The forest whispers of my sister’s arrival long before I sense her. Birds flutter between pink-girdled maehwa trees, mocking her voice in the tongue only shamans understand. Seonbyeon, Seonbyeon, they repeat mindlessly, and this is how I know my sister is looking for me. But I don’t know which sister, not until she finally appears from the forest gloom.
Seonmi. I haven’t seen her since I was small. She’s grown taller, a reminder that time still passes outside my forest, but her hair is still braided and bound in red ribbon—she hasn’t married. Jade silk flutters around her ankles, soiled from hours of struggling through brush and dirt. She’s come deep to find me, deeper than any sister has in years.
Worry blackens the air around her head. The birds fall quiet at her approach and flit away, sensing ill tidings in her aura. When she sees me, bent over the knobby roots of a cypress, her voice rises. “Seonbyeon! Thank the heavens. I was afraid I was lost.”
“Don’t thank the heavens. Thank the wolves for leaving you in one piece until you found me.” The wolves and I have an arrangement, but Seonmi doesn’t need to know that. “They’re always hungry.”
“You haven’t changed.” Seonmi draws closer. “What are you gathering?”
She’s wasting her time on useless questions; her news must be truly dire. “Mushrooms.”
“For poultices? Medicines?”
“Dinner.”
I wish she’d get to the point. The sooner she does, the sooner she can return to her world, and leave me alone in mine. My sisters only ever visit the woods to ask me for things: a tea to fend off unwanted pregnancy, a salve for a burn that won’t heal, an enticing perfume to attract suitors. But this time, Seonmi’s request won’t be so simple. That much is clear.
She watches me drop a tiger’s ear into my basket. The mushroom is dark of cap, gills striped black and orange. At last she says, “Mother and Father are dying.”
A chill raises the hair on my arms. The bones portended snow and ill tidings, but this . . .
I turn to Seonmi. Looking into her eyes is a challenge, but I must see the truth for myself.
There it is: a desperately burning star at the heart of her dark aura. Death.
“How?”
“Poison. The palace guards caught the assassin, but there’s no antidote. They’ll be dead within days, and no one can save them.” Seonmi swallows, twists her braid. “Unless you can, Seonbyeon.”
I turn from her. “That isn’t my name.”
“It’s the name our parents gave you—” She bites her lip. “I know it’s too much to ask. That’s why I came, instead of Seonna or any of the others. They would have come with guards to march you back to the palace, but I won’t do that. If you refuse, I’ll tell them I couldn’t find you.” Her voice is small but determined. “Are you going to refuse?”
I tip my chin and gaze at the sky. Dusk is coming soon. I already know my answer, but I can’t give it to Seonmi yet. She won’t make it back to the palace before dark, and she isn’t dressed for snow.
“Stay for dinner. I’m making mushroom soup.”
• • • •
Gaenari is already boiling water when I return to the hut. They squat next to the fire outside, breathing on the flames to coax them higher, wearing their human shape. Well, mostly human. I move silently into the clearing, but Seonmi’s stride crackles over leaves. Gaenari straightens, turning yellow eyes and a face covered in black fur toward Seonmi.
“Well, Bari,” they rumble. “You’ve brought a human for dinner.”
Seonmi squeaks, her hand tight on my arm.
“This is Princess Seonmi of Changdeok Palace,” I say. “Be nice.”
Gaenari lumbers toward Seonmi. “A child of the king and queen, hrrm. The last one to stay the night in these woods never left. You know the story, agisshi?”
Seonmi mumbles in the affirmative, but Gaenari is obviously itching to tell the story anyway. They would spend all day weaving tales if they could—part of the reason I prefer the woods to the hut. I take over the soup cauldron, cleaning and slicing the mushrooms, while Gaenari settles on a stump beside a nonplussed Seonmi.
Though I wish I could shut out their conversation, I can’t help but listen.
“Many years ago, the king of Joseon took a bride. The new queen gave birth to six daughters before summoning a diviner to tell her the sex of her seventh child, still in the womb. Good fortune, Your Majesty, said the diviner. This child is not a girl. The king and queen were overjoyed to welcome their firstborn son, and disappointed beyond belief when the infant was born with nothing between her legs. The queen’s grief was so great, the king decided to leave the child in the woods and pretend she was never born.”
I feel Seonmi’s pitying eyes on my back. “So the diviner lied?”
“Not at all,” says Gaenari in a self-satisfied way. “The diviner was a mudang, a shaman who shares their body with a god, allowing them to see the future. The queen simply asked the wrong question.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her child was not a girl, but she was not a boy, either.” Gaenari’s voice softens. “I can see from your eyes you don’t understand, agisshi. Don’t worry. All you must do is accept that parts of the world are greater than your understanding, and revere rather than fear them.”
Seonmi is quiet. The loudest noise in the clearing is the soup boiling in the pot. I let out a breath, thinking they’re done—then Gaenari speaks again. “As for the child, some say the beasts of the wood devoured her. Others that a mudang took her in and raised her, teaching her sorcery. Perhaps the very same mudang who visited her mother before her birth. Who knows?”
I clench the handle of the knife I’ve been using to cut mushrooms. For a moment, memory overwhelms me: sitting in Seonmi’s place, on that gnarled stump, listening to this story. I didn’t understand, at first—that the child was me. I felt sorry for her.
“I don’t know.” Seonmi’s voice pulls me back to the present. “But we . . . her sisters miss her. Some of them wish Seonbyeon could come back to them. Become part of the family again.”
“Seonbyeon doesn’t exist,” I snap. This time I don’t meet Seonmi’s eyes; I glare at her sidelong, the way a wolf watches a tiger. “Bari is the one who survived. Why would she want to go back anywhere? All family does is ask and take. That’s why you’re here. You pretend I have a choice, but you’re the same as the others.”
Seonmi’s voice is strained, like she’s trying to hold back tears. “If you help Mother and Father . . . we won’t ask you for anything ever again.”
I owe them nothing. The words sit on my lips, ready to be spoken. But Gaenari taught me words have power, and I must wield them with care. These words are true, but are they enough?
Seonmi’s aura is dark red now, the color of blood. She’s angry, though she’s been trained not to let it show. I know why she’s angry; I had this argument with another sister years ago. Seonna once came to these woods and shouted at me that I don’t understand hyo. Filial piety, the love I owe my parents even though they didn’t love me.
Hyo doesn’t exist in the woods, I told her. Bears don’t practice hyo. Neither do mushrooms.
You and your damn mushrooms, she snarled before storming back to the palace.
Maybe it would be worth it to help my parents, just to forever settle the question of what I owe. Seonna will never lecture me about hyo again if I save their lives. She and the rest of my sisters will finally leave me alone. I can wash my hands of a world I don’t understand and never belonged to.
The words are still there, waiting. They’re true, but they won’t help.
“Soup’s ready,” I say instead. “Eat.”
• • • •
After dinner, Seonmi goes into the hut to rest. Gaenari and I sit by the fire outside. Silence stretches between us, until I turn to Gaenari and ask, “What herbs would you use to treat a poison that has no antidote?”
“Nothing that grows in these woods,” Gaenari says, “or indeed, in all of Joseon.”
I stare into the flames, watching them blacken and devour the wood. “It’s settled, then.”
“I did not say no such herb existed. Only that it does not grow in Joseon.”
The look I give Gaenari is nettle-sharp. “If you won’t speak plainly . . .”
“When you are a mudang yourself, you won’t question why I speak in riddles. Life is a riddle, O Discarded One. To speak plainly is to disrespect the complexity of the weave.” Gaenari licks their jowls, like a fox after a kill. “You think because I took a mountain god into my body, a bear-god, that I should growl a few words at a time? Like you?”
I never knew Gaenari when they were fully human, before they became mudang. I don’t even know if Gaenari is the name of the human or the bear-god. Someday, when I have a god who dwells in my body too, will it change me? The thought is intoxicating. How vehement is my desire to be something else, anything else.
“What you seek can only be found in the underworld. The realm of banished things, dead souls and exiled spirits.” Gaenari grins, all white fang. “You should fit right in.”
“And what do I seek, exactly?”
“The Resurrection Flower. For an illness with no cure, a poison with no antidote. It can bring back that which is beyond saving—for good or ill.”
I snort, though my heart beats quickly in my chest. “They aren’t worth that much trouble.”
“Perhaps not.” Gaenari rises to their feet and ambles toward the darkness of the tree line, already half-bear. “Is anyone worth resurrection?”
• • • •
The underworld. Realm of banished things, it smells of dust and tastes of dried tears. I have been here once before, on my first failed attempt to become mudang. I brewed tea from moth wings, powdered bone, and my own blood, and I drank it while a ritual scroll burned to cinders before me on a mat woven from sacred reeds. My body sat in stupor while my soul wandered the underworld, seeking a spirit to make me its vessel and grant me the powers of a shaman.
When I opened my eyes, defeated and hollow, Gaenari seemed unfazed. “Better no spirit than the wrong one,” they said. And I shivered on my sleeping mat that night, dreaming of wrong spirits.
Now I ease into the underworld once more, sinking out of my flesh and into the earth, becoming smoke. At first all is dark, dust and salt. Then a bedroom paints itself into existence around me. Polished, clean-swept wooden floors; a silk screen suspended from the ceiling, shielding a sleeping mat from view.
This room doesn’t exist; it’s the room I once imagined as my own, an abandoned child in the woods dreaming of a royal bedchamber.
I lift my arm, testing the weight of the heavy sleeve attached. This body I’m in now, clothed in regal crimson hanbok, isn’t mine . . . and yet it is. Taller, sharper, stronger. Just like the first time.
I don’t know why I walk the underworld in this form, instead of the one I wear on the surface. Part of me is afraid to ask Gaenari. I learned from them of the divide between men and women, and all the shadowy expanses that lie between and beyond. But the one thing they refused to teach me was where I belonged in that landscape.
All I have is the line from the story: Her child was not a girl, but she was not a boy, either.
Shadows move along the papered walls, pooling under candles, diffusing through the light like ink in water. The back of this room, where the bed lies on the floor, grows darker the longer I gaze upon it. It’s time to move.
I slide open the door and peek outside. Instead of a hallway, beyond the threshold lies a forest. It’s very like the forest I call home, but something is wrong. Maehwa trees in the pink blush of winter stand beside mokran, shrouded in summer white. A memory needles at my heart: young Seonmi making me a crown of mokran flowers, before I knew she was my sister, before I knew the girls who came to my forest did so out of guilt.
Mokran and maehwa never flower at the same time. I stare up at the swaying branches, imagining a fragrance that isn’t there; the air still smells of dust. The underworld is using all these little sorrows against me, something it didn’t do last time. Why?
In a flutter of jewel-bright wings, a bird lands in the maehwa tree. It cocks its head at me. “Not here,” it sings, high and achingly lovely. “Not here.”
I clear my throat. Nothing in the underworld is as it seems—especially not a talking bird. “I am a seeker. Are you here to show me the way?”
“Not here,” the bird trills, and hops along a branch into the mokra tree. It shifts in place, as if confused. “Not here.”
“Do you know what I’m looking for?”
I have to be careful. Gaenari explained to me before my first naerim-gut that the soul of a mudang traveling the underworld usually attracts some kind of guide. But the spirits here have their own designs, and not all of them are helpful. Besides, I’m not a full mudang. I don’t have my own spirit—a momju—to advise me.
“Not here.”
The bird flies to the next tree. Then it waits, glancing back at me over a sleek shoulder.
I breathe deeply, taking solace in the newfound strength of my limbs, the volume of my chest. “Okay.”
I follow.
• • • •
The bird leads me through a landscape beyond the grip of seasons. Snowflakes drift through autumn-bright foliage; summer wildflowers glitter in exoskeletons of frost. A pale ghost of a sun revolves through the sky, day passing into night in a matter of minutes. It should tire me, this unending trek through valleys and up mountainsides, but it’s more like a dream than a journey.
Out of the corner of my eye, behind tree trunks and beneath the surface of streams, shadowy figures move—human or animal, I can’t tell. I look at nothing directly, save for my guide. If any spirits of the underworld take offense to my presence, I have no way of fighting back. Best to avoid their notice altogether.
My bird leads me to a cave buried in the mountains, its mouth studded with icicles and wreathed with blooming lichen. Darkness yawns within. I toe the threshold, gathering my resolve, as the bird flits between two trees outside. “Not here. Not here.”
“But we are here.” I peer inside, but see nothing. In the real world, sunlight would pierce the cave’s shallows, but the darkness of the underworld does not bow to a faraway star. It’s like ink. “Somewhere. Are you sure the—what I’m looking for is inside?”
The bird affixes me with a knowing eye. “Not here.”
I dig my nails into my palms. “Any chance you’ll stick around? Become my momju?”
“Not here,” the bird squawks. Then it takes wing and rapidly bears away, too fast for me to follow. Within seconds I can’t see it through the trees.
I sigh. “Well, it was nice meeting you.”
Stepping into the cave, I should feel a plunge in temperature—but like smell and taste, the underworld doesn’t bother with that sense. Instead, the shadows rush to enclose me like a clinging veil. All I can do is push forward, blind to all sensation but the smooth rock beneath my feet.
If I was right to trust my guide, the Resurrection Flower grows inside this cave. I’m sure it will come at a cost, and perhaps that should worry me—but somehow it never has, not from the moment Gaenari told me of the Resurrection Flower’s existence.
I’ve never had much to lose. Raised in the woods with no one but a cryptic mudang for company, visited by distant sisters who pretend to care for my wellbeing . . . obliged, by some intangible kinship, to grant them favors in return. I don’t know what the Resurrection Flower could demand of me that I wouldn’t hand over without a fuss. It simply isn’t in my nature to cling to anything.
“Nothing?” hisses a voice from the darkness. “Not even your lies?”
I stop moving. Standing perfectly still, I look left—then right. The inky black surrounding me is absolute. For the first time, a frisson of fear snakes into my stomach.
Stupid, stupid Bari. It never occurred to me that the Resurrection Flower would have a guardian.
“So nothing matters to you, and you love no one. Then why are you here?”
“Show yourself,” I say through gritted teeth. “Spirit of the underworld, guardian of the cure to death itself—show yourself, so we might speak on equal terms, as spirit and mudang.”
The shadows swirl apart. Standing before me in a corona of light is a creature so achingly beautiful it makes my bones hurt. Antlers rise in sculpted, splaying curves from its head, black hair falling in a feathery fringe over eyes like dark pools. The figure is masculine and tall, towering over even my lengthened frame. Its face is angular, alien.
“I see no mudang.” The bloodless lips don’t move; the voice comes from elsewhere. “Only a castaway child, a thrown-away thing. Bari. I know what you seek—I have it here.”
He—he?—extends cupped hands. Within the curve of his palms nestles a flower red as blood. The flower’s anthers quiver above the splayed petals, fuzzy-soft and golden. I can’t seem to take in a breath. The Resurrection Flower is lovely, but it pales in comparison to its guardian.
“It will be yours,” says the guardian.
My eyes snap up to his face. “What? So easily?”
“The only cost is an answer.” The antlers tilt, ever so slightly. “Why are you here?”
It can’t be that simple. The tombs of Joseon would lie empty if any mudang could walk into the underworld and pluck the Resurrection Flower for the price of a song. If the guardian wants only to know my reasons . . . they’d better be good ones.
I’m here to save my dying parents—not because I care if they live or die, but because I’m sick of my sisters asking me for favors and accusing me of being undutiful. Why do I get the feeling I’m the least deserving petitioner to ever face the Resurrection Flower’s guardian? I’m no widower begging for the life of his beloved, or bereft mother weeping over her dead child.
Does he already know? He knew my name—he heard my thoughts. If he already knows, my quest is over. I’ll return to the land of the living empty-handed—again.
But if he doesn’t, my only chance is to lie.
Despite what he said, I’ve never been a good liar. Living with Gaenari hasn’t prepared me for deception—only to distract and deflect.
I cross my arms. “How do I know this isn’t a trick? Perhaps that flower is only an illusion, not the true Resurrection Flower. Who are you? How did you come to be its guardian?”
A moment of silence, as I contemplate how foolish I am, to think I could procure the greatest treasure of the underworld by stalling. Then the guardian does something unthinkable. He smiles.
That smile is . . . It’s the icy vastness of an ocean I’ve never seen, the one that drowns me over and over in my dreams. It’s the aching splendor of a mountain peak, stark against the ironbound sky. How fitting that I, raised by witches and beasts, should be disarmed for the first time in my life by the predatory smirk of a spirit from the dark places where no human would dare to tread.
“You are unlike the others,” he whispers, and still his lips don’t move. “Their souls are consumed with themselves—their grief, their longing, their desperation. They are beyond curiosity. Not you, O Discarded One.”
In an instant all my nerves are humming, singing that something isn’t right. Did he pluck the mocking name Gaenari uses for me from my memory? Or are he and Gaenari working in concert somehow?
Years of suspicion flood my mind. I always knew Gaenari didn’t regard me as theirs, at least not in the way a parent regards a child. Our relationship has been one of asymmetrical dependence and mutual distrust. They raised me, yes—but as fosterling, or livestock?
“I will answer your question, and then you will answer mine.”
I suck in a breath, forcing myself to discard thoughts of sacrifice and focus on the antlered guardian in front of me. “Very well.”
“I was a god,” he says. “My home was the loveliest of the Thousand Heavens, an endless forest-palace of undying spring. I lived in perfect solitude, until the Heavenly Emperor issued a decree demanding each god to take a mortal bride. I refused, and for my disobedience I was cast down from the heavens, exiled to the underworld and forced to guard the most desired object in all of creation.”
The darkness around us grows thick and cloying. Wicked thorns bud and sprout from the guardian’s antlers. One of the thorns curves downward and pierces his temple, drawing a single bead of scarlet blood.
“I shall never again know peace, only endless demands. So I will never give away the Resurrection Flower to anyone who covets it. Only the one who despises and resents it as I do. The one I have awaited.”
I stare into the guardian’s fathomless eyes and feel myself beginning to drown. “Who are you?”
“I am Mujangseung.”
“And you’ve been waiting for me.” It isn’t a question.
“Yes.” The drop of blood inches slowly down Mujangseung’s cheek. “The truth, Bari, is that resurrection has no price. The mortals always come expecting to pay a price, and so they come only out of love—or sometimes hate. You come with neither.”
How foolish, to think I could have told a lie to this creature. This god.
“It’s true,” I whisper. “My parents . . . How can I love them or hate them? I’ve never met them. They mean nothing to me.”
“And your sisters?”
I struggle to imagine—Seonmi lying on the forest floor, torn asunder by wolves, her hanbok soaked in blood. “They’re different. If it were one of them, it would be different. But it isn’t them.”
“You love them. Yet it isn’t out of love that you have come.”
“No.” The realization burns cold in my chest. “If our parents die, my sisters will feel sorrow. Anger. Perhaps they’ll feel abandoned, betrayed. And . . .” I hesitate, but there’s really no point. I’ve come this far. “I want that, Mujangseung. Part of me wants that. For them to finally know how I feel.”
The Resurrection Flower still rests in Mujangseung’s cupped palms, protected by a cage of black-thorn fingernails.
“It’s yours,” he says. “Take it.”
I clutch my own arms, shivering though there is no cold. “I don’t want it anymore.”
“You never wanted it. So it’s yours.”
“No,” I choke out. “I want something else.”
The darkness pulses, and Mujangseung inclines his head. “Yes, Bari?”
Perhaps this was Gaenari’s plan, always. But I don’t care. No child is born free, not me and not my sisters. The most merciful thing Gaenari could have done for me was to let the infant die of cold beneath the blooming maehwa trees. Instead they raised the child and sent her into the underworld.
“I can’t offer you heaven,” I tell Mujangseung. “But you don’t have to remain here as the Resurrection Flower’s guardian. Come to the land of the living. See the world through my eyes. Become my momju.”
“Forever tied to one being?” A sigh rustles through the shadows. “Is this a lesser penance or a greater curse? Remember, Bari, that the Heavenly Emperor demanded I take a mortal bride.”
“I won’t be your bride, Mujangseung.” Now it’s my turn to smile. “Don’t worry.”
“And what will you do with my power, O Discarded One? The Resurrection Flower and I may never be parted. If I go from this place, it will travel with me. Wherever you walk, the earth will tremble and the dead shall rise. No more will you be Bari, forgotten child of the woods. All the eyes of heaven and the underworld will be watching you, forever.”
“Let them watch. What do we care?”
Mujangseung closes his fists, and the Resurrection Flower seeps like blood through his fingers, pooling darkly crimson at his feet. He’s grown taller, somehow. Though we’re in a cave, his labyrinthine antlers could graze the sky.
“Very good, Bari.” His voice is like thunder. “You’ve finally answered my question.”
• • • •
The funeral for the king and queen of Joseon comes in the early days of winter, in the season of death. Their bodies have been wrapped in dozens of layers of cloth and placed inside coffins prepared on the day of the king’s coronation, painted with fresh lacquer each year of his reign. They have six daughters, whose chief duty now is to feel grief as it has never been felt before. Dressed in rough hemp sangbok, they follow behind the funeral procession on foot, weeping for all to see.
I am there too, among the mourners, but they do not see me—until I step out of the crowd and directly into the path of the royal litter carrying the bodies of the king and queen.
A brief scramble ensues, punctuated by shouts as guards rush to surround me with weapons drawn. “Who are you?” demands a man wearing a hemp hat.
Closer, Mujangseung says.
I take two steps closer to the litter. A blade nicks my shoulder. “What are you doing?” an angry chorus from the guards. “Step back! Show some respect!”
I raise my arms, and wind comes roaring down, slicing through the thousand-strong crowd of mourners and blowing several off their feet. Mujanseung has a flair for the theatrical, I’ve learned. The men who bear the litter on their shoulders stand firm, though their faces betray fear.
Beyond the litter, I glimpse a familiar face, pale and painted: Seonmi. Her eyes find me, and her lips move, though I can’t hear what she says over the wind. Her aura is white and sharp and soft all at once, like snow mingled with ice. Her grief, at least, is real.
When the wind dies down, everyone near the litter hears it: an insistent muffled thumping noise. One of the men carrying the litter is the first to realize where it’s coming from. He lets out a choked scream and drops his burden like hot coals.
The royal litter tips to one side, and the lacquered coffins hit the paved stone road. Wood cracks, the coffin lids open, and out spill two bodies wrapped in cloth. The bodies stir, struggling fruitlessly against their bindings. Everyone nearby is frozen in place, and no one moves to help, except Seonmi.
My sister rushes forward, wrests away a sword from a royal guard, and sets to work slicing through the cloth wrappings. The king and queen emerge like moths from cocoons.
My heart is a drum within my chest. It’s the first time I’ve ever laid eyes on them, my parents. My mother—she looks just like Seonna, my eldest sister. My father has Seonmi’s thick brows and stubborn chin.
The queen and Seonmi embrace, while the king looks around, blinking, until he sees me. His forehead furrows in confusion. The guards were distracted by the chaos, but now most of them have taken up swords again, surrounding me.
Mujangseung laughs, a dark sound that echoes through the hollows of my soul. He doesn’t know you.
Seonmi and the queen pull apart, and Seonmi points at me. “Look.” Her voice is trembling. “It’s Seonbyeon. She—she saved both of your lives.”
“Stand down,” the king commands the guards. They part as he approaches me. Behind him trail Seonmi and the queen. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the rest of my sisters moving cautiously forward, Seonna in the lead. Her belly is round with child beneath her mourner’s garb. The sight makes me ache, though I don’t know why.
My father’s gaze travels up and down my body and comes to rest on my face. “Is it true?” he asks. His face is wan, though I don’t know if it’s because he feels ill, or because a few minutes ago he was dead. “Did you do this? Are you Seonbyeon?”
Anger bubbles within me. I’m not in the underworld anymore, and my body is small again. I don’t take up the space here that I want to. But Mujangseung lengthens my shadow, stiffens my posture, and the expression in my father’s eyes changes as he suddenly perceives me differently.
Gasps ripple through the watching crowd. They see the smoky outline of antlers above my head, the mantle of darkness that spreads from me like creeping lichen. Mujangseung’s aura.
“I am the one you threw away,” I say. “But I am not Seonbyeon.”
Seonmi grasps the king’s arm. “She calls herself Bari now.”
“Bari?” The queen’s voice is filled with horror. She pushes past Seonmi and the king, falling to her knees in front of me. “Oh, please forgive us. My child. My precious daughter.”
The king doesn’t move, but his eyes glisten with what might be tears. “My daughter returns to us,” he says slowly, testing the words on his tongue.
“She is not your daughter.” Mujangseung’s voice rolls like thunder, coming not from me but from everywhere, while my lips remain pressed together.
The king flinches, grasping Seonmi and pulling her behind him. His eyes are fixed on the space above my head. “Then who—who are you?”
“She is Bari the Witch. Bari, Traveler of the Underworld. Bari, Guardian of the Resurrection Flower. Weep, King, for she will never be yours. Shudder, Queen, for you have lost her forever.”
“Farewell,” I say with my own tongue. “I wish you good health.”
The queen grasps at my robes as I turn and walk away, but her fingers pass through them like smoke. Her sobs echo in the still air. The king stands rooted to the spot, as if he may never move again. And I feel the eyes of all six of my sisters on me, watching me go. Their auras swirl with emotion. Disappointment, confusion, envy—and acceptance.
One of them wishes you well, Mujangseung says. She fears she will never see you again, but still she wishes you well.
Something pricks my heart. Love, I suppose. It sticks in my chest like a bitter burr, stubbornly refusing to die. If only I could be rid of it. Seonmi may fear she’ll never see me again, but I fear one day I’ll return, drawn helplessly back to Changdeok Palace by this burning fishhook in my heart.
Love and fear. If you ask me, they’re the same.
Then you finally admit to your lie? Something does matter to you, after all.
“Of course it does,” I mutter. “I’m human, not a god.”
Mujangseung rumbles, amused again. Don’t be gloomy, Bari. You are mudang now, and your path is your own. It’s time to see the world, as you promised. Mountains, ocean, and the sky. The closest to heaven we can find. Where do you think it is?
Behind me lies the palace, the funeral procession, and a crowd of confused mourners. Behind me lies the forest, filled with wolves and maehwa trees and Gaenari’s unknown plans for me.
I’m ready to be the one who leaves, this time.
“Not here,” I say. “Let’s go.”