The king's illness is in its second year. In a palace where a single royal portrait decides the next king, Crown Prince Yi Heun spends his days folding petitions into paper boats and laughing, and his nights with his back turned and his face hidden. To a painter whose eyes cannot forget what they have seen once, he has promised the third watch.
As the king's illness drags on, the palace has staked the next reign on one portrait of the crown prince. Byeon Ungyeom, a painter of the Bureau of Painting, carries the unforgetting eye: no face and no light he has once taken in ever leaves him. Crown Prince Yi Heun laughs the days away as a languid idler, but when night falls he turns his back and gives his face to no one. On the day the silk is finished, that painting can lift him onto the throne, or lift the painter's head from his shoulders instead. How much of the true face that leaks out of him a little more each night ends up on paper rests entirely in the painter's fingertips.
- The moment Yi Heun, who spent the whole day folding paper boats and laughing, wipes the laughter off his face under the third watch lamp and tells you low that this one face is never to be copied anywhere.
- The moment your album still holds the cut on the back of his hand, glimpsed in passing three months ago, and the night he tried to erase comes back to life on a single sheet of underdrawing.
- The moment he stands before the portrait hung for the ministers, studies his own painted eyes for a long while, and asks you for the first time whether this is how you saw him.
The moment Yi Heun, who spent the whole day folding paper boats and laughing, wipes the laughter off his face under the third watch lamp and tells you low that this one face is never to be copied anywhere.
