Dayo’s descendants will end the Treaty. Until then …” He smiled tightly. “At least we know who to blame for our nightmares.”
That night I slept in fits and woke up just as exhausted as when I had first laid down. When Ye Eun offered me breakfast, I shook my head. The screams of phantom children still rang in my ears. “I need air,” I said.
Ye Eun didn’t move from the doorway. “You upset Traitor Prince.” She looked haunted. “We heard him, late into the night. He was crying. Traitor Prince never cries.”
“I’m sorry, Ye Eun. He’ll be fine after a while. Don’t worry.”
“I never listen when big people say that. ‘Don’t worry.’ As if they know. As if they can protect you from anything.” The child watched me for a moment, taking in my tense shoulders and swollen eyes—and her hard expression softened. “Sometimes when I think of the Underworld, I scream for hours and hours. I have to. I can’t do it in front of the little ones, but when it gets bad—I go to the shrine.” She pointed through a window up to a stony, overgrown path that crept into the woods behind the house. “It’s old. Traitor Prince says shamans built it centuries ago. It’s meant for prayers, but when I cry … I don’t think the Storyteller minds.”
I nodded. “I don’t think so either.” And since my numb feet had nowhere else to go, they left the house, turned, and crept up the path.
Wind chimes echoed through the trees. Bits of color flashed, crystals hanging high above in the branches. They must have been tied decades before, when the skyscraping trees were close to the ground. The chimes grew in volume until the path finally ended, and I arrived at a lean-to with a peeling green roof, overgrown with vines. Stacks of smooth boulders marked the remains of a shaman’s meditation garden. A mysteriously clean marble altar rested beneath the lean-to, and fading on the rotting green overhang was a mural: the Pelican of Am, splaying its wings.
I fell to my knees. Dew seeped through my trousers. I felt suffocated—trapped in a cage with no walls, stretching to the cloudy Songland sky. I had failed Aritsar. I had failed Dayo. And now, I would fail Ye Eun, Ae Ri, and countless others as well.
Monsters were nothing. The true terrors were people like me—the ones who saw suffering, who heard the screams of a hundred generations echoing for miles around them—and still did nothing.
Chimes jangled in the trees overhead. A delicate breeze rattled the shrine, and for a moment, the pelican’s eyes seemed to flash.
“It’s never enough,” I told the mural. “The ones I save won’t outnumber the people I’ve hurt. Not in ten years. Not in a hundred. Or a thousand …” The damp carpet of pine needles looked suddenly inviting. My voice slipped away to a whisper as I sank to the ground, resting my cheek by a mound of stones.
Hours could have passed, or minutes. I neither knew nor cared. The chimes grew louder and distorted, and with the growing cold, a new kind of sleep spread through my body: the kind from which many winter travelers have never woken up.
But before my mind could slip beneath that cold, still pool forever … Something glowed from the shrine. A pulse of heat rolled over me in waves, like the gale of an enormous creature beating its wings.
Then a tritoned voice—not old or young, not male or female, but warm as the sun on a clear savannah morning and resonant as a griot’s drum.
Do not ask how many people you will save. Ask, To what world will you save them?
The voice, soft and calm, seemed to fill all of Sagimsan Mountain.
What world, Wuraola, is worth surviving in?
Then I woke, alone.
The chimes were silent as I sat up, and pine needles fell from my hair as I blinked dazedly. Gold streaked across the sky. The morning had aged to afternoon—mere hours between now and sunset.
I turned up the path and ran. I did not stop to wonder why my cloak was warm as a brazier, instead of damp from dew. I did not question why my limbs were lithe and swift, instead of rigid with the forest’s chill. I did not ask myself if the tritoned voice had been real or a dream.
I knew only one thing: A world worth surviving in wasn’t built on the screams of children.
When I returned to the camp, Ye Eun