Twicelight

Chapter - 15

Third person's pov:

Tzuyu led Sana back to the room that he'd pointed out as Jeongyeon's office. He paused outside the door for an instant.

"Come in," Jeongyeon's voice invited.

Tzuyu opened the door to a high-ceilinged room with tall, west-facing windows. The walls were paneled again, in a darker wood — where they were visible. Most of the wall space was taken up by towering bookshelves that reached high above their head and held more books than she'd ever seen outside a library.

Jeongyeon sat behind a huge mahogany desk in a leather chair. He was just placing a bookmark in the pages of the thick volume he held. The room was how always a college dean's would look —only Jeongyeon looked too young to fit the part.

"What can I do for you?" Jeongyeon asked them pleasantly, rising from his seat.

"I wanted to show Sana some of our history," Tzuyu said. "Well, your history, actually."

"We didn't mean to disturb you," Sana apologized.

"Not at all. Where are you going to start?"

"The Waggoner," Tzuyu replied, placing one hand lightly on Sana's shoulder and spinning her around to look back toward the door they'd just come through.

Every time Tzuyu touched Sana, in even the most casual way, her heart had an audible reaction. The wall they faced now was different from the others. Instead of bookshelves, this wall was crowded with framed pictures of all sizes, some in vibrant colors, others dull monochromes. She searched for some logic, some binding motif the collection had in common, but she found nothing in her hasty examination.

Tzuyu pulled her toward the far left side, standing her in front of a small square oil painting in a plain wooden frame. This one did not stand out among the bigger and brighter pieces; painted in varying tones of sepia, it depicted a miniature city full of steeply slanted roofs, with thin spires atop a few scattered towers. A wide river filled the foreground, crossed by a bridge covered with structures that looked like tiny cathedrals.

"Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea in the sixteen-fifties," Tzuyu said.

"The Suwon of my youth," Jeongyeon added, from a few feet behind them. Sana flinched; she hadn't heard him approach. Tzuyu squeezed her hand.

"Will you tell the story?" Tzuyu asked. Sana twisted a little to see Jeongyeon's reaction.

Jeongyeon met Sana glance and smiled. "I would," he replied. "But I'm actually running a bit late. The hospital called this morning — Dr. Kwon is taking a sick day. Besides, you know the stories as well as I do," he added, grinning at Tzuyu now.

It was a strange combination to absorb — the everyday concerns of the town doctor stuck in the middle of a discussion of his early days in seventeenth-century Suwon.

It was also unsettling to know that he spoke aloud only for her benefit. After another warm smile for her, Jeongyeon left the room.

Sana stared at the little picture of Jeongyeon's hometown for a long moment.

"What happened then?" Sana finally asked, staring up at Tzuyu, who was watching her. "When he realized what had happened to him?" He glanced back to the paintings, and she looked to see which image caught his interest now. It was a larger landscape in dull fall colors — an empty, shadowed meadow in a forest, with a craggy peak in the distance.