Namgi grins. “I’m fine. Nothing could stop me from seeing Mina.”
“You should be more careful,” Kirin insists. “Not long ago, you were soulless.”
“Not anymore, thanks to you!” Namgi attacks Kirin in a hug. They go off into the flowers, arguing like they did when I first met them in the Sea God’s hall—though I can see now how much they love and care for each other, their bickering turning soon to laughter.
I face Shin, my heart beating painfully in my chest. When I first met him, I thought his eyes did more to hide his thoughts than his mask did to hide his face. No longer.
He looks at me with such longing it breaks my heart.
“What are you doing here?” I ask softly.
“I said I would take you to your ancestors.”
I almost fall apart then. Shin—tall, not very frightening, and honorable, who never goes back on his word, who always keeps his promises, even when he’s hurting.
I swallow. “Then let’s go together.”
* * *
Spirit House is just as Hyeri described it, a gigantic building—shaped somewhat like a bathhouse—beside the River of Souls. It’s at least five stories high and built in a square design. I can see the shapes of beings through the papered windows, feasting and dancing.
Shin leads us through the grand doors into the main room of the building, bypassing what looks like a huge line of very wet people.
Namgi leans down to whisper in my ear, “Recent arrivals.”
The room is magnificent, a large enclosed courtyard, ranged on all sides with balconies on every level.
A portly man with round eyes and a mustache hurries to greet Shin. “Oh great and powerful lord of Lotus House—”
Kirin interrupts. “We need to arrange an ancestral meeting.”
The man blinks rapidly. “Yes, of course!” He snaps his fingers, and a small, hunched grandmother hobbles over. She wears a mask depicting a youthful girl. Slowly, she hands the man a rolled-up scroll.
The man clears his throat. “Family name?”
“Song,” I say.
“Village of origin.”
“Beside-the-Sea.”
“Are you the Songs of the Lower Mountains, the Farmlands, or the Riverside?”
“Lower Mountains.” I grimace. We don’t speak to the Songs of the Farmlands after their grandfather had a falling-out with my grandfather over a game of Go.
“Ah, here we are.” The man’s finger lands on the paper. “It looks like … both your great-great-grandmother and your grandfather are registered as Song ancestors in the city.”
I can’t breathe. Tears rush to my eyes. Grandfather. My great-great-grandmother.
“They are?” I whisper, overwhelmed. I turn to Shin. “They’re here. I’m going to see them.” I didn’t know how much I needed to see them until this very moment.
“I’m glad for you, Mina,” Shin says softly.
The grandmother coughs behind her mask. I turn from Shin and the others to follow her. We travel up five flights of stairs and down a hall with closed doors. She stops at the third door on the left and slides open the panel.
“Wait in here,” she says.
I walk into the room, and she closes the door behind me. The room is small with low shelves filled with items, some of which I recognize from the ancestral rites my grandmother and I would conduct every year. There’s the food we left out for my grandfather on his birthday the month before last. It hasn’t spoiled. The bean rice and dried-pollock soup—his favorites—still steam from their bowls. Although I notice the amount in the bowls is less. There are the bright fruits my grandmother left for my grandfather, his favorites, and for her grandmother, the bouquet of fresh flowers picked from the garden—golden flowers and deep red hibiscus, as bright as the day we picked them.
My gaze falls on a cradle tucked in the corner of the room.
I suck in a harsh breath. It’s the boat Joon carved, the one he labored over for weeks.
We were so excited when Sung, five years Joon’s elder, told us he and Soojin were going to have a baby. Joon and I went out into the mountains so that I could make a prayer to the guardian of the forest while he cut down his favorite tree, the one he’d planted when he was only a boy himself. Out of the heart of the tree, he fashioned a cradle for the baby. He carved beautiful images into the wood of the bed—a crane in flight to guide the baby through her dreams, a rising tiger at the head to protect her from nightmares—and every night I stood over the unfinished bed and said a prayer to the Goddess of Women and Children, giving a kiss to the wood where the baby would one day rest her head.