Please Fall for the Male Lead (Not Me)

The card came at breakfast on the forty-fourth day, gold-edged, hand-delivered by a boy who had clearly been paid.

Yeju read it twice.

YEON CHAE-RIN hereby notifies HAN YEJU that the third contest of merit will be held at half past three in the morning on the forty-fifth day, in the second bake room, in the discipline of THE SECOND PROOF. Judge: Master Sohn. Attendance is not optional. There will be no crowd.

No crowd. She's written 'there will be no crowd' on a gold-edged card. In her own hand.

She's spent nineteen days building the only arena in this school where nobody can watch me get lucky.

"She's picked bread," Yeju said.

"She's picked the only thing she can do." Bori tore the loaf. "It took her eleven days. She had to find a discipline with no luck in it, no audience in it, and no chance for you to fall over sideways into a win, which rules out everything in this school except cooking, sewing, and dying." She ate. "You're going to lose."

"I know I'm going to lose."

"No. You've been saying that for a month and you've been wrong every time, so you've stopped meaning it." Bori looked up, which she almost never did. "This time it's true. You're going to stand in a warm room at half past three in the morning and be worse than her at something, in front of her. Nothing will save you. There's no point in me telling you that, because you'll find out."

The second bake room at half past three was the warmest place Yeju had been in either of her lives.

The first oven was going. The heat came off it in a wall you had to walk through, and the air was thick with flour that hung in the lamplight without falling. Along the scrubbed table lay forty white shapes under cloths, resting. A tub of starter sat at the end with a crust on it like river ice. On the wall, the tally, sixty names in chalk. And in the middle of the floor stood Master Sohn, sixty-one years old, forearms like mooring rope, in an apron that had not been white since the war.

Yeon Chae-rin was already there. She had her sleeves rolled to the elbow, her ringlets pinned back, flour to the wrist. She was not standing at any particular angle. That was the first thing Yeju noticed, because there was no doorway to be seen from.

"You came," Chae-rin said.

"It said attendance wasn't optional."

"It did say that." She did not look up from the dough. "Master Sohn. Explain it to her. Slowly. She has never done it."

The head cook turned a shape out onto the table. He did it with the whole flat of his hand, no hurry, and the dough came out of the basket with a sigh.

"Second proof," he said. "First proof's done, it's full of air. You turn it now to get the big bubbles out and the small ones in, so the crumb's even. Do it too little, you bake a lung. Do it too hard, you kill it, it comes out a brick." He folded it in three, then in three again, then turned it a quarter and pressed with the heel of his hand. "Forty of them, every night, before four. There's a feel to it. That's all it is. There's a feel and I've had it forty-one years."

"How do you know when it's right?" Yeju said.

"It stops arguing," said Master Sohn.

Oh, that's beautiful. That's an actual thing, that's a craft, that's a man saying a true sentence about his work at half three in the morning and nobody has ever once asked him.

She asked him. Twenty nights ago. That's the whole reason I'm standing here.

"Ten each," Chae-rin said. "He judges. He does not know which is which; we work at opposite ends and he turns his back and the trays go on the rack unmarked. I have arranged all of it and I would like it noted that I have arranged it to be fair, because a win I arrange is not a win."

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They worked at opposite ends.

Yeju's first one came apart. She got it out of the basket in three pieces, which she had not known was possible, and Master Sohn said nothing at all, which was worse than a comment. Her second one she killed. She felt herself do it: she pushed with her palm instead of the heel, the dough went dense under her hand, and something that had been alive stopped being alive, quietly, without any drama, in about four seconds.

It stops arguing. It stopped arguing. That's not the good version of it stopping arguing.

By the sixth she had worked out that her hands were too small for it. By the eighth she had worked out that this was not the problem. The problem was that she was thinking about it, so she thought about not thinking about it, which is the same as thinking about it with an extra step.

Across the table, Chae-rin's hands went fold, fold, quarter, press.

She did it without watching herself. She had the ledger open beside her on a clean scrap of board, out of the flour, and every few minutes she wrote something in it with a pencil, one-handed, without stopping her other hand, and then went straight back into the dough.

She's taking notes. In the middle of the contest. She's taking notes on his method DURING the contest she's trying to win, which means the contest isn't.

The contest isn't the point. It's never been the point. Bori said that on day twelve and I wrote it down and I still didn't hear it.

At four in the morning Master Sohn turned his back. The trays went on the rack. He came along them with a candle, pressing each shape once with two fingers, and he took his time.

He stopped at Yeju's seventh, which had come out looking almost correct, and pressed it, and the dent stayed.

"Dead," he said.

He went down the rest of the rack. He did not stop again. At the end he blew out the candle.

"Hers," he said. "All ten. That one's the best loaf that's come off this table in two years, and I've been on this table since before her father was born." He wiped his hands. "You've a hand for it, girl. It's not from anywhere. Some people have it."

Chae-rin stood in the flour with her sleeves rolled up.

She had gone the wrong color. Yeju watched her be handed, by a man who did not care about her house or her name or the size of the room, the only unqualified sentence anyone had said to her in her whole life, and watched her have absolutely nowhere to put it.

"Thank you," Chae-rin said. Her voice had gone thin. "That's. Thank you."

"Mm," said Master Sohn, going to the second oven.

The ledger was on the board by her elbow, open, the lamp behind it.

Yeju did not mean to. That was true, and it stayed true, and it did not help. Chae-rin turned away to wash her hands at the trough, taking her time about it, and Yeju stood in the warm with her ruined dough on her fingers, and the light came through the page from behind.

BREAD. WON.2. ARCHERY. WON.3.

The third line was still blank. Under it, held up by the lamp behind the paper, the scraped-out words came through the page like veins in a leaf. A knife had taken the ink off. It had not taken the pressure of the nib out of the fibre, because nothing does, because paper remembers being written on.

Two words. Yeju read them.

COME BACK.

The oven ticked. At the trough, Chae-rin was scrubbing flour out from under her nails with a great deal of attention.

She wrote it. Then she scraped it off with a knife, ruled a line, numbered it, left it empty for nineteen days. Because the only contest she wants is one where I'm alive in the spring. There's no discipline for that. She can't put it on a card, because putting it on the card would mean saying it.

She's Seorin. God help me, she's Seorin with better tailoring.

[ +2,600. ]

Not now.

[ Ledger's phrasing: 'Yeon Chae-rin has won, cleanly, on merit, once in her life, and has not felt anything.' ] A beat. [ Host. In the original she never wins one. Four hundred chapters, thirty-one contests, and the boy beats her every time, and every time she tells herself the next one is the one. ]

Why are you telling me that.

[ Because you're about to feel sorry for her, and I want you to have the comparison in front of you when you do. ]

Chae-rin came back from the trough, drying her hands, and picked up the ledger, and turned it away from the lamp without noticing anything.

She wrote in it. Yeju heard the nib.

BREAD. WON.

"Three to nothing," Chae-rin said.

"Three to nothing."

"I have beaten you three times." She shut the book. She was looking at the shut book. "At bread, at archery, at bread. That's the record. That's what it says. In forty years somebody will find this in a drawer and it will say that I won."

She put it inside her coat.

"Chae-rin."

"Don't." She was already crossing the floor. She got to the door, where the cold from the corridor came in against the oven-heat in a seam you could stand in. She stopped there. She did not turn around, because she was her mother's daughter, whatever else was true.

"Fourth contest," she said.

"When?"

"After."

Don't. Don't ask. You know what after is. She's been carrying what after is for nineteen days with a knife-scrape in it.

"After what?" Yeju said.

"Don't be stupid," said Yeon Chae-rin, and went out into the corridor.

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