “I’ll give you another chance. Run away.”
“Why would you let me go?”
“Remember when I tried to meet my own father?” Shim’s voice rasped. “He hadn’t recognized me, called me a thief, and had his men beat me. Remember your promise—that one day you would help me rise from my status? Keep your word and let me go.”
“I would rather you be quick and kill me,” Inspector Han said calmly. “Add to your shame.”
His words sent a shock through me, and through Officer Shim as well, for he stood frozen. Perhaps the thirteen-year-old boy in him, the one thrown into the well by his own mother, beaten by his own father, did not have enough greed and fury left in him to drag the blade across the throat of his longtime friend—and possibly the only human being who cared for him.
As hesitation gripped Shim, I knew I had to move. This was my only chance, and they were but a few paces away. Like a calf with wobbly legs, I stumbled forward. My arm moved of its own accord, reaching behind and grabbing hold of the steel pin that held up my own topknot. I jerked it out, the end gleaming fang-sharp.
With all my might, I raised it high and then plunged the end into Officer Shim’s upper back, feeling flesh rip and the tip scraping across bone.
A roar exploded from his throat, a sound so full of rage that I startled back, falling to the ground. He swung around, the pin still protruding from his back. “You again,” he growled, brandishing his sword, the blade whooshing through the air. “I thought I’d killed you!”
I closed my eyes. Enough, I thought, I have done enough in this life.
And I waited to feel the burning slice of death.
But it never came.
I opened one eye, then the other. Waves of shock reeled through me at the sight of Commander Yi on horseback, as well as officers, around a dozen of them, in a circle around us with arrows nocked and drawn.
“Halt!” the commander’s voice thundered. “Lower your sword, Senior Officer Shim.”
For a moment, the briefest moment, Officer Shim’s eyes darted from one side to the other, as though he was calculating his escape. But he was surrounded.
“Lower. Your. Sword!”
The moment the blade dropped to the ground, two officers hurried forward. They held Shim Jaedeok in a painful grip, his arms twisted behind, making him stagger with his back bent forward. At the sight of his sword, left on the snow right before me, my body shook uncontrollably. I had been too close to death. The inspector had been, too.
I looked over to see Inspector Han struggling on the forest floor, one arm slung over Officer Goh’s shoulder. I moved forward to help, but stopped at the sound of Officer Ky?n’s voice.
“I knew it was him all along.” Ky?n stood a few paces away, whispering to a fellow officer, a red flush burning the panes of his cheeks. He wouldn’t look my way. “I knew it must have been someone close to the inspector—”
“Silence!” Commander Yi snapped. “If you stir disorder again in the police court, I will cut out your tongue myself.”
“But, yeonggam, anyone would have misunderstood the evidence I’d discovered—”
The officers elbowed Ky?n, gesturing at him to be silent. And the thorny memories in me also fell still as Councillor Ch’oi stepped through the row of officers, arriving before the seoja, his bastard son, who stood with his torso and wrists bound in rope.
“You are Madam Byeol’s son?” Councillor Ch’oi demanded. His gaze was sharp and firm, his jaw locked, and his shoulders drew back as though he were king. “The son of the woman you killed?”
Officer Shim’s face was white and his lips bloodless. He spoke without emotion and did not meet anyone’s eyes. “I am he. The boy named Ji-Won.”
“You were her disgrace.”
“I … I did not ask to be born.”
“But you were, and you caused chaos in the capital.” Councillor Ch’oi gathered his hands behind his back and stared over his son’s head, like he could not bear to spare him another glance. “Tell the commander.