Chapter Text
The spring of Momo's ninth year was when she learned that home was not a place, but a person who looks at you without flinching.
General Park's estate bloomed with an almost obscene abundance. Azaleas, pinks, and whites clustered along the stone pathways like spilled paint. Cherry blossoms drifted on breezes that smelled of damp earth and new beginnings.
Momo hated it.
The beauty felt like a mockery. The brightness made her eyes ache, accustomed as they were to the dim corners of the servants' quarters where she slept on a thin mat, clutching a broken tanto beneath her pillow like a child clutches a doll. In the fishing village of her birth, spring had smelled of salt and iron, not this cloying sweetness.
She had been on the estate for three years by then, but she was still a creature of winter inside. The other servants gave her a wide berth.
They whispered—the foreign savage, the general's pitiful experiment, that mutt.
Momo cultivated this fear. It was her only armor. She trained with the soldiers in the yard, a small, fierce thing among grown men, her practice sword a blur of controlled violence. She spoke only when spoken to—the language of Joseon now no longer strange on her tongue—but delivered in a flat, affectless monotone.
She was a weapon being sharpened, and weapons did not need friends.
The General had given her his surname when he took her in, as was customary for adopted children and wards. In the household registry, she was listed as Park Momo—a name that marked her as belonging to his house while allowing her to keep the only piece of her mother she had left.
She had fought for that. On the day the scribe had come to record her new identity, she had stood before the General, a feral six-year-old still healing from the wounds of the invasion, and refused to let them take her name.
The General had studied her for a long moment, his weathered face unreadable, and then he had nodded. A single, curt motion. “Keep it, then.”
It was the first kindness he had ever shown her, and she had never forgotten it.
The soldiers she trained with were not cruel, precisely. Some, like the grizzled arms-master Kang, treated her with a gruff respect born of watching her take hits that would have felled boys twice her size and rise again, her jaw set, her dark eyes blazing.
Others resented her presence. This small foreign girl who had been plucked from the rubble of her own people and given a place among men. They tested her. They tripped her during footwork drills, struck harder than necessary during sparring, "accidentally" misplaced her practice weapons.
Momo endured it all without complaint. She had learned, in the ashes of her village, that complaint was a luxury of the protected.
But the isolation carved a hollow in her chest. She did not know the word for it then. She only knew that when she lay on her mat at night, listening to the distant sounds of the servants laughing over their evening meals, she felt a vast, cold emptiness that no amount of training could fill.
***
The day she met Park Jihyo, the sky was a perfect, untroubled blue.
Momo had been summoned to the main pavilion, an order delivered by a nervous servant who kept a safe distance. She expected a reprimand—perhaps she had injured a soldier too badly in practice, or her silence had finally been deemed insubordination. She did not expect the girl.
Jihyo was eight years of age, sitting on the polished wooden floor of the pavilion with the patient stillness of a much older child.
She wore a hanbok of pale yellow, the color of early spring chrysanthemums, and her hair was plaited into a single, neat braid tied with a coral ribbon. She was a small, contained thing, but her eyes—dark, luminous, impossibly curious—were already too large for her face, as if they needed extra room to hold all the world she wanted to understand.
General Park stood at the edge of the pavilion, his arms crossed over his chest, his weathered face unreadable. "This is my daughter, Young Lady Jihyo," he said, his voice gruff but not unkind. "You will be assigned to her when you complete your training. I thought you should meet."
Momo stopped at the threshold, her bare feet silent on the wood. She did not bow. She stared.
Jihyo stared back. There was no fear in her gaze. No revulsion at the foreigner, no morbid curiosity at the scar that cut through Momo's left eyebrow, a souvenir from the invasion that had orphaned her. There was only a frank, open assessment, the way one might examine an unexpected painting.
"You are Momo," Jihyo said. It was not a question. Her voice was clear, high but not shrill, like a small bell struck gently. "Father says you are very strong. He says you will be my guard one day, when you are older. He says you are the best student he has ever trained."
Momo glanced at the General, startled. He had never said such a thing to her directly. The General's expression did not change, but something in his eyes softened, almost imperceptibly.
Momo said nothing. Words were slippery, treacherous things. Silence was a wall.
Undeterred, Jihyo tilted her head, a bird examining a strange new object. "Momo. That is a pretty name. Does it mean something?"
Still nothing. The silence stretched. A normal child would have grown uncomfortable, looked away, called for a parent. Jihyo simply waited, her small hands folded in her lap, her gaze unwavering. She had the patience of someone who had already learned that the most interesting things in life revealed themselves slowly.
"It means peach," Momo finally said, the words scraping out of her throat like stones. "In my language. It is for protection. To ward off evil spirits."
A smile broke across Jihyo's face, sudden and radiant, a sun emerging from behind a cloud. It transformed her. The composed little noblewoman vanished, replaced by a child of pure, uncomplicated delight.
"Protection! See? You are meant to be my guard. It is fate." She said this with the absolute certainty of a child who still believed the universe was a story written just for her.
"Do you know what my name means? Jihyo. It means wisdom and filial piety. Boring things. I would much rather be named after something that wards off evil spirits."
Momo felt something shift in her chest, a tectonic plate grinding against another, deep and disorienting. No one had smiled at her like that. Not since her mother. Not since before the fires and the screaming.
She did not know what to do with it, so she did what she always did. She retreated behind her wall of stone, her expression flattening, her eyes going distant.
"I am to return to training now," she said, and turned on her heel before Jihyo could respond.
But as she walked away, her bare feet silent on the wooden path, she could feel the girl's gaze on her back, warm as the spring sun. And for the first time in three years, Momo did not feel like a ghost.
"Come back tomorrow," Jihyo called after her, her voice carrying across the courtyard like a bell. "I will have honey cakes waiting. I always have honey cakes."
Momo did not turn around. She did not acknowledge the invitation. But the next day, she found herself walking toward the main pavilion at the same hour, her heart beating an unfamiliar rhythm against her ribs.
***
The weeks that followed were a quiet siege.
Momo's duties did not yet include guarding Jihyo—she was too young, too untested—but the general's daughter seemed to have decided that Momo was her personal project of interest.
She appeared in the strangest places.
Momo would be practicing her forms in the training yard, sweat dripping down her back, and she would glance up to see a small figure in pastel silks perched on a wooden fence, watching with rapt attention.
The foreign girl would be eating her solitary meal of rice and pickled vegetables in the servants' hall, and a servant would appear, breathless, bearing a plate of honey cakes "from the young mistress, with her compliments."
The other servants noticed. The whispers changed. “The young mistress has taken a liking to the savage. How peculiar. How dangerous.”
Momo ignored the honey cakes in public. She ate them only when no one was looking, in the privacy of her small room, the sweetness melting on her tongue like a forbidden memory.
She told herself it was because she did not want to encourage the girl's attentions. She told herself it was because accepting gifts created obligations. She told herself many things, and believed none of them.
One afternoon, Momo was tasked with delivering a bolt of silk to the women's quarters. It was a servant's errand, beneath her training, but she had learned not to question orders.
She found Jihyo in a small garden courtyard, sitting alone beneath a blossoming plum tree. A book was open in her lap—Confucian analects, Momo recognized the characters—but Jihyo was not reading. She was looking up at the petals falling around her, her expression distant and vaguely melancholic for a child so young.
She sensed Momo's presence and looked over. The smile that bloomed on her face was immediate, instinctive. It did things to Momo's insides that she refused to name.
"Momo-yah," Jihyo said, the informal suffix a gift freely given, a tiny rebellion against the rigid hierarchy that separated them. "Come. Sit with me."
"I am delivering silk, my lady. I must return."
"The silk can wait. I cannot." Jihyo patted the ground beside her. "I am bored. Tell me something interesting. Tell me about your country."
Momo stiffened. "I have no country." The words were flat, a recitation of a lesson beaten into her.
Jihyo's brow furrowed. The concept seemed genuinely confusing to her. "Everyone has a country. Even the birds in the sky have nests. Even the fish in the sea have rivers."
"I am not a bird or a fish. I’m a…sword. Swords have no home."
A long pause. Jihyo set down her book, her small face grave. When she spoke, her voice was softer, stripped of its childish imperiousness. "Even a sword belongs somewhere. Swords are made by someone. Swords are cared for by someone. Swords are kept in special places, polished and oiled and treasured. That’s what Father has always told me."
She looked at Momo with those too-large eyes, and for a moment, she seemed far older than eight. "But, you are not a sword, Momo-yah. You are a person. And a person deserves a home."
Momo had no response. The words hit her like a physical blow, cracking something inside her that she had kept carefully sealed. She stood there, the bolt of silk forgotten in her arms, as Jihyo turned back to the falling petals, apparently satisfied with her pronouncement.
"I have decided," Jihyo announced, her tone shifting back to its usual bright confidence.
"When you are my guard, we will be friends. I do not have any friends. The daughters of the other noble houses are too boring. They only want to talk about embroidery and marriage prospects. I want to talk about interesting things. Battles and sea monsters and faraway countries. You have been to a faraway country. You are interesting."
"I am a servant," Momo said. "Servants and ladies cannot be friends."
"Says who?"
"The rules of society."
Jihyo made a dismissive sound, remarkably expressive for a eight-year-old. "Rules of society are made by old men who have forgotten what it is like to be interesting. I will change them when I am older." She said this with such conviction that Momo almost believed her.
"Now, sit. You have not eaten your honey cakes today. I know because I sent three and they all came back. Do you not like honey cakes?"
Momo hesitated. Then, very slowly, she set down the bolt of silk and lowered herself to the ground, a careful distance from Jihyo. "I like them," she admitted. "I ate them. When no one was watching."
Jihyo beamed. "Good. Then tomorrow I will send four."
That night, Momo lay on her sleeping mat, staring at the ceiling, and replayed the conversation in her head until dawn. You are a person. A person deserves a home. When you are my guard, we will be friends.
It was the first time anyone had ever said such a thing to her.
And it was the first time she allowed herself to think, with a dangerous, fragile hope, that perhaps home was not a country. Perhaps home was a girl in a yellow hanbok, sitting beneath a plum tree, waiting for her.