I pull her head onto my lap and wail, “Mother.”
You must run, Daughter. You must never stop running.
I don’t know what my mother meant, but I intend to do as she said. I bury my mother by our little house. Then I run.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I return to the ancient cypress grove, raw with pain and horror. Time had dulled the sharp edges of my grief, but now I feel the pain as though my mother just died in my arms. In a way, she did. Do I have to live another hundred years for it to hurt less? I stand swaying on my feet, with unseeing eyes.
“The price has been paid,” Samshin Halmeom intones.
I instinctively take a step back when she suddenly grunts in pain. She holds out a trembling arm as her fingers stitch together, melding into one. The half-moon-shaped sleeve of her hanbok rips to shreds as her arm twists and thickens into the root of a tree, with deep grooves scored along its dark length. I scream when green fire engulfs the root from its tip to where her elbow had been.
Samshin Halmeom’s eyes flicker back and forth under her eyelids, and sweat beads on her forehead. Her thin lips move in an ancient tongue that I don’t understand, but she speaks with rising urgency as the flames grow.
The smoke stings my eyes, and the smell of burning flesh and wood coats my nostrils and throat. Nausea lurches me forward, and I vomit on the ground. I didn’t realize this was what I’d asked of her. I want to tell her to stop, but the pain of the price I paid—and why I paid that price—stays my tongue. All this because of Daeseong. What evil does he intend to unleash in the worlds that the Seonangshin would make such a sacrifice?
I hear muffled shouting behind me.Ethan.He twists against the branches roped around him. He’s afraid for me. I shake my head, silently telling him to wait. Samshin Halmeom isn’t going to hurt me. But he struggles harder, and something inconceivable happens. The branches splinter and split, and Ethan tears through them. The leaves fall from his mouth as he shouts my name and runs to my side.
“Are you hurt?” He grasps my shoulders as his eyes dart over my face, then my body. “Are you okay?”
“I’m ...” I can’t make myself say I’m okay. “I’m not hurt.”
He pulls me into a rough embrace, and I bury my face in his chest, taking the solace he offers. My mother bled to death in my arms, and my halmeoni is being burned alive in front of me. I can’t bear this on my own. I can’t even try.
Then it all stops. The fire, the smoke, the smell. It’s all gone. The sleeve of Samshin Halmeom’s hanbok is whole again, but the place where her forearm had been lies flat. She holds out the palm of her one remaining hand, cradling a silk bokjumeoni. It’s a round rainbow-striped pouch tied off at the top—the kind children carry on New Year’s Day to stash the money their elders gave them.
If I wasn’t an empty husk of a person at the moment, I would’ve laughed at the irony of it all. Something begotten by so much suffering stuffed inside a colorful lucky pouch. I step away from Ethan and accept the bokjumeoni with both my hands.
“How do I ...” My throat feels raw. “How do I use the sacred ashes?”
Samshin Halmeom told me stories of brave heroes defeating evil villains with the sacred ashes, but she never told me the logistics of how they did it.
“I am weary.” The one-armed deity sighs. “Stop Daeseong. Fulfill your destiny.”
“What—”
Without another word, Samshin Halmeom waves her hand, and the world spirals out from under us.
“No, no, no,” I yell when my feet land on solid ground. I spin in a wild arc. Samshin Halmeom and the cypress trees are gone. More accurately, she madeusgone. I bury my face in my hands. We got the sacred ashes. But what do I do with them? Eat them? Throw them in Daeseong’s face? “Oh, gods.”
“Hey.” Ethan wraps me in his arms, and I let him. Again. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure this out.”
He’s right. The toughest part is over. We can figure out the rest. And now that we have the sacred ashes, we might even be able to enlist the help of the Suhoshin. I peel my hands away from my face and rest them against his hard chest. Without thinking, I spread my fingers wide, reveling in his strength. He shivers and pulls me tighter against him, trapping my hands between our bodies.
We can’t stay like this forever. I have to make a decision. I could either brush my cheek against the solid wall of his chest and soak up his warmth. Or I could push him away and quit being a baby.
“Are you ...” I step away from him, averting my gaze. I’m no baby, but I’m not going to tempt myself by looking at him just yet. I scrape the tip of my sneaker on the ground until I scrounge up the guts to look him in the face. “Areyouokay? Those branches were squeezing the hell out of you.”
“I’ll live.” He shrugs, his face hardening with the memory of his helpless fury. “Do you know where we are?”
“Looks like another mountain ...” I’m too tired to care, which isn’t smart, considering we have some very scary people after us. I glance around with half-hearted interest until goose bumps spread across my arms.
“How ...” I sprint through a copse of trees and skid to a stop. “It can’t be.”
But it’s true. The thatched-roof hanok, a traditional Korean house, that my mother and I used to live in stands in the small clearing, no worse for wear after over a century. There’s even smoke coming out of the chimney.
“Mother?” I scramble to the kitchen, knowing she won’t be there ... hoping she will be there. “Mother?”
