The Only Dream

Perhaps because autumn had arrived only recently, flowers were still in full bloom throughout the rear garden of the detached palace. Yi Yeol, the Grand Prince Uijeong, strolled among them, drinking in each blossom one by one.

It was quite early in the morning. Walking the garden in the hour when no one else was awake had been a pleasure of the Grand Prince's since childhood, and now, standing before a storm as fierce as the Crown Prince's death, it was a routine he could not bring himself to skip.

Born the youngest son of Emperor Yi Yoon and raised wanting for nothing, the Grand Prince had always loved simply walking alone, in peace and quiet.

A sparrow startled at his approach and burst up onto the roof. With the flutter of its wings, a past he had briefly forgotten came back to him. The horrific accident of that day. The day he had had to part with a beloved brother and niece. The day he had nearly lost his only daughter as well. Even now, the mere thought of that moment raised gooseflesh over his whole body.

"Father?"

His quiet was broken by the small call, and a smile rose to the prince's lips.

"When did you arrive? I never heard you."

"Past midnight. It was so late I let myself in quietly. And what about you, out at such an early hour?"

At the appearance of his daughter, his one and only child, the lingering images melted from the Grand Prince's mind as though dissolving. Seon flashed a bright smile and took her place beside him.

"Too much on my mind. I woke before I knew it."

"I see. I suppose it would be so."

Bitterness touched the corners of the Grand Prince's mouth. He had lost family too. It had been only two days since the accident took his eldest brother, the solid pillar he had always leaned on. A lifetime of living as a royal had made pretending that nothing was wrong second nature, but there was no helping a heart that rotted away in secret.

"Grandfather has entrusted me with a task."

The moment Seon spoke, a flash of dismay crossed the Grand Prince's face. It was a change plain enough for her to catch.

"Father, it's all right. I'm not a child anymore."

The Grand Prince could not bear to lose Seon. She was his only daughter. Just as he had lost his brother, he did not want to lose her too, and so, even now that she had turned twenty-seven, he cherished her like a child still in his arms, precious beyond all else. The dread that had been closing in on him left him teetering.

"Much is going to change."

"I suppose it will."

Seon answered evenly. Her father's gaze settled on her, then quickly slipped away.

"Do not add to your mother's worries."

"You know how Mother always worries."

As she spoke, Seon wiped away the smile that had been fading from her lips.

However much the imperial family had narrowed the distance between itself and the people, unmistakable limits remained. Marriage, for one.

They no longer issued selection edicts and searched for a partner amid the clamor of old, but they still chose, carefully, from houses that had been more or less vetted: new nobility, if not of royal blood, whose social standing and pedigree lacked for nothing.

Seon's mother, Grand Consort Yeosan of the Song clan, had been different. She did hail from the same clan as a former empress, but she was no close kin of that house, and her family's fortunes were modest at best. What was more, before her marriage, the Grand Consort had been...

"I still can't believe Mother was an actress. From what I hear, that world is every bit as cutthroat as the palace."

She had worked in the entertainment world as an actress. In her day, they said, she had been hailed as a young star of the era; yet watching her mother's eyes well up at the slightest thing, Seon found it impossible to imagine her ever having belonged to that world.

"It isn't only the strong who endure."

The Grand Prince's voice had softened a little.

That the two of them had broken with imperial convention and married for love was still a story on people's lips thirty years later. A dramatic romance draws every eye, in any age.

"Go easy on your mother. She has never lived a life other than ours."

"I know that well enough. But can anyone defy an imperial command?"

The Grand Prince's sigh stretched out long. His daughter, so like him it was uncanny, weighed on his mind. If he were the young man he had once been, he too would have said the same: that a royal must obey the Emperor's command, without fail. The foolish youth he had been, who had never even known the pain of losing something, seemed to overlap with Seon before his eyes.

But in one decisive respect, Seon and he were different.

At twenty-seven, the Grand Prince had never felt, down to the bone, the pain of losing what he cherished. At twenty-seven, Seon had been feeling that pain to the bone since she was small. That was why he could not stop her, and it was a regret he would carry to his grave.

"So. What task has His Majesty given you?"

The Grand Prince asked as he swallowed his unease. He had managed to arrange his face into composure, but he could not hide the corner of his mouth, which kept twitching. Seon glanced up at him, then quickly looked away as though she had noticed nothing.

"He said there was something suspicious about my uncle's accident."

"What did you say?"

No sooner had the words left her mouth than the Grand Prince stumbled backward. His eyes, steeped in terror as though he had seen a ghost claw its way out of the grave, wavered wildly.

"No... that can't be."

Seon gazed fixedly at his mouth as it denied reality, then silently went on.

"I'm afraid too, Father."

A very faint, washed-out smile hung on Seon's lips.

"I could hardly fail to understand why Grandfather entrusted this to me."

In that instant, a man's face flashed through her mind. That man, so full of laughter and mischief, who had always made the people beside him happy.

"Seon. I will speak to His Majesty myself."

Foreboding made the Grand Prince hurry his words. Urgency had risen on his face.

"It cannot be. It's far too dangerous."

"It seems you have been thinking much the same, Father."

Seon's smile twisted. An unlovely smile spread across her face, as if to lay bare the rot that had long since festered, bent, and warped inside her.

"Perhaps I was the one who was meant to die that day, Father."

"Seon!"

"And yet I alone survived and am standing here. That must mean I am the one meant to bring the truth to light."

Seon reached out and fingered a petal. Swaying in the breeze, the petals tickled her fingertips. Yes. The flowers she had seen that day, from inside the overturned car, beyond the shattered glass, beyond the black heel of a shoe, must have been these. Cosmos. The symbol of autumn.

"Until I turned seven, I was a child full of dreams. You remember, Father? One day I wanted to be a nurse, another day an astronaut. And then there were days I insisted I would grow up to be an actress, just like Mother."

Seon's voice, going on evenly as though she were telling someone else's story, did not waver.

"But after that day, when I was seven, I could never dream anything again. I had to live carrying two lives on my back."

"You never had to..."

"No. I had no other choice. I was the only one who survived."

Seon, who had left her hand among the petals until now, soon drew her arm back. Her fingertips, where the wind had been, felt suddenly empty.

"From that day on, my dream was revenge. Finding the man who had killed my third uncle and Princess Cheongsong: that was the only dream I had."

"Seon. Seon."

"And if that man truly had a hand in my uncle's accident as well..."

"No! No!"

The Grand Prince shouted before he could stop himself. Then, his face tight with the fear that someone, anyone, might have heard, he swept his gaze quickly around the garden.

The detached palace was merely a space under the Imperial Household Agency's authority, not a place where the Grand Prince could feel safe. He was afraid some hidden ear might be lying in wait to catch this conversation, that the peace he had barely found might be stolen away.

"It was an accident. An accident!"

Unlike her father, whose whole body trembled with fear, Seon was composed.

"I am different, Father. I will not be brought down the way my third uncle was."

There was strength in her voice as she declared it.

She was a daughter so like him it was chilling, yet in moments like this she was nothing like him at all. Even in his most hot-blooded days, the Grand Prince had known how to be afraid. He had known to watch which way power leaned and bow just deeply enough.

Seon did not. Afraid or not, she would not give up the truth. Not once had she let the longing she had carried in her heart for so many years come to light. And if this was to be her last chance, she did not intend to let it slip away.

The piece Grandfather had pressed into her hand might well prove to be the poison that turned her life inside out. Knowing all of that, Seon still could not bring herself to give it up.

"I won't hide a truth everyone knows and pretend I cannot see it."

"Seon."

With despair in his eyes, the Grand Prince called to his daughter in sorrow.

"The only reason I have endured my second uncle all this time is that, with no evidence in hand even now, I had no wish to turn my back on him without cause. He outranks me, after all, and he is an elder by far."

At last the name he had never wanted to hear reached his ears, and the Grand Prince went ash-gray. Seon watched her father shudder in silence, then put strength into her faint smile.

"But Father. If my second uncle is behind this too..."

"Yi Seon!"

"I will not stand by and stay silent."

Before her father, who had cried her name like a scream, Seon made her declaration.

Her eyes shone brighter than they ever had. Facing them, the Grand Prince, as though every last ember of his will had gone out, could do nothing but fall silent.

He knew it well. No one with eyes like those could ever be stopped.