Prologue

Three Years Before the Black Moon

The cage is too small for Baek Cho-rin to kneel and too low for her to stand.

Every breath drives a bamboo rib deeper beneath her shoulder blade. Hemp cuts her wrists. Black mud pushes between her toes through the woven floor, cold and soft as a tongue. Around her, the tide crawls over the flats in silver threads, gathering itself beneath a moon with no halo.

The villagers have brought forty torches to watch one woman drown.

Their flames bend inland, away from the sea. Cho-rin wonders if even fire knows better than to witness this.

“The water rejected our cattle,” Chief Park Sang-ho declares. “It rejected our rice and silver. The rot must be cut from the village before the rot reaches every house.”

The crowd answers with bowed heads.

No one looks at the girl in the cage.

Cho-rin looks only at the mudang standing beside the final knot.

White ceremonial robes. Long black hair pinned beneath a narrow ritual crown. A cracked brass bell hanging from one hand. The woman’s face is hidden behind a veil painted with five colors, but Cho-rin knows the shape of the mouth beneath it. She knows the small scar beside the left thumb. She knows how those fingers feel threaded through hers beneath a summer quilt while rain hides their breathing.

She knows the promise those lips made beside this same sea.

When the camellias open, we leave together.

The camellias opened twelve days ago.

“Yun—” Cho-rin begins.

The bell rings.

Its broken note strikes the bones behind her eyes. Her jaw locks. The shamanic binding already braided through the cage tightens around her muscles, turning her body rigid. Only her lungs remain free enough to panic.

The mudang flinches at the first syllable of her name.

So she remembers.

That is worse than hatred.

Chief Park steps closer to the white-robed woman. He speaks too softly for the crowd, but the wind carries his words through the cage.

“Tie it, Initiate Seo. Prove the village is cleaner than its rumors.”

Cho-rin watches the veil. Behind the painted silk, Yun-hwa’s breath comes fast enough to stir the fabric.

There are choices inside that breath. Cho-rin can hear all of them.

Run. Confess. Ring the bell against the chief. Tell them where they were the night the fishermen saw two sets of footprints leading to the abandoned shrine. Tell them Cho-rin did not summon the black tide. Tell them the chief’s own men opened the seawall and blamed a woman no family would defend.

Yun-hwa lowers the bell.

She kneels in the mud beside the cage.

For a heartbeat, hope is so violent Cho-rin nearly laughs. Yun-hwa’s body shields the knot from the villagers. Her scarred thumb slips between two bamboo slats and presses against Cho-rin’s bound hand.

Warm skin. The faint fragrance of camellia oil. Home.

“I knew you would come,” Cho-rin whispers.

Yun-hwa’s fingers tremble.

“If I speak, they will drown us both.”

The words are scarcely louder than foam collapsing on sand.

Cho-rin presses closer to the bamboo. “Then let them learn how many ghosts two women can make.”

“You do not understand.”

“I understand that you promised.”

Beyond Yun-hwa’s shoulder, Chief Park lifts his torch. The village waits.

Yun-hwa turns her veiled face toward them, then back to the cage. “You are already condemned.”

Cho-rin feels the sentence before she understands it.

The scarred thumb withdraws.

Yun-hwa takes the wet rope in both hands and begins to tie.

Not a fisherman’s knot. Not something Cho-rin might worry loose against the current. Her lover makes a shaman’s binding, looping hemp through hemp while her cracked bell murmurs at her wrist. Each turn lays another invisible weight across Cho-rin’s limbs.

“Look at me,” Cho-rin says.

Yun-hwa tightens the first loop.

“Look at me.”

The second loop locks.

Cho-rin lunges until bamboo splinters beneath her nails. “You touched me with those hands.”

Yun-hwa’s shoulders jerk as if struck.

“You said my name against my skin.”

The final loop slips through.

Yun-hwa pulls.

The knot closes with a small, ordinary sound.

Cho-rin’s body goes still.

The villagers cheer.

Chief Park and three fishermen drag the cage toward the channel. Bamboo grinds over shells and stone. Mud piles against Cho-rin’s knees. She cannot fight the binding, but she can move one finger—the smallest finger of her left hand, hidden beneath the red silk ribbon wound around her wrist.

The ribbon was Yun-hwa’s gift.

So the sea can always find you, she had teased when she tied it there.

Now the sea is coming.

Water spills through the cage floor, shockingly cold. It climbs Cho-rin’s ankles and soaks the hem of her dress. The fishermen wade deeper, grunting as the cage grows buoyant. Behind them, the torches become a wavering orange wall.

Yun-hwa stands at its center in white.

She has not moved.

The water reaches Cho-rin’s waist.

She works her smallest finger beneath the ribbon, tearing skin against a bamboo splinter. Blood warms the knot. The silk loosens by the width of a breath.

The cage tilts as the men reach the drop beyond the mudflat.

Water surges to Cho-rin’s chest.

“Confess!” someone shouts from shore.

They mean Cho-rin.

She keeps her eyes on Yun-hwa. “I love you.”

The tide takes the words, but Yun-hwa hears. Her cracked bell swings once though her hand remains still.

Water covers Cho-rin’s mouth.

Her lungs seize. She tastes salt and the blood from her bitten tongue. The cage descends another handspan, and the world becomes screaming bubbles, torchlight fractured into trembling gold, Yun-hwa’s white robes blurred by the surface.

The red ribbon slips free.

It coils upward through the black water like a vein searching for a heart.

Cho-rin catches one final glimpse of the woman on shore. Yun-hwa raises both hands to her veil. For one desperate instant, Cho-rin thinks she will tear it away, speak the truth, dive after her.

Instead, Yun-hwa turns her face aside.

Something inside Cho-rin survives the drowning.

It is not hope.

The cage strikes the seabed. Mud erupts around her, swallowing the last trace of moonlight. Her body convulses against the binding. Black water forces its way into her nose, her mouth, her burning chest.

Above, the red ribbon reaches the surface.

And from very far away, the cracked bell rings a final time.

Cho-rin dies listening to the woman she loves pray for the mercy of forgetting.

The sea remembers for her.