Page 52

Iseul

Iseul tears herself from Seojin’s embrace, eyes wide as something heavy lands behind her. “Oh, shit ,” she breathes. A pale boy with dark hair and even darker wings meets her gaze, and her stomach plummets as he takes a step closer. Seojin’s sharp inhale cuts through the panicked cries of fleeing healers, and Iseul knows that somehow, this has something to do with Shin Lina.

The boy’s eyes have purple shadows beneath them, as if he hasn’t slept for a very long while. “It is time to leave,” he says, and there is a firmness in his tone that is almost menacing.

Outside of the sickbay doors, there sounds the sudden, hurried flurry of footsteps . A rescue , Iseul realizes as the boy impatiently reaches out a hand toward her. This is a “rescue,” orchestrated by Lina’s forces, although how the boy got in—and intends to get out —of Gyeulcheon is a mystery to her.

Jae, clinging to her, whimpers.

“I am getting impatient,” the boy whispers, and it is more of a panicked hiss than anything. Iseul swallows hard. She must make her decision fast. To go, or to stay? To return to Shin Lina and help her raze down villages, orphan children, and generally spread terror? Or to stay here, with Seojin’s soft smiles and healing hands?

What a dilemma .

Impatiently, the winged boy takes a step toward her, eyes on the chain binding her to the human boy. He unsheathes his dagger, clearly preparing to sever the chain—

Iseul, holding Jae close to her, brings up her knee and kicks the boy in the face.

“Unggh!” he howls, rearing back, hand on his nose which is at a funny angle and bleeding profusely. His eyes squeezed shut, he drops the knife, a glint of sharp metal falling through the air before clattering on the sickbay’s cold floor. With a smug little smile, Iseul admires her handiwork.

It’s never too late to turn over a new leaf. And here, with Seojin, she’d rather like to try.

“I really hate birds,” she says, almost conversationally. “I’ve never quite seen a bird like you, though. What is it? Are you an overgrown crow?”

“Iseul,” warns Seojin at her back. The boy is wiping blood from his face.

She turns to roll her eyes at him. This, here, is her victory. “Oh, he’s not going to—”

Seojin’s eyes snap to a point past her shoulder. “ISEUL!” he warns in a very different tone as she whirls on her heels just in time for the boy to launch himself at her with a growl of desperation. It rattles her for a moment, just how very deep that desperation seems to go.

“You have to come with me! I need to earn her trust…”

What ensues is a frantic scuffling, which proves rather difficult for Iseul, as she is holding a five-year-old child and chained to Seojin , who barely knows how to fight.

She has scarcely had time to set Jae down and shout for him to run for safety when the boy flips his fallen dagger into the air with a kick and snatches it with two fingers. Iseul’s wrist chafes against the manacle as she tries, oh she tries , to fend the winged boy off. But Seojin, the poor thing, has worked himself all up into a tizzy. He’s jerking her in entirely the wrong directions, utterly ruining all of her defensive positionings.

“SEOJIN!” barks Iseul as he somehow manages to trip her with his foot.

“Sorry,” he pants. “I’m, oh gods, Iseul, I’m sorry…”

A moment later, Seojin is staggering back and dragging her with him. They both crash into the medicine cabinet, which sways…topples…and then falls sideways…

Iseul shrieks in outrage as they both fall with it, hitting the sea of bandages and vials with ungainly thumps. Oh, this damned chain! She tries to flounder to her feet, but the winged boy is standing above them, casting a long shadow over the healer and the Gumiho.

With deadly precision, he brings down his dagger on the metal tie between Iseul and Seojin’s cuffs. The chain breaks. Iseul shrieks as he grabs her by the hair, hauling her thrashing body out of the sickbay and whizzing past the approaching soldiers. “LET GO OF ME THIS INSTANT!” she commands, and the order does not apparently carry much weight when it is high-pitched and panicked.

The boy ignores her, pressing a dagger to a Dokkaebi soldier’s throat, snapping his demand—to open a portal and allow them a way out of Gyeulcheon. When the soldier refuses, he slits his throat. And the next’s. And the next’s.

Until one—a terrified Dokkaebi smelling of panic—opens a shadowed corridor behind him. Around the corner of the palace’s corridor, Iseul sees Seojin, running desperately after her, his hands outstretched…

But he’s too late.

Iseul is gone.

More accurately, she is screaming her lungs out as the portal spews her and this bird-boy out into thin air, thousands of feet above Wyusan. He holds her tightly around the waist as he spreads his wings, the howling, autumn winds battering them to and fro.

“LET! GO!” Iseul howls.

“Do you want to drop to your death?” the boy shouts in her ear and loosens his hold on her, just enough for her screams to rise tenfold in volume.

Furious, Iseul gnashes her teeth, imagining killing this bird boy with exquisite detail. Yet she has no choice but to cease her wild movements, lest she does indeed fall to her death.

“By the way,” the boy continues as their fall steadies, and they begin to bank over the looming pines of the Wyusan Wilderness, on course to the capital, “I’m a little bit offended.”

“Really?” Iseul scoffs, her mind on more important things.

Seojin . She has to get back to him, somehow. Trust the universe to guarantee that the very moment she decides to be a nice, semi-good person, she’s captured and dragged back to the very army she’d just decided to officially desert . “Why’s that?”

“I rescued you, and you broke my nose,” he replies, and Iseul frowns, wondering if that’s a thread of plaintive hurt in his voice.

“I fail to see the issue.”

“I rescued you and you broke my nose !”

The boy is whining.

“Hm,” Iseul says, wondering at what point she can escape from his hold without falling to a gruesome death. “I don’t see why I should care about that. I don’t even know who you are.”

“I see that you hit first, and don’t ask questions until later,” he snaps— complains , really—although he is apparently attempting to conceal his disconcertion. “You break my nose before you even know my name —”

“What’s your name, then?” Iseul demands, mostly to shut him up about the broken nose. Really. It’s hardly anything compared to what she could have done…

“Jeon Eunwoo,” the boy replies. “Of Bonseyo.”

Jeon. Of Bonseyo.

Iseul stiffens, every muscle in her body seizing. “You wouldn’t happen to be related to the Royal Dynasty, would you?” she manages.

“Emperor Jeon is my father,” says the boy, a small, broken tilt to his words that Iseul ignores. “I am a part of his dynasty.”

And that, that is her breaking point.

The shriek Iseul releases has the animals of the Wyusan Wilderness cowering in their dens and wondering what sort of foul creature flies above.