The Dokkaebi Bride: Meeting The Quills

The lanterns swayed in the evening breeze, each one trailing a thin veil of heat shimmer that caught the last copper light of sunset. Wren Quill counted them from the terrace, seventeen in a row, and tried to remember why she had agreed to any of this.

Seventeen lanterns, and a man on the far side of the garden making her sister laugh.

She pressed the cool stem of her glass against the inside of her wrist and watched Seojin work. He had that quality about him, the way a candle flame has about a room, drawing every eye without ever seeming to ask for it. He stood a full head taller than Eun-Ji, and the indigo of his jacket turned brighter when he moved through the pools of lantern light, as though the fabric were holding onto the dusk. His laugh reached Wren across the terrace in fragments, low and unhurried, the kind of laugh that made strangers feel like they had been let in on a private joke.

"Wren." Her sister had spotted her. "Wren, are you hiding?"

"I'm surveilling," Wren said. "There's a difference."

Eun-Ji crossed the flagstones in quick, uneven steps, her shoes losing the argument with the grass. She had landed at Incheon that morning, hair still flat from the airplane, and she looked like someone who had packed for a funeral and found a wedding. Her eyes were the same shade of dark as Wren's, but rounder, more alarmed.

"You said he was a consultant," Eun-Ji said.

"He is a consultant."

"He just told a man he's never met exactly which year his grandfather's comb was made."

"He has an interest in antiques."

"Wren."

"He has an interest in a great many things."

Eun-Ji looked at her, then at Seojin, then back at Wren. "You look terrible."

"Thank you. I packed for this."

At the far end of the terrace, Seojin bent over a small velvet case that Ethan Marsh had produced from his jacket pocket. Ethan was Hae-won's fiancé, and he had the broad, slightly puzzled look of a man who had been pulled into something he did not entirely understand but was determined to be polite about. The case held a comb, old, the color of stained walnut, and Seojin held it up to the lantern light with the careful attention of a man who had seen many such things and found one of them interesting.

The two men stood in a triangle of lantern light. Ethan spoke, gesturing with the hand that was not holding the case. Seojin listened, head tilted, then turned the comb in his fingers. Wren saw the moment his thumb found a small notch on the spine, hidden under a frill of carved cloud. He did not look surprised. He looked, Wren thought, like a librarian who had just been asked about a book he had shelved himself.

She excused herself from Eun-Ji and went down the terrace steps into the garden.

The grass was cool under her flats. Someone had strung paper lanterns between the persimmon trees, and the fruit hung heavy and orange above her head, catching the light. A woman Wren did not recognize was describing a hiking trip in the Sobaek Mountains. A man she had met twice was laughing about the wine. The house behind them, old and white and patient, watched it all with the expression of place that had seen many such evenings.

Seojin noticed her before she reached him. She knew this because the quality of his attention shifted, the way a searchlight swings, and the man in front of him paused in midsentence.

"Wren," Seojin said. Her name sounded different in his mouth than in anyone else's. Heavier. Heavier in a way that she had decided she did not like, and then decided she did like, and then refused to decide about at all.

"Ethan," she said, and smiled in the direction of the fiancé. "I hope he isn't boring you."

"Not at all." Ethan had a kind, weathered face, the kind that suggested a lot of highway driving and a love of small dogs. "He was just telling me about the comb."

"The comb," Wren said.

"It was my grandfather's." Ethan held the case a little closer to his chest. "From his mother. He was very particular about it. Said it was older than the family."

"It's Baekje," Seojin said. "The carving. The cloud pattern was a court style that went out of fashion before the Silla dynasty finished taking the peninsula. The notches here, and here, are wedding notation. They added them when your grandmother's family accepted the bride price." He turned the comb once more, then handed it back with the gravity of a man returning a child to its parent. "It's a beautiful thing. You should keep it somewhere it doesn't get handled."

Ethan took the comb and looked at it as though he had never seen it before. "How did you know?"

"I told you," Seojin said, and smiled. "I have an interest in antiques."

"There is more of that upstairs," Ethan said, half to himself. "In the family room. Boxes."

"I would be very glad to look, if you like."

They moved off together, Ethan gesturing toward the house, Seojin walking one step behind him with the easy composure of a man who had all the time in the world, which, Wren thought, watching him go, he probably did.

She stood in the grass and felt the evening settle around her shoulders. From somewhere in the kitchen, a kettle whistled, and a child laughed, and a woman's voice rose in mock outrage over a missing plate of jeon. The house was a small traditional one in the hills south of Seoul, the kind of place that had been in Seojin's family for a long time, by which he meant a very long time, and which he had offered for the party because his own apartment was, in his words, unsuitable for the number of shoes a Western family tended to bring.

Eun-Ji appeared at her elbow. "He's telling Ethan about the comb."

"I know. I was there."

"I know. I was there," Wren said, and Eun-Ji gave her the look that meant she had noticed something and was deciding whether to name it.

"He's different with the Americans," Eun-Ji said. "Less... performed."

"He's been alive for a very long time. I imagine he has a lot of rooms to perform in."

Eun-Ji hummed. She was holding a small glass of something amber, and she turned it in her hands without drinking. Her cardigan had slipped off one shoulder, and the evening light made her look both very young and very tired, the way she had looked at the airport in Incheon when Wren met her, when the whole impossible thing was still a thing that could be theorized away.

"Are you all right?" Eun-Ji asked.

"I'm standing in a garden in Korea, watching a nine-hundred-year-old goblin charm my brother's boyfriend with a story about a hair comb. How would I be?"

Eun-Ji considered this. "You haven't eaten."

"I've eaten."

"You've moved food around a plate."

"Eun-Ji."

"Sorry." She took a sip of her drink, winced, and set it on the stone wall beside her. "I keep thinking about the journal. How she knew. She knew, Wren. There's a whole section in there about the Quill family and the waiting, and she drew the same symbol that's on the comb. She drew it in the margin of a page about a wedding in 1912."

"I know. I read it."

"I'm just saying. She knew, and she didn't tell us, and now we're here."

Wren did not say anything to this. Across the lawn, Seojin had paused at the edge of the porch and was looking back at her. The light was the color of weak tea, and his face in it was the face of someone who had been kind to her brother and was now trying to decide whether to be kind to her. She knew that face. She had seen it on her father, the same careful weighing.

She set her own glass down. "I'm going to go sit on the porch for a minute."

"Do you want me to come?"

"No. I want you to go eat. Tell Mira Vance I sent you and that she should put something in your hand that doesn't have to be chewed aggressively."

Eun-Ji laughed, a small surprised sound, and went.

Wren climbed the three wooden steps to the covered porch at the back of the house, where the boards were cool and the whole valley opened out below. The hills rolled away in waves of darker green and lighter, the dusk softening everything into a kind of plausible watercolor. Somewhere below, a dog was barking. Somewhere closer, a woman was laughing in the kitchen, and a man was telling a story with the cadence of a man who had told it many times and was enjoying it less each time.

She sat on the low bench against the railing and let her hands rest on her knees. Her palms smelled faintly of grass and something older, the camphor of the box Seojin had shown her earlier, the box that had been sitting in the house for a hundred years waiting for someone to open it with the right intent.

She did not hear him come up the steps. She only knew he was there because the air changed, the way air changes when someone very tall stands just behind you, and because when she exhaled, his name came out before she had decided to say it.

"You're not reading the journal," he said, and sat down at the far end of the bench, leaving a careful distance between them.

It was not really a question. With Seojin, the sentences that were not questions were often the ones that mattered most.

"No," she said.

"You should. When you're ready."

She looked at him. He was looking out at the valley, his hands loose on his knees, the posture of a man who had sat on this porch before the trees in the foreground had grown. His profile was severe in the way some Korean faces were severe in later life, the bones coming forward, the patience built into the architecture. He was not in any particular hurry. He never was.

"Did you mean what you said to him?" she asked. "About the comb."

"I generally mean what I say. I find it saves time."

"And the notches."

"Yes."

She was quiet for a long time. The dog had stopped barking. The dog had been replaced by a frog, or a small mechanical thing that was imitating a frog, and the valley was otherwise very still.

"I want to ask you something," she said.

"You can ask me anything. I reserve the right to answer in my own way."

"Did you research him?"

He turned to look at her. For a moment she thought he was going to deflect, to make some joke about antiques again, and she had a small tight feeling in her chest, the feeling of having asked the wrong question.

But he did not.

"Yes," he said.

"Before you came to the house. Before you even came to the country."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He was quiet for a long time. The light was going. The first of the fireflies, if they were fireflies, were beginning their tentative little circuits in the grass below.

"Because I am a creature who lives a long time," he said, "and I have learned that the most useful thing I can do when I am about to be responsible for a person is to know who raised them. To know what kind of accident they are."

"You make it sound clinical."

"It is. Some of it. Some of it is not."

He shifted on the bench, turning more fully toward her. The careful distance he had left between them was not a rejection of her. She understood that now. It was the distance of a man who had learned that mortal people needed a certain amount of room to take him in.

"I read what I could find," he said. "The papers he published in Ireland, which were few. The interviews he gave in 1987 to the local papers when the book came out. The dissertation, which I had translated. The book itself, which is a strange and beautiful book. I read it twice."

"You read the book."

"I read it twice."

Wren looked away. She looked at the valley, and at the dog that had apparently gone home, and at the small bright places in the grass that she was carefully not thinking about.

"No one reads that book twice," she said.

"I did."

"He would have hated that."

"No. He would have been flattered, and then he would have made a joke about it, and then he would have invited me for tea and asked me a thousand questions about the Korean folk tradition, and he would have left the conversation knowing more than I had begun it knowing. That is the kind of man he was."

The frog stopped. The valley was very quiet.

"He was a quiet man," Seojin said. "That is what I kept finding. Not silent. Quiet. There is a difference. Silence is a refusal. Quietness is a choice. He chose to listen first. He chose to wait until someone had finished their sentence before he began his. He wrote in his journal, in the parts of his journal that have been preserved, that he wanted to be a man who saw things before anyone else did, and then he was. He was that."

Wren did not trust her voice. She sat with her hands on her knees and looked at the place in the grass where there had been a firefly a moment ago, and she thought of her father at the kitchen table in Galway, with his cup of tea going cold, listening to her mother talk about a wedding she had read about in a borrowed book, and saying almost nothing, and seeing everything.

"I never told anyone that," she said.

"I know."

"I never told Eun-Ji. I never told Mira Vance. I never wrote it down."

"I know."

"How do you know?"

He turned his face back to the valley. "Because I am a creature who has lived a long time," he said, "and I have learned that the thing you do not tell anyone is almost always the thing that is most true."

There was a long silence. The valley was almost dark now, and the first of the true fireflies had begun, the ones that were not mechanical, the small cold lamps of the hills. Downstairs, the kitchen had gone quiet. Everyone had moved to the front of the house, or out onto the lawn, or up to the family room to look at the boxes.

She realized, with a small jolt, that Seojin had engineered this. He had walked into the house with Ethan. He had let Eun-Ji go to the kitchen. He had waited for the household to redistribute itself, and then he had come up the porch steps and sat beside her, and he had waited again.

"You are a very patient man," she said.

"I have had practice."

"You are also a very manipulative man."

"I have also had practice."

He did not smile. She almost did.

"What did you find," she said, "when you researched him. Beyond the book. Beyond the dissertation."

He was quiet for a moment. "I found a man who lost his wife and did not collapse. I found a man who raised two daughters alone and who answered their questions and who left his door open when they wanted to come in and who left it open when they did not. I found a man who was not famous in the way he thought he wanted to be famous, and who came to be at peace with that. I found a man who loved Korea before he ever came to Korea, because he had read it correctly, and who came here as soon as he could and was sick about it for a month, and who wrote his daughters letters from his sickbed that were very funny and that he asked them to keep."

"I have those letters."

"I know."

"He wrote me about the comb."

Seojin turned his head. It was a small movement, but she saw him make it.

"He wrote me about the comb," she said again, "and he did not tell me what it was. He told me it was an heirloom. He told me to keep it in the family. He told me not to sell it."

"He did not know what it was."

"He suspected."

"Maybe."

"And he didn't tell me."

"Maybe he wanted you to find out in your own way."

Wren looked at her hands. The lines of her palms were very clear in the dusk. She had her father's hands. She had been told this many times by people who had known him, and she had always accepted it as the kind of thing people said, the way they said you had his eyes, the way they shaped a memory into a kindness.

She had not believed them until she held the comb.

"I think about him a lot," she said. "More than I used to."

"Yes."

"I think about whether he would have liked this. Any of this. The house. The party. The way Ethan laughs at Seojin's jokes. The frog."

Seojin, for the first time that evening, gave a small sound that was almost a laugh. "I have not heard the frog," he said. "I have heard him for nine hundred years, and I have never once heard him laugh."

"You haven't told him any jokes."

"He does not require them. He is a professional."

She looked at him. He was looking out at the valley with the patience of a man who had been watching this particular valley for a very long time and who was patient enough to watch it for a while longer.

"He would have liked you," she said.

Seojin did not say anything for a while. The fireflies were multiplying. The valley was a small sea of them now, lifting and falling and lifting again.

"I would have liked him," he said, finally. "I would have liked him very much."

They sat with this for a while. The dog had not come back. The kitchen, down the hall, was quiet. Somewhere, a child had been put to bed. Somewhere, a door had been closed.

"I have not told anyone that either," Seojin said, very quietly. "That I would have liked him."

She did not look at him. She looked at the fireflies.

"I won't tell anyone," she said.

"Thank you."

They sat together for a while longer. The dusk became the dark. The valley became a thing of cold small lights and the smell of grass and the sound of a frog who had survived, very improbably, into the present.

The kitchen door slid open behind them, spilling yellow light and laughter across the veranda. Wren blinked, turning. Inside, the party had thinned to its hardier participants. The aunts had retreated. The children, mercifully, had been carried off to bed by Mira Vance, who had the efficient tenderness of a woman who had raised four of her own and could still recall the exact weight of a sleeping toddler. Ethan Marsh stood at the far end of the room, helping Lord Myung-ho stack dishes in a tall, precarious column. The old man's sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, and there was dish soap on his chin, and Ethan was laughing at something he had said.

Hae-won was at the kitchen table, a bottle of soju before her, her sleeves also pushed up, her hair coming loose from its pins in dark wisps. She looked up when Wren and Seojin came in. Her eyes had the particular brightness of a woman who had been sitting alone with her thoughts for some time.

"There you are," she said. "The runaway bride and the runaway groom. Sit down."

Wren sat. Seojin did not. He moved to the counter and began, very quietly, drying a dish that Ethan had left there. The cloth moved in his hands with the careful attention of a man who had not dried a dish in nine hundred years and intended to do this one correctly.

"Sit down, Seojin," Hae-won said. "I am asking you a question."

"I am drying a dish."

"You can dry a dish and answer a question at the same time. You have hands."

Wren watched Hae-won pour another measure of soju into her cup. The exorcist's movements were loose, precise in the way that only very practiced drinkers could be precise. Her eyes, when they found Wren's across the table, were sharp underneath their glaze.

"I have been thinking," Hae-won said.

"Dangerous," Wren said.

"Shut up. I have been thinking about contracts."

Wren did not shut up. She had a sip of her own cup, which was still half full of the tea that Mira Vance had set in front of her an hour ago. The tea was cold now and tasted faintly of ginger and grass.

"Contracts," she said.

"Yes. The kind that bind. The kind that have clauses." Hae-won tipped the bottle toward Seojin's back. "The kind with loopholes."

Seojin set the dish in the rack. He picked up another. He did not turn around.

"Mistress Hae-won," he said, "you have had a long day."

"I have had a long life. The day is nothing." She drank. She set the cup down. "I have also been thinking about moons."

"Many people think about moons."

"Quiet. I am thinking about blue moons. Specifically the next one."

Wren's cup had stopped halfway to her mouth. She set it down. The kitchen was very quiet. Ethan, at the far end of the room, was stacking another dish and not listening. Lord Myung-ho was listening. She could tell because his hands had paused on the column. He did not turn.

"The next blue moon," Hae-won said, "is in eleven days."

"Yes," Seojin said.

"You have been waiting a long time, my lord. Longer than I have been alive. Longer than my mother was alive. Longer than her mother."

"Yes."

"And now there is a woman in your kitchen."

"There is."

"A woman you have known for a matter of weeks."

"Closer to a month."

"A month. Out of nine hundred years. That is nothing. That is a breath." Hae-won poured herself another cup. She drank it. She poured another. "So I have to ask. I have to ask because I have been hired to sever this contract, and I would like to know, before I do any severing, whether the severing is going to break someone's heart."

The kitchen went very still. The firefly light from the window lay on the table. Wren's hands were folded in her lap and her knuckles were white. She did not look at Seojin. She looked at Hae-won.

"I am asking," Hae-won said, slurring slightly, the words coming out with the careful shape of someone who had rehearsed them, "when you plan to propose."

The word fell into the room like a stone into a well. Wren heard it hit the water far below. Her face, she knew, was doing something. She could not have said what. She had lost the use of the muscles in her cheeks.

Seojin set down the dish he was drying. He turned. He had a towel in one hand and his sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and he looked, in that moment, absurdly mortal. A man in a kitchen, a man with dishwater on his cuffs, a man whose face was doing the careful, controlled nothing that his face did when something had landed close to home.

"Mistress Hae-won," he said.

"Answer the question."

"I have no engagement ring."

"That is not an answer."

"It is, in fact, the only answer I have."

Hae-won squinted at him. She raised her cup. She drank. She set the cup down with the small hard sound of porcelain on wood.

"Then I will tell you one," she said. "I will tell you one as a professional observation. You are going to lose her if you wait."

Wren's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"You are going to wait," Hae-won said, "because you have been waiting for nine hundred years, and you have decided that a little more waiting costs nothing. You have decided that you are patient. You have forgotten that she is not."

Seojin did not move. The towel in his hand had gone still.

"She is a mortal woman," Hae-won said, "and mortal women do not have nine hundred years. They have, if they are lucky, eighty. If they are unlucky, less. If they are unlucky in a particular way, they have the exact number of weeks that it takes for a contract to bind and a man to decide that he has all the time in the world."

"Hae-won," Wren said. Her voice was not quite her own.

"No. Listen. I am drunk and I am right, and these two conditions do not often coincide." Hae-won looked at Wren now, and her eyes were very bright. "You came here to research your mother's book. You found a contract instead. You have been very brave about the contract. You have not been very brave about the man."

Wren could feel her face burning. She could feel Seojin, across the kitchen, not moving. She could feel the small weight of the binding mark beneath her collar, the faint cool pulse of it against her skin.

"I am not," she said, "having this conversation."

"You are not having it," Hae-won agreed. "He is. He has been having it for nine hundred years, and he is very good at not having it, and you are allowing him to not have it, and I am telling you, as a professional, that this is a problem."

Seojin set the towel down. He walked to the table. He pulled out the chair beside Wren. He sat. His face, when she finally allowed herself to look at it, was doing something she had not seen before. It was not the patient mask. It was not the amusement. It was the face of a man who had been caught, very neatly, by someone who understood him better than he had thought she did.

"Mistress Hae-won," he said. "You are drunk."

"Catastrophically."

"Then I will answer your question. I will answer it plainly, because you have asked it plainly, and because the woman beside me deserves a plain answer."

Wren stopped breathing.

"I do not yet have a question to answer," he said. "I have not asked. I have, perhaps, been avoiding asking. You are correct. I have been avoiding it for some time."

Hae-won nodded. She poured another cup.

"But," Seojin said, "the reason I have been avoiding it is not the reason you think."

"Then tell me the reason."

"The reason is that I do not wish to bind a woman to me by contract. I wish to bind her to me by choice. The contract is the curse. The choice is the marriage. These are not the same thing."

Hae-won considered this. She drank.

"That is a very good answer," she said, finally.

"Thank you."

"It is also the answer of a man who has been alive for nine hundred years and has learned how to make a sentence land properly."

"Yes."

"Fine. I will accept it. I will also tell you that you are running out of time, my lord. The blue moon does not care whether you are ready."

"I am aware."

"Are you? Because from where I am sitting, you are drying dishes."

Seojin's mouth twitched. The almost-laugh. Wren saw it. She saw him, in the yellow kitchen light, with dishwater on his cuffs and his sleeves pushed up and his hair coming loose at his temples. She saw him as a man. She saw him as a man who had just said, in front of a drunk exorcist and a folklore scholar with her mother's manuscript in her bag, that he wanted her to choose him.

She did not know what to do with this.

Seojin stood. He held out his hand.

"Wren," he said.

She looked at his hand. She looked at his face.

"Dance with me," he said.

"There is no music."

"There is a frog."

From the veranda, faintly, the frog sang.

"You cannot dance to a frog," she said.

"You have not tried."

She took his hand.

His hand was warm. Warmer than she had expected. The fingers closed around hers, careful, with the same precise attention he had given the dish he had dried. She stood. The chair scraped back. Hae-won, at the table, raised her cup in a small salute.

"Do not break her," Hae-won said. "I will know."

"I have no intention of breaking anyone."

"You have every intention. That is what love is. You will just have to do it gently."

Wren did not hear the rest. Seojin had drawn her toward the center of the kitchen, where the floor was clear, where the light from the paper lanterns fell in overlapping circles. The frog, beyond the window, kept its small steady rhythm. He put one hand at her waist. He took her other hand in his.

"We do not have to," he said.

"I know."

"You are not obligated."

"I know."

She set her hand on his shoulder. Under the fabric, the muscle was warm and present and very real.

"Lead, then," she said. "Since you asked."

He led. They did not, strictly, dance. They swayed. They turned, slowly, in the small clear space between the table and the counter. The frog provided the only music. Hae-won, behind them, was humming something off-key. Ethan Marsh, at the far end of the room, had stopped stacking dishes and was watching them with the open curiosity of a child. Lord Myung-ho was smiling into his beard.

Wren looked up at Seojin. His face was close. His eyes, in the lantern light, were darker than she had remembered.

"You meant what you said," she said. "About the choice."

"Yes."

"That was not the contract speaking."

"No."

"That was you."

"Yes."

She breathed. His hand, at her waist, was steady. The frog kept time. The binding mark at her collar pulsed once, faintly, as if it had heard something it did not understand.

"Wren," he said. "I am going to ask you a question. Not tonight. Not this week. But before the moon."

Her heart did something she did not have a name for.

"All right," she said.

"All right?"

"All right."

He turned her, slowly, under the lanterns. The frog, somewhere in the valley, was still singing. The dog had come back and was lying under the table with its head on its paws. The night, beyond the windows, was full of cold small lights, and somewhere out there her mother's manuscript waited in her bag, and somewhere out there her sister was asleep in a guest room with a dog-eared journal under her pillow, and somewhere out there the blue moon was eleven days away and closing.

She had walked into this kitchen thinking she was in trouble.

She was in worse trouble than she thought.

But the hand at her waist was warm, and the frog was singing, and the man turning her under the paper lanterns had just told her, very quietly, that the curse was not the marriage.

The marriage was the choice.

She let him turn her again. She let the slow music carry them. She let herself, for the length of one song, be exactly where she was.