The Emperor does not attend the Spring Festival.
This is, according to the reaction at every table in my father's compound the morning after the announcement, deeply unusual. The Spring Festival is one of the four imperial ceremonies where the Emperor's presence is not optional. It is constitutional. It is written into the founding documents of the Hwangeuk Empire in language that my tutor, Master Hwang, describes as "quite firm."
"The Emperor is occupied with matters of state," says the official announcement, which is read to the household by my father's secretary in a voice carefully stripped of any opinion.
What this actually means, I learn from Madam Sohn over the following three days of listening to her talk to other maids while I practice calligraphy nearby, is that the Emperor has been in the northern war rooms since before sunrise for eleven consecutive days. The border clans have moved again. Not an invasion. Something quieter: the displacement of three villages in the outer territories, their residents gone overnight, no bodies and no explanation.
The other thing it means, which nobody says directly but which I piece together from the pauses and careful word choices of every adult I observe, is that the Emperor's absence from the Spring Festival is a political statement. Attending means performing normalcy. He is choosing not to perform.
The system gives me a new panel.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION: EMPEROR SEO JEONG-MIN. AGE: 23. TOOK THRONE AT 19 FOLLOWING FATHER'S DEATH. KNOWN FOR: EFFICIENCY. BLUNTNESS. ENDING AUDIENCES EARLY. HAVING NO PATIENCE FOR CEREMONY. SPIRITUAL FIRE ABILITY: HIGH. THE STRONGEST RECORDED IN THE SEO CLAN'S HISTORY. POSSIBLY THE STRONGEST IN FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. PERSONALITY NOTE: DEEPLY PRIVATE. THREE PEOPLE IN THE EMPIRE KNOW WHAT HE ACTUALLY THINKS ABOUT ANYTHING. TWO OF THEM ARE HIS PERSONAL GUARD. ONE IS HIS GRANDMOTHER. RELEVANT DETAIL: HE HAS REJECTED FOUR MARRIAGE RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE PAST TWO YEARS. NOT POLITELY. FURTHER RELEVANT DETAIL: WHEN ASKED WHY, HE SAID "I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THAT." THE MINISTER WHO ASKED HAS NOT RECOVERED HIS DIGNITY.
I read this twice.
The Emperor is twenty-three years old and has rejected four marriage candidates and skipped a constitutional ceremony and is doing something in his war rooms that has every adult in the capital speaking carefully.
He sounds, I think, like a man who is holding something very large and not asking for help with it.
I know that specific shape of exhaustion. I wore it myself, in my previous life, for about three years before I admitted that the data pipeline problem was too large for one person and asked for a team. The admitting was the hardest part. Harder than the fixing.
The difference, of course, is that he is an emperor and I am a ten-year-old girl and the timeline between now and any version of relevant is eight years long.
I go back to my calligraphy.
The Spring Festival proceeds without the Emperor. Our family attends, because not attending would be a statement my father has no interest in making. We dress carefully. Hana looks like something out of a painting, which I notice the way I notice weather, as a fact about the world that is both true and not particularly about me. I wear my best, which is well-made and appropriate and which Madam Sohn frets over for forty minutes before declaring it acceptable.
The festival is held in the outer palace grounds, which are open to the nobility on this one day of the year. I have been to the outer palace before, in the memories that came with this body, but those memories are a child's impressions, mostly about the food. My own impressions are different.
The outer palace is large and deliberately so. Every measurement of it was chosen to communicate scale, to make the humans walking through it feel appropriately small. The spiritual fire is thick here. Thick and old, the kind of concentration that comes from four hundred years of a ruling family's energy compounding in one location. When I step through the main gate I have to concentrate to keep the shimmer from being distracting, because it is everywhere, layered like sediment, and my Flame Gathering skill pulls toward it instinctively.
I keep my hands very still and my expression very calm.
The festival is a series of careful performances. Nobility from all four great houses circulate through the grounds, saying things that mean other things. My father navigates this with his usual cautious competence, greeting where greeting is required and removing himself from conversations that are about more than they appear to be.
I follow him and I watch.
I am looking for the shape of the network. Who speaks to whom, and for how long, and with what posture. Who seeks whom out, versus who is sought. Who watches the door during a conversation, and who watches the person they're speaking to. These are the things you learn when you pay attention to data instead of surface.
Two hours in, I see something interesting.
Lord Yoon Hak-su, head of House Yoon and one of the two noble families making succession noises, spends eleven minutes talking to a man I don't recognize. The man is dressed as a minor court official. He is standing with the specific stillness of someone trained in it rather than someone naturally still. Lord Yoon's posture, which has been politely attentive throughout every other conversation I've observed, is different during those eleven minutes. Closed. Lower in the shoulders. When the conversation ends he walks immediately to the refreshment table and picks up something to drink and doesn't drink it.
I flag this in my mental ledger.
Then, because I am ten years old and this is a festival, I eat three rice cakes and watch a fire performer and note that the spiritual fire the performer is working with is the ambient variety, thin and show-quality, nothing like what I can feel pooled in the palace stones.
The system, which I am beginning to suspect enjoys observational humor, offers a new panel.
OBSERVATION: YOU HAVE EATEN THREE RICE CAKES AND WATCHED A FIRE PERFORMANCE AND ALSO POSSIBLY IDENTIFIED SOMETHING IMPORTANT ABOUT LORD YOON. RECOMMENDATION: THE RICE CAKES WERE MORE ENJOYABLE THAN PRODUCTIVE. THE LORD YOON OBSERVATION WAS THE REVERSE. FOLLOW UP: THE MAN HE SPOKE TO WAS SEEN ARRIVING FROM THE NORTHERN GATE, WHICH IS NOT THE PUBLIC ENTRANCE. HE SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN INSIDE THE FESTIVAL GROUNDS AT ALL. ADDITIONAL RECOMMENDATION: TELL SOMEONE.
I stand in the middle of the festival grounds and I think about this.
Telling someone means explaining how I know. Explaining how I know means explaining that I watch patterns in crowds the way a data analyst watches traffic in a network. I am ten years old. Ten-year-old noble daughters at festivals do not watch patterns in crowds. They watch the fire performers and eat rice cakes.
I tell no one.
But I remember his face. The court official who shouldn't have been there, speaking to Lord Yoon Hak-su in a way that made Yoon immediately need something to hold onto.
The system is right that it matters. I'm just not the right size yet to do anything about it.
SEVEN YEARS AND TEN MONTHS REMAINING, the system notes, unprompted.
"I know," I say, under my breath.
Hana, who is standing two feet to my left, gives me a sideways look.
"Are you talking to yourself?" she asks.
"Praying," I say. "For patience."
She looks at me with the particular expression of someone who suspects they're being mocked and can't prove it.
"You're strange," she says.
"The fever," I tell her.
She turns back to the performance. I watch Lord Yoon set down his undrunk cup and straighten his robes and smile at someone across the garden, and I think about the man who shouldn't have been there and what he might have put in Yoon's ear.