The Interrogation of So-Ssang

JUNE 2025, SHORT STORY, 2300 WORDS

You are there when they behead Ho-cho.

The king’s guards stand around like a flock of crows. Their black robes must be warm on a day like today. Your braid feels heavy on your neck, and the sun reflecting off the palace courtyard blinds you as you fan your mistress. Your arms hurt from the repetitive motion.

Ho-cho is tied prostrate on the ground, her gray hair falling loosely over her face. The crowd jeers and spits at her, calling her a witch, but Ho-cho remains completely silent, not even begging for her life, her face hard.

The former Crown Princess Hwi will not be here to see her maid’s end—she has already been demoted to a commoner and sent back in disgrace to her clan, for trying to cast spells to control the prince.

Beside you, your mistress is trembling with excitement. With Hwi gone, she will become the Crown Prince’s new wife: Crown Princess Sun.

Your mistress is fifteen—one year older than you, but you can’t help but feel older. She still has baby fat in her cheeks where yours are hollow from years of hunger. She cries easily and you have not cried since you were very small.

The executioner raises his glaive.

“So-ssang,” your mistress hisses in your ear, “do you think I can have ice cream every day when I am queen?”

Her words are cut off by the sound of the glaive falling, metal on stone.

When you first arrive at the capital, old Ho-cho is the only one who shows you kindness. She came from a small seaside village like yours, the daughter of a shaman and knowledgeable in all manner of curatives. She lacks the other servants’ pretensions and always greets you kindly.

The other servants dislike you from the moment you set foot in the palace. You are a nobi, indentured to the Haeum Bong clan, and specifically their daughter Lady Bong Sun-bin. You lack the lifelong training of a royal maid, but your mistress dotes on you, feeding you scraps from her table and letting you wear her cast-off dresses.

The more you are rejected by the others, the more you cling to your mistress’s skirts, the more they whisper that you act above your station. You move your possessions out of the servants’ quarters and spend your days attending Lady Sun personally, doing the work of three maids.

One day, while carrying breakfast to your mistress, you lose your way in the palace halls. All of the massive buildings look the same to you. When you stop to ask another maid for directions, she pushes you, and you fall and twist your ankle.

You hobble to Ho-cho’s quarters, clenching your teeth hard to keep from crying out.

She is in the middle of casting a spell, and creatures of white smoke twist in the air around her. You hold your hand up to a rabbit, and it scampers away, dissolving into mist. For a moment, you almost forget about the throbbing in your ankle .

When you tell her what happened, she clicks her tongue and takes out her bag of needles.

“They’re jealous of you,” she says. “You and that spoiled mistress of yours.”

You can’t imagine why. They’ve seen you sweeping up broken porcelain, heard Lady Sun’s voice echo through the courtyards. Everyone knows her mood is as changeable as the sea.

“What is it like serving Princess Hwi?” you ask.

“She’s a good girl,” Ho-cho says. She smiles, running her fingers along the pressure points in your leg.

Ho-cho has no children. In exchange for healing, she asks you for help gathering materials for her teas and spells. Her hands bother her with stiffness sometimes. Grateful, lonely, her needles in your flesh, you agree.

Here is what she requests of you:

Mugwort

Purple hyssop

Lingzhi

A snake caught in a cloth bag, alive.

You find the snake hiding in the shade of a grave mound not far from the royal mausoleums. Before she died, leaving you and your sisters to fend for yourselves, your mother warned you to stay away from the creatures. Even at your hungriest, you never caught them for meat.

If it is poisonous, at least Lady Sun will be compensated by the court.

You dive into the grass. Your hand stretches out—you manage to grasp the serpent by the tail and quickly cover it with the cloth, scooping it into the bag and tying it tightly closed. The snake flails, throwing its body against the inside of the bag, struggling to free itself. You go completely still, afraid to move, until it stops writhing. Your heartbeat pounds in your ears.

Eventually, you stand up and brush yourself off.

Ho-cho smiles warmly as you approach, holding the bag at an arm’s length. You flinch when she opens it, but the snake slithers out and curls around her arm like glittering black jewelry. It looks at you with calm eyes and tastes the air with its tongue.

Ho-cho runs a finger down its scales. “Thank you, So-ssang-a. You’re a good girl, aren’t you?”

The servants whisper that Ho-cho told the Crown Princess to wear the snake’s blood on her dress. This, Ho-cho told her, will make the prince love you. This will give you his ear above all others.

You imagine the Crown Princess smearing it beneath her jeogori, over her breasts, close to her heart. She is not as lovely as your mistress, but she is undoubtedly of noble bearing.

Crown Prince Yi Hyang is not a tyrant, but unlike his father, he has no sense of duty. He spends his time composing poetry for his concubine instead of dealing with the schemers at court, and they trample all over him. You feel sorry for him, living as a puppet in the shadow of a great king.

You once saw him, standing by himself on his balcony, his cup of wine reflecting the moonlight, and you wondered what could trouble a man who has everything.

It is the Crown Prince’s lack of interest in Crown Princess Hwi that leads to her downfall. The servants talk, and you see Crown Princess Hwi move through the palace like a stalking cat, her eyes shifting and bright, Ho-cho following close behind.

The last time you speak to Ho-cho is the night before she and the Crown Princess are arrested. She offers to teach you a spell—a land-folding spell that will let you travel fifty li in a single step.

It is a complex spell that requires writing characters, ones you never learned to read, but she patiently puts her hands over yours and together you draw them in the dust.

You don’t know where you would go with such a spell. Your sisters are scattered, married off or indentured, as you are.

“You could go anywhere,” says Ho-cho. “Haven’t you ever wanted to visit home?”

Once, your mother told you of the place where her parents grew up, a village at the base of a mountain. The stream that ran by their house was so clear that she could catch fish out of it with her bare hands. But you wouldn’t know how to find it.

“I am home,” you tell Ho-cho.

She looks a little sad. It makes you feel ungrateful, so you clasp her hand and promise to use the spell anyway. You are too embarrassed to tell her she is the closest thing you have to a mother, now.

The wedding ceremony is a disaster.

The newly crowned Princess Sun drinks too much wine. You watch her face glowing red to match her wedding dress, swaying under the weight of her headdress. The Crown Prince is cold and officious, standing straight-backed across from his new bride like he is carved from wood.

You help her wash her hands, pulling her long sleeves back from the water.

You hold her shoulders as she bows. Each time, you go down with her, your forehead almost touching the floor, and then raise her up again, as she is unable to stand on her own in the headdress.

During the cup sharing ceremony, your hands tremble filling her cup, and wine splashes over the side. “Stupid,” she whispers. “Can’t you do anything right?”

Your mistress doesn’t understand your sullen mood. She thinks you are jealous of her marriage to the prince and promises to keep spoiling you. You are seeing Ho-cho beheaded in your dreams every night. You don’t understand why she didn’t use her land-folding spell to escape. But maybe her execution was another sleight of hand. Maybe she returned to her village, to her mother’s hut at the base of the mountain, where she can live the hermetic life of a mudang.

The prince does not visit your lady’s chambers. You would know. At night, she curls against you and holds you as a child holds a doll. Sometimes, she kisses you and twines her fingers through your hair. You recount this to the prosecutors, later.

Your mistress insists on sending food back to her family. She makes you recite her order back to her as you dress her in the morning:

100 jars of kimchi

500 bricks of meju

100 ducks

300 bags of rice

When you bring her request to the kitchen, the Minister of Rice doesn’t even look at you, just gestures for you to leave it with his workers and tells you it will be done.

Surely the former princesses did it? Palace officials are always taking a cut for themselves.

The other servants, you notice, go quiet when you come too close.

“I’m bored,” your mistress says for the fifth time that afternoon.

Crown Princesses are not allowed to leave the palace or receive visitors without permission. She sprawls on her couch, her skirt hiked up to her knees.

“Take me to the servants’ quarters.”

It’s a bad idea. You tell her this. Her face crumples in a scowl.

“Lend me your dress!” She grabs at your jeogori. It is her dress; she doesn’t remember giving it to you.

Disguised, the two of you pass into the courtyard of the gate building. She giggles and hides her face on your shoulder. The servants are looking at you.

“I want to see outside,” she tells you, so you bring her to the farthest edge of the courtyard, an alley obscured by trees and shadows.

Slipping off her sandals, she clambers up onto your shoulders, pressing her face to the gap between the top of the wall and the roof. Her legs shake with the effort of balancing.

“I see the palace guard!”

She leans forward, her palms flat against the stones. You reach up to grab her legs and steady her. She is light in your arms, but you are used to hauling water for her baths and wood to heat her floors.

“You’re moving too much,” she calls down to you.

You close your eyes and imagine what she sees, what you saw when they brought you to the palace for the first time: the guards in their colorful robes, the wide stone road lined with trees. Men coming and going, carrying the first of the rice harvest taxes by horse and donkey.

You open your eyes. All you see is the wall.

The Crown Prince’s concubine is pregnant. Your mistress claims to be as well, as a way to save face, but she miscarries. You help her bury a pair of empty clothes to sell the lie. Afterward, you wash the dirt from beneath her nails, holding her sleeves back the way you did on her wedding day.

“I’d hate being a mother,” she murmurs as you lay together that night. You tire of her petting and grab her hands. She makes a soft, startled noise, and you turn to see her flushed pink. She squeals, and you slap your hand over her mouth. It’s open against your palm, warm and wet.

Is this how it happened to Ho-cho? One moment, you are serving breakfast to your mistress, and the next you are being dragged by your hair out of her chambers. The prosecutors take you to the Ŭigŭmbu, the ministry for interrogating treason. You tell them everything, of course. What else could you have done?

You and the former Crown Princess Sun stand in the same courtyard where Ho-cho was executed, before the same officials who handed down her death penalty. The Crown Prince is not looking at the princess no matter how much she cries.

Officially, the reasons for your mistress’s deposition are many: her improper behavior receiving guests, the luxuries sent back to her family, the incident in the servant’s quarters. But you know the real reason, the truth none in the court can bring themselves to charge her with or even speak aloud: You are a nobi, and she is a princess.

Demotion, it seems, will not be enough to sate their sense of justice: they demand she be banished.

She collapses with a wail when the verdict is read.

What will happen to you? You cannot return to your village, nor can you remain at the palace. The prosecutors never promised you anything, because the punishment for not cooperating is death.

You do not cry. Instead, you take a piece of charcoal from your pouch and begin to write, characters trailing down the inside of your arm. You begin to work a spell.

“Stand up,” you tell her. “We’re leaving.”

All sound is drowned out by sea around you, lapping at your body. When you stagger to your feet, there is grit and salt in your mouth. Over the hills you can see the thatched rooves of Ho-cho’s village. You feel a tug at your chest: your mistress holds the ribbon of your hanbok and looks up at you, pleading, her face shining with tears. You look down at her and smile.

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Behind the Scenes with Seoung Kim

What was the initial inspiration for this story, and were there significant changes from that inspiration through edits and revisions?

I was researching witchcraft in Korea, and I came upon Princess Hwi’s story first: a princess in the Joseon court who was deposed for trying to cast spells on the prince, with the help of her maid. Her maid, Ho-cho, was executed.

I was fascinated by the recorded events that followed. The princess who took her place was also deposed, but this time for having sex with her maid. Did the two maids know each other? Was she also executed?

I think the dynamic between Princess Sun and So-Ssang came out more in revision. Before, it was more about Ho-cho and So-ssang’s relationship. I think I was afraid of writing such an unbalanced relationship, but my Lambda Lit cohort who workshopped this story encouraged me to lean into it.

How does this story fit into your body of work—is it similar in ways to what you usually write or is it very different?

I’ve written about mudang before: “Heavy Possessions” in Strange Horizons. That story is also in second person. I love court drama and Gothic fiction. Basically, if you made a bingo card of shit I write, this would fill in all the squares.

How would you describe the heart of this story?

The confinement of the different women at court and the ways they try to make their situations bearable.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you, your work, or this piece?

The man who invented Hangul is famously the greatest king in Korea, King Sejong. The prince in “The Interrogation of So-ssang” is actually his son.