My eyes find the shape of the bedpost behind her head, faintly outlined in silver from the balcony. “It’s my dreams. The spirits in the Dead Wood won’t leave me alone.”

Her fingers tighten around mine. “Have they ever spoken in your dreams? Like how they did today?”

I’d told her earlier about the strange moment in the trees. “No. Do you think I should try to talk to them?”

“It’d be safer than going back into the trees. They can’t hurt you in your dreams.”

I burrow deeper into the warmth of the blanket as I remember the sensation of decaying fingers trying to worm into my mouth and gouge my eyes. The pain always feels real enough.

After what happened today in the Dead Wood, the last thing I want is to be confronted again by those horrifying spirits in my head. But for Saengo, I’ll try.

FIFTEEN

Hands emerge from the dark. I suck in my breath as the clammy cold of their dead skin closes around mine. Ragged nails tear into me.

“Stop,” I whisper. I have to fight the urge to curl into myself and hide from their grasping hands. That familiar dark awareness settles in my gut. Claws of ice wrap around my spine, tugging me somewhere I don’t want to go. Back into the depths of that garden maze. “I need to speak to you.”

Faces appear next, broken beyond recognition. Their necks swell and roil as roots push up their throats. One mouth opens wide, black sap spilling down its chin. Panic seizes me, and all I want is to scream or run. But I’d done that in the Dead Wood, and I owe it to Saengo to swallow my fear.

Broken fingers wrap painfully in my hair. Before I lose my nerve, I shout, “Why do you stay in the Dead Wood?”

The hands clawing at me seem to recoil, if only for a moment. The faces snarl and gnash their teeth. “Trapped,” they whisper in raw, overlapping voices. “Trapped, trapped, trapped.”

“How are you trapped? What keeps you here?”

But they only repeat the word, as if no longer capable of anything more than that.

Then another face emerges, pushing out from the side of a swollen, twisted neck. Everything inside me turns to ice. There’s enough of her left that I recognize the thin lips, the gaunt cheeks, the small but slightly crooked nose. Where her bright emerald eyes had been, there are only black, weeping burls.

It’s the healer from the Valley of Cranes.

She opens her mouth and whispers in a harsh, broken voice, “Suryali.”

I awaken with a scream lodged in my throat.

Saengo is leaning over me, calling my name. With a deep breath, I relax into the bed and throw an arm over my face. Enough light presses through the drapes that it must be well past dawn.

“The spirits?” she asks softly.