“Sorry,” said Ye Eun, “I told Hwanghu to be gentle.”

“What in Am’s name . . .” I croaked.

I was outdoors, and it appeared to be twilight, my sprites barely visible in the sky. I was lying on a translucent jade altar, which rested on the banks of several steaming pools. The spring lay in a mossy clearing, surrounded on all sides by vine-covered rock face. Ye Eun was kneeling by my side, wearing nothing but an unbleached shift. A short distance away, Ae Ri sat among the moss in only a nappy, splashing her pudgy hands in the water.

“Ye Eun, where are we? And how did you—”

“Drink,” she ordered, holding a drinking gourd to my lips. The mist had saturated her short black hair and strands clung to her stony face. “You’re thirsty.”

She was right, and so I obeyed, gulping down several ounces of metallic-tasting water. “You slept for a week,” she explained. “The Well priests had to force drinks down your throat until I used sowanhada. I learned how to command the water to stay in your mouth. Eventually, you’d swallow it.” She cocked her head, raising her eyebrows at my lioness mask. “You wouldn’t have died either way, I suppose. But you wouldn’t have gotten better either.”

I drew my knees to my chest. Besides the mask, I wore only a strip of linen, tied gently across my breasts, and a matching loincloth that hung to my ankles. Every inch of my map-covered skin beaded with sweat. Someone had sectioned my hair into neat twists and massaged my scalp with tingling peppermint oil.

I sat in a temple, of course. If Ye Eun’s mention of priests hadn’t been enough, the stone goddess towering nearby would have confirmed it. The natural rock face had been carved into the shape of a winged, plush-lipped young woman emptying a jug. An enormous waterfall gushed from her vessel, landing with billowing clouds of steam into the springs below. Turquoise pricks of light danced on the water’s surface, diving, chirruping, leaving trails of rainbow bubbles: ombitsu sprites, much rarer than tutsu, and said only to appear where water was exceptionally pure.

“That’s supposed to be Iyaja,” said Ye Eun, nodding at the mountain sculpture. “The spring’s alagbato—King Water’s favorite daughter. She blesses mortals with good health. If you believe in all that.”

I sucked in a breath. “Then I’m not in Djbanti anymore.”

The sects of Arit religion made for wildly different places of worship. In Oluwan, Ember-sect halls devoted to Warlord Fire were most common, built near volcanoes and holy forges, and bustling with merchants of coal and gemstones. The Temple of Iyaja, a collection of springs and tunnels carved into a mountain, was the only Well-sect shrine to King Water and his pantheon near Oluwan City. The ancient hot springs—which mysteriously spouted salt water instead of fresh—were said to cure troubled souls of evil spirits. I glanced around. My altar stood a stone’s throw from several cave openings. Drumbeats and string music floated out from the gloom, interspersed with distant chanting.