The court froze. No one spoke to the Queen like that.
Later, in the silence of a moonlit pavilion, he found her crying. "Why did you do that?" she whispered. "You don't even know me."
Then came the face. Sharp, beautiful, and utterly unreadable. A man in dark, blood-stained robes stared down at her with the cold calculation of a wolf sizing up a threat. "Who are you?" he asked, his voice a low rasp.
Ha-jin scrambled back, stammering about Seoul, about an accident. The man—Wang So, the Fourth Prince—merely tilted his head. "Mad," he muttered, and walked away.
Wang So.