Kensei Jon's Arc

Chapter 11 of 49

The market bench taught Kensei one hard fact. He could hold Jeon-min's hand in the open, but he owned nothing. No trade, no place, no name to build on. He watched Jeon-min unfold the sketch of his family's knot pattern and study it between bites of pear. Then Kensei knew what he had. He knew the pattern too. He had watched Jeon-min trace it a hundred nights. "I can help you finish it," he said. "Not just watch. Work." Jeon-min lowered the sketch. "You've never sewn a stitch." "I can learn. I can carry, measure, find the dye makers you write down." Kensei's voice steadied. "You've been to four cities alone. Let me be the one who goes to the fifth with you." Jeon-min said nothing for a long moment. A small gecko with cat ears crept along the edge of the fruit crate, watching them both. Jeon-min flicked his eyes to it, then back to Kensei. "We can't work from a borrowed room. We wake up in someone else's bed." He tapped the sketch. "I need a table. Light. A place I don't have to fold everything away by morning." That was the wall. The borrowed apartment gave them a roof and nothing more. No door of their own to close. No table to leave the work out on. Kensei set down the pear. "Then we find a place. Today." They walked the streets past the market until the crowd thinned. A guesthouse stood on a low stone base, its dark tiled roof curved up at the corners. Wooden lattice doors ran across the front. A woman swept the porch and called it half-empty since the season turned. She named a monthly price for the two back rooms. Kensei counted his coins. He counted Jeon-min's. Together it covered one month and part of a second. Not more. "We can't hold this," he said quietly. "Not without earning." "Then we earn from it," Jeon-min said. He turned to the woman. "I mend hanbok. I know old patterns most people lost. Send me anyone who wants theirs repaired." He held up the sketch. "This is my work. Show it to your guests." The woman looked at the drawing a long time. She said guests came through often with worn festival clothes and no one to fix them. She would send them. She took the first month's coin and handed Kensei a key. Kensei stood on the porch and turned the key in the lattice door. It swung open onto a plain wooden floor, empty, theirs. Light came through the paper screens. He saw the whole room at once, and he saw the table that would sit in it. "Ours," he said. "Ours," Jeon-min said. He set his bag down on the floor and did not fold anything away. He opened the sketch flat and left it there. "You're ridiculous," he added, but he was already looking at the light. "Okay," Kensei said. For the first time he had a place to wake up in, and a trade to learn in it.