To My Beloved Thief: Episodes 9-10
by mistyisles
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The line between justice and vengeance is often very thin, and not even a righteous thief toes it perfectly all the time. But when tragedy rocks our characters’ world so deeply that not a single person is left unaffected, the line blurs until it’s all but invisible.
EPISODES 9-10
After saving Eun-jo — and the rest of the village — from a fiery death, Yeol sends Jae-yi away, barely restraining his rage. He stays with her in the village all night to keep watch. When Eun-jo calls his actions reckless, Yeol admits he’s more the running-away type — but being with her makes him brave (I’ll say it again: aww, these two). If the almost-massacre weren’t bad enough, though, one of the children casually parrots that the people of this village are considered worthless beasts, and both Yeol and Eun-jo see red.
They handle it differently, but target the same enemy: Seung-jae. Yeol dangles him (“like a beast”) in a net until he agrees to confess in writing to ordering the attack. Eun-jo, on the other hand, sends Seung-jae messages tied to arrows — which come increasingly close to killing him — until he obeys her instructions to apologize to the villagers. Specifically, she makes him call himself a beast to their faces.
Meanwhile, Jae-yi has been agonizing over having almost killed Eun-jo. At first, he lashes out at her in guilt. But when she explains that, unlike him, she sees every life as equally precious, something finally seems to register. Jae-yi apologizes to the villagers, unprompted. He doesn’t suddenly become kind and gentle, but it definitely kicks off a change in how he interacts with Eun-jo and Yeol. He and Yeol even call each other friends at one point, if you can believe it. It’s halfway sarcastic and completely sincere (though Jae-yi will deny it), and it takes a tragedy and common goal to bring them to it — but now I’m getting ahead of myself.
Yeol still has Lord Hong’s warning to reckon with, and a growing understanding of all this family has been through. Eun-jo and her mother, it turns out, weren’t born slaves, but became such as part of the confiscation of Lord Hong’s property. Eun-jo wouldn’t let Lord Hong fight back, at which point his heart failed and she had to nurse him back to health while working to support the family. Now, Yeol promises Lord Hong that he won’t add to her burdens. Instead, he plans to leave and doesn’t trust himself to say a proper goodbye. He does drop hints while they stroll through the market and write wishes on a paper lantern. But even though Eun-jo remarks that her father used to always give her “one last happy day” before leaving for war, she doesn’t seem to pick up on Yeol’s plan.
And then, all plans are thrown out the window. Here and there we’ve gotten a few scenes of the king prolonging his hunt, chasing a tiger that may or may not exist, and one particularly ominous closeup of his array of blood-soaked arrows. It’s all clearly leading up to something horrible, but when it comes, it’s even worse than I expected. Lord Hong and Dae-il set out on a journey of their own, and along the way they encounter whole villages of people who have lost their homes and crops to the king’s hunt. Righteous Lord Hong can’t stay silent. He rebukes the king… and is carried home dead, with the king’s arrow in his back.
Eun-jo appears numb, but inside, she reaches a boiling point. As the king’s procession nears the city, she grabs her bow, takes to a cliff, and sends the king’s arrow right back to him. But it becomes an even more twisted version of Jae-yi’s flaming arrow, because Yeol has figured out her plan and races to intercept. Literally. He takes the arrow right in the chest. His talisman necklace — a gift from the village child — stops the arrow from piercing his heart, but it still pierces him a little. The wound lays him out cold for five days.
Meanwhile, Jae-yi has to slap sense into Eun-jo so she won’t keep trying to kill the king and doom her whole family. He has Hae-rim keep her company while the funeral proceeds, and when accusations of revenge inevitably fall on the bereaved family, Jae-yi and Yeol work together to absolve them. This is the common cause that ultimately leads to the “friendship” discussion, as well as a sweet little dance around Jae-yi wanting to ask if Yeol is okay and Yeol telling him since he knows Jae-yi will never outright ask.
While the boys are busy becoming almost/maybe/temporary friends, Eun-jo wrestles with complicated feelings towards Yeol. Since expressing any sort of resentment towards the king is tantamount to treason, Yeol lets her vent her grief at him instead. Eventually, Jae-yi informs her that Yeol was the person she shot, which turns all those complicated feelings on their head. Yeol spends the next few days making it abundantly clear that he’s recovering just fine and it’s okay to forgive herself.
Lord Hong’s death draws mourners from all walks of life, including the female monk who tried to recruit Gil-dong before. She, like Eun-jo, lost family to the king’s wrath. There are dozens — hundreds maybe — like her all over Joseon, waiting to rise up. She wants to use Gil-dong as a symbol of hope and resistance in the coming rebellion, but Eun-jo turns her down once more. The monk isn’t disheartened, though. She trusts that Eun-jo will come around, and right now she’s more concerned about what’s happening inside the palace.
Rumor has it the king has fallen into a deep sleep, and those rumors aren’t far off. Lord Im and the king’s concubine GEUM-NOK (Song Ji-woo) are keeping him drugged, because they have a terrible secret. The king didn’t willfully kill Lord Hong; he sent him home. Then he resumed his hunt, finally set eyes on that tiger, and felled it — or so he thought, until his men carried Lord Hong’s body out of the woods. Lord Im and Geum-nok failed to factor in the drug’s side effect of hallucinations.
They’re safe for now, though, because when the king wakes up, he immediately has Dae-il arrested and interrogated for attempted assassination. After all, only an archer of Lord Hong’s caliber could have made that shot, and Dae-il is Lord Hong’s only (male) descendant. Yeol intervenes, declaring the king himself to be the root cause of all these tragedies. And that’s when Yeol and Eun-jo’s souls switch bodies again. For all Eun-jo’s remorse over giving in to thoughts of revenge, as soon as the king is standing in front of her — with a sword in his hand and Dae-il tied to a torture chair — revenge is all she can think of.
Every time I think I know where this story is going, it twists in a new and better direction. Not that Lord Hong dying was good, of course, but it sure had a powerful impact on the story — and, most importantly, on the characters and their relationships with each other. I’m excited to see what it will do with the body-swap this time around, and how long it will take Jae-yi to make the Gil-dong connection. Assuming he hasn’t already, that is. Unlike the king, he knows exactly which child inherited Lord Hong’s archery skills.
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