Walking in the Darkness || Yeosang (A Treasure Tale)

The Turning Point

Thankfully for Yeosang, it was a cloudless night. A tame nor'easter caught the sails and all he had to do was calculate the route to the closest inhabited island.

"If there's enough bread and water for five days and the wind doesn't change, let's see..."

He glanced at the stars again. It was fall and the beak of the southern bird was the brightest in the constellation, so if he followed it but adjusted a few points to the west he'd hit the Tae peninsula in—

"A week?" Yeosang hummed to himself and jotted the answer down, not yet satisfied. "Oh, I'm such an idiot, I haven't factored in the currents!"

Gently slapping himself in the face with the feathery tip of his quill pen, he rolled over on the plush sofa of his favourite parlour and tried to envision the maps Father had shown him.

It was his last night to study for the examination in two days and he wouldn't be allowed any maps then at all.

Yeosang was sixteen now and while he had always studied diligently at home, all the other boys who would be examined had real experience as cadets aboard naval vessels already. He knew it was no matter to be anxious over— after all, Captain Bang had practically promised to apply for Yeosang to be brought on as junior navigator assuming the results were decent— but still he didn't want to be looked down on as a lazy slob just because he hadn't gotten his feet wet, technically speaking.

He didn't notice the midnight blue of nighttime fade into the first grey shades of dawn while he scribbled out his answer until the clink of porcelain on the other side of the room startled him.

A serving maid fiddling with the fine dishes on her way to extinguish the candelabras.

"Did I not give the serving matron instructions that I not be disturbed?" Yeosang grumbled after pointedly clearing his throat.

"Ah," the girl gasped in surprise and nearly dropped the bowl she definitely wasn't supposed to be touching, blushing intensely when Yeosang got to his feet and snatched it from her, returning it to its stand behind glass doors. "I'm so sorry, sir, I must have misunderstood which parlour was to be left undisturbed—"

"On your way now," he interrupted, nodding to the door and staring at her unblinking until she scurried away, still stealing glances at him and not daring to breathe wrong in his presence.

That was how all the new staff behaved, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, and utterly doltish. They didn't know the schedule or the layout of the estate or the way Yeosang liked his tea in the morning, even though they never ruined Father's, and it was starting to become suspicious.

At first he thought they were simply incompetent, but soon he realised what was going on.

Housekeeper Sohyun had made a lot of new hires as caring for her ailing mother made her less present and the other senior staff couldn't handle all household matters themselves. The new servants treated Yeosang with plenty of deference— probably more than was necessary— but their lack of ability signalled the possibility that their admiration for him was in fact the reason they applied to be hired on.

He had no time for kitchen maid Yoora to bump into him at the wrong place and time constantly and bring him three different cups of tea in order to apologise profusely just for a chance to talk to him for a few more minutes when the biggest moment of his life was just days away.

Yeosang wasn't the prince of Jaecho or anywhere else, he was just a navigator's son trying to make something of himself without all the giggling distractions.

But now the sun was up and he had somewhere to be. Such was life as the busiest sixteen year old in Bundam.

Just as he suspected, the door to the observatory was already unlocked when he knocked on it gently, pushing his way in to see Father at his desk, flipping through some new charts he'd been sent by the cartographers from the Admiralty.