Kensei Jon's Arc

Chapter 26 of 49

Three days after the birth, Kensei carried Jeon-min and Ha-ni home. The green and blue house held them all. The client's coat sat unfinished on the table. The thread lay wound and waiting. Kensei looked at it, then looked at Jeon-min on the bed, gray and slow. He made a choice. He walked to the neighbor's door and asked the woman who mended nets to finish the coat's seams for a share of the coin. She looked at his hanbok, then at his tired face, and said she would. The work would go out. It would not be their hands, but it would be done. "You gave our work away," Jeon-min said when Kensei told him. He tried to sit up. His arm shook. "For three days," Kensei said. He pressed a hand to Jeon-min's shoulder and eased him down. "You bled. You need to lie still. The coat will not fall apart because someone else pulls the thread." Jeon-min's jaw set the way it did over a bad price. Then Ha-ni made a small sound from the crib, and his face changed. He stopped counting the loss. "Bring her," he said. Kensei lifted the baby. She was awake, her dark eyes moving across his face like she was reading it. He laid her against Jeon-min's chest. Jeon-min's hard hands went soft around her. Kensei sat on the edge of the bed. He kissed Jeon-min's temple, then his cheek, then the corner of his mouth. Jeon-min let him. That was new. Jeon-min let things now that he once would have swatted away. "You're allowed to rest," Kensei said. "I found that out. I bought us the days." "You bought them badly," Jeon-min said. But his mouth curved. He shifted Ha-ni higher. "She watches everything." "She does." Kensei touched the baby's fist. It opened and closed. He thought of the market they had walked to together, the vows at the empty stall, the stranger who had shrugged and gone. No one here knew what they had been. No one came to take this away. He kissed Jeon-min again, slow, because he could, because the door was solid and the walls were theirs. Ha-ni began to cry, thin and rising. Jeon-min went still. "She's hungry," he said. "Or wet. I don't know which." Kensei did not know either. He had learned to hold her, to warm the water, to watch for fever. He had not learned this. He looked at the crying child, then at Jeon-min, worn to the bone and unable to rise. The rest was over. The coat was handled. But the small red mouth kept crying, and neither of them could name what she needed. Kensei stood. "I'll go for the midwife," he said. "We ask. That's how we learn the rest."