Dreamslinger, page 9
“Here’s mine,” Tui exclaimed, as she located the plot brandishing her name. She pointed to the garden kitty-corner to her. “And there’s yours, Aria. Lion’s is farther down. I wonder where he is this morning.”
As their gajokmates rushed to find their named plots, Aria stared at her little garden. Something tugged at her chest unexpectedly.
“The soil looks freshly turned,” Tui noticed.
Aria kneeled down to touch the damp scarlet dirt, and a word from her mom’s journal punched her in the chest:
DESIDERIUM (Noun) (Latin origin): An ardent desire or longing; especially a feeling of loss or grief for something lost.
It felt like she’d registered for the first time that she’d been born with a third of her soul missing. Perhaps the king’s words hadn’t just been propaganda, after all. Maybe this dreampanion really could fill her Soul-Gap and make her profoundly whole. The thought frightened her in more ways than one.
“As you can see, your seeds have already been planted here, patiently awaiting your love and care,” Bobby-Uma announced. “It will take hard work, but it is my fervent hope that you will all sprout your seedlings, nurture them to grow tall and strong, and successfully unfurl your dreampanion seedling from its flower. But first, you must pass the Knowing.”
She led the group back to the Pavilion. “And on that note, I believe full-cohort briefings are about to start. Go forth and study hard, trialeers. Your dreampanions are relying on it.”
Aria cursed Junghee as she and Tui hurried to make their Asleep Geography briefing with the Head Scholar of Winter Palace, Jamie-Ann Kim. They were late because Aria had to get changed. Junghee’s experimental hanbok—which could change color depending on Aria’s mood—had given her a nasty rash. Even now, having changed, she couldn’t stop scratching.
They ran through the frosted white gates of Winter Palace and stumbled into the Scholars’ Hall, interrupting the bouncy-haired Head Scholar mid-speech.
“Dear delightful trialeers! You’re just in time. Do come in and find yourself a floating seat.” The scholar’s frost turtle napped near her desk, its gigantic frame dressed in a polka-dotted onesie.
Jina Jeong sneered as Aria and Tui hurried past. “Trust Spring Palace to be tardy. That’s why being kind isn’t enough to run the world. We need rules.”
They found seats next to Lion, who’d reappeared after his disappearance this morning. As usual, the heritage kids were giving him a wide berth.
Head Scholar Kim spun her wheelchair toward the cohort. “As I was saying, today we will be learning all about the geography of the Asleep.” She pointed to her desk. “Please come collect your Season maps.”
Everyone rushed to grab a scroll, and Aria saw there were four different ones—one for each gajok, with the symbol from their capes engraved into the tip of the scroll’s rod.
“Whoa,” Tui breathed as they returned to their desks and opened them.
The map of Spring had a circular center like the pistil of a flower. Blossoming out of it was one petal-shaped piece of land pointing east. It looked like the dreamslinger symbol, but with only one of the four petals.
“Hey, yours looks like Summer, but the landmarks have different names.” Daxia Hsu, a friendly Taiwanese trialeer with an undercut and lots of piercings raised her map. Hers looked the same as Spring, except that the petal was facing south, not east.
“Oh yeah!” Mason Hewett, a British trialeer, agreed from behind them, holding up his map of Winter, whose petal pointed northward. Mason wasn’t wearing his guitar or violin today, but he was wearing his mischievous grin, which he never seemed to be without. “Same-same but different.”
They compared landmarks across Seasons, to find that the Meadow Plains of Spring were called the Desert Plains in Summer, and the Ice Plains in Winter.
Zahra Amini, an Iranian girl from Autumn Palace who wore loads of handwoven bracelets down her arms, came to join them, and together they discovered that all four Seasons had different names for the mirrored landmarks on their maps. All except one—the circular pistil that everyone had at the heart of the map.
“Head Scholar Kim, why is the Heartsglade the only landmark we all share on our maps?” Zahra asked.
“The Heartsglade is like our arrivals gate when traveling to the Asleep,” the scholar explained. “No matter which gajok you’re in, we must all pass through it in order to get to our respective Seasons.”
As Aria took in the map, it suddenly clicked that the Heartsglade was the Nightmare Circle—the circular land of the dream world before the four seas began. Aria looked closer, and as she suspected, she saw the coven of trees at the very center, convening like a four-seasons pizza. The map called it the “Heart of the Heartsglade,” which Aria thought wasn’t nearly as catchy as Treehenge.
Studying the map of Spring further, Aria deduced that the land protruding eastward from the Heartsglade was where the East Sea of Poisonous Plants was in her dreams. In her pretrial, the Season archway to Spring had appeared above the poison sea. It made sense, then, that the entire petal-shaped land was Spring, once the archway had been crossed.
“Head Scholar Kim, what’s this gray stuff?” Niko Horvat, a Canadian trialeer with pink-and-blue braces asked, referring to the fuzzy border surrounding the petal-shaped land on his map.
“Oh yeah, I have it on mine, too,” said Misha Mora Perez, an Autumn Palace trialeer from Chile.
The frost turtle snored as the scholar wheeled toward the cohort. “I’m glad you asked. Does anyone know the League rule about the Ash Frontier? Yes, Trialeer Jeong?”
“The Ash Frontier is the outer boundary of the Asleep, and is strictly prohibited,” Jina answered confidently. “Those who are caught near it will face immediate disqualification from the Trials, or, if already a Fellow, immediate disbarment from the League.”
“Clear and precise, well done!” Scholar Kim commended. “It bears repeating that the Ash Frontier is forbidden due to the unspeakable dangers that lie past its border. Everything beyond the Ash Frontier—the area we call the Beyondash—is extremely dangerous. In fact, of those who have attempted to cross the Ash Frontier, none have returned with their lives intact.”
She markedly slowed down her speech, as if to belabor the point. “So please, do take heed of the rule, trialeers. It is the League’s most important rule for a reason.”
The warning made a shiver run down Aria’s spine. Her dad had warned her that the League’s training was dangerous. And here was a Head Scholar confirming that there were areas of the Asleep that could kill them. She gulped.
“Honestly, though, what did you do? Did you kill someone? Kick a puppy? Why do they treat you like a social pariah?” Tui asked Lion as a group of heritage kids bolted from their study table upon seeing Lion. “Are you contagious? Should Aria and I be worried?”
Lion shrugged as his cheeks went all shiny. “They just don’t like me, okay? On the upside, we got the last table in the library. You’re welcome.”
Afternoon briefings had concluded, and the trio had decided to do some studying at the Library of Scrolls. It appeared the rest of the cohort had the same thought, too.
For a good hour, they studied silently, committing facts to memory, until Zahra came to join them, and she and Tui got distracted talking about the little creatures from the Asleep.
“Not the dreampanions,” Tui clarified. “I mean the little ones that Fellows catch in those violet orbs.”
“Yeah!” Zahra exclaimed, twirling the colorful bracelets on her wrists. “The ones that give you temporary powers. What were those called again?”
“You mean nightjoys?” Lion asked, being pulled into their conversation.
Aria remembered how Tae had grown eight arms after his bloom dragon had slung a nightjoy orb at him. She’d experienced them herself in her pretrial—the bunny that’d given her superhearing, the winged hamster that’d given her wings, and the tiny fawn who’d made the ground under Aria’s hooves fizzle with electricity. There were supposedly endless species of them across the four Seasons, all with different traits and powers—many of them still undiscovered.
“Yeah, the nightjoys,” Tui said excitedly. “What I wanna know is when we can start catching them.”
Zahra’s intelligent eyes shone. “I know, right? I overheard the king has over two hundred different nightjoys in his pride.”
“Amaaazing,” Tui breathed.
“We’re not being tested about nightjoys in the Knowing,” Lion reminded them. “You can’t start catching them until after you get inducted, anyway.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be curious about them,” Zahra argued. “Learning is like dessert for the mind. And what can I say? I have an insatiable sweet tooth.”
Tui grinned. “Me too. We’re just two nerdy sweetpeas in a pod, Zahra, and I’m feeling nibbly.” She turned to Lion. “Oi, do us a solid and help feed our dessert addiction, eh?”
Eventually, Lion relented and took Tui and Zahra to the huge section of the library that was dedicated to the identification and categorization of nightjoys. It gave Aria the perfect opportunity to do a spot of sleuthing.
“Librarian Yong, where can I find all the kingdom’s old newspapers?”
Aria figured that getting a sense of the kingdom’s news cycle leading up to the reopening of borders might help give a hint as to why the decision was made.
“The waterfiche system,” the cowboy-hatted librarian explained in that standoffish way of hers, as she took Aria to what looked like a stone birdbath in one corner of the library. “Water retains its history in its molecules, which makes it the most effective way of logging our historical records. You’ll find the old newspaper clippings in there.”
The librarian taught her how to use the system, which was a simple but tedious (and wet) process of manually “swirling” through chronologically filed newspapers, and Aria started by scanning the Royal Gazette articles. They were old and pretty unexciting—mostly interviews with local dreamtraders about their growing industries, stats and highlights for something called Battlejoy, which appeared to be the national sport, updates about a quarterly Harvest of Service event, and some advertisements for the newest dreambrews. It was essentially just a local community paper. The only notable thing about the articles was that they abruptly stopped just over ten years ago.
“Where are the newer articles kept?” Aria asked the librarian, her hanbok damp from using the waterfiche.
The librarian didn’t make eye contact as she pointed to the restricted-access slippers behind the locked cubbies. “They were moved to the classified section temporarily for the duration of the Trials. King’s decree.” She frowned. “I don’t like the articles being split and kept separately. It’s not as it should be.”
Aria gazed up at the cling-film-like layer above the eighth floor and harrumphed. Of course they were moved. Nothing like kicking your mess under the bed when the guests come over. At least it proved the League was hiding something. Aria just had to find out what that was.
Tui, Zahra, and Lion still seemed to be busy poring over nightjoy scrolls, so Aria went back to the waterfiche to see if she’d missed anything the first time around. Librarian Yong even brought Aria a leafy snackpocket of honey butter chips she’d freshly plucked from her snackpan tree, as if to apologize for the missing records. The librarian seemed to guard the small potted tree with the ferocity of a mama bear protecting its cub, and Aria had to agree it grew the best snacks she’d ever had in her life.
Scanning the Gazette, she didn’t find much that was noteworthy the second time around, apart from a super-old photo of the young king and his “bosom buddy, Ko Iseul, the daughter of the Royal Mudang,” playing chase in a meadow. According to the caption, they were inseparable. You couldn’t see their faces properly in the image, but Aria did the math and concluded Ko Iseul must’ve grown up to become the current royal shaman. If the role was passed down their family line, it made sense she’d taken over from her late mother.
It wasn’t much, but it confirmed for Aria that the Royal Mudang would be a valuable source of information. Not only was she the king’s most trusted advisor, she was also his oldest friend.
Aria felt a small sense of victory. At least now she knew whom to target. And that, for now, was better than nothing.
THE DAYS SEEMED TO FLY by for Aria. Every dawn and dusk, their palace matron led them to the Dreampanion Nursery so they could water their gardens. In between those two daily bookends, the cohort spent their days attending briefings and studying their scrolls until their eyes crossed and their brains felt like putty.
Despite her best intentions to not be indoctrinated by League propaganda, Aria was increasingly intrigued by what she was learning. That is, from a purely academic standpoint, of course. There was something satisfying about growing your expertise in a certain area of knowledge, and she hated to admit she wasn’t despising the entire process.
Aria’s least-hated text by far was The Royal Scroll on How to Sprout Your Dreampanion, closely followed by The Comprehensive Treasury of Flora in the Four Seasons of the Asleep—a collection of scrolls that took up an entire subsection of the library. Her least-hated briefings were all the ones not given by Head Scholar Byun from Summer Palace. Turned out the small, shrewd man was Jina Jeong’s uncle, and he proved to be just as insufferable as his niece.
Unfortunately, despite all the study she was doing—or perhaps because of all the study she was doing—Aria hadn’t yet found anything that warranted a formal report to her dad. She’d missed her first deadline already, but she was confident she’d be able to make up for it soon. She just had to make it past this first Trial first, so she could stay in the kingdom.
Somehow, the fortnight whizzed past. And before she knew it, it was the day of the Knowing, and she was being awoken by the sound of someone gasping, then footsteps scurrying around her room.
“Trialeer Love, why does it look like a bomb went off in your bedchamber?!”
Aria bolted up as Junghee picked up scrolls, clothes, and study cards that had been strewn everywhere. Little bits of red meat were spotted around the floor and walls.
Aria gaped. “Junghee, I did not make this mess.”
A waft of something that smelled like rotting sea creature slathered in sewage, then dunked in vinegar, assaulted her nose. She gagged.
“Urghhh,” Aria squealed, pinching her nostrils shut. “What is that?”
“This,” Junghee said, taking off her apron and bravely scooping up a meaty flower the size of a plate from the floor, “is a corpsespinner.” She dry-heaved before rushing to the door. “Let me return this before we die of asphyxiation.”
Aria flapped her hands in the air around her. She remembered learning that corpsespinners from Summer were unrivaled in their ability to spread their foul stink. The secret was in their spinning movement that flicked pieces of their rotting flesh to all corners. They were deemed more parasitic weed than flower, which was why they were kept locked up inside the Floratorium and not allowed to be removed. She had no idea how it’d managed to get inside her room.
Picking up her dad’s domino tile from the floor, she took a deep breath. However it happened, she wouldn’t rattle that easy. Corpsespinner or no, she had an exam to pass.
When Junghee rushed back wearing a fresh apron, she was uncharacteristically quiet. By this point, Aria knew her maid well enough that something was wrong.
“Out with it, Junghee,” Aria demanded.
The maid wrenched the white apron in her fingers. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. I’d probably get fired if they found out. But I just overheard the other gung-nyeo speculating, and…” She exhaled. “Every year, there’s some kind of added distraction to the exam. To see how you work under pressure.”
Aria raised her brows. “So the corpsespinner was the distraction?”
Junghee frowned. “No, I have no idea why the corpsespinner was in your room—that’s a mystery for later.” She let out a quick huff. “I’m talking about during the actual Trial today. They’re going to do something to throw you off.”
Of course they were—way to raise the stakes even more. “Did you hear what it will be?”
Junghee lowered her voice. “Something to do with a shriekcicada.”
Aria grimaced. She wouldn’t have known what that was, if not for Tui and Zahra’s obsession with nightjoys. Thanks to their incessant discussions about the creatures, even Aria knew that the shriekcicada allowed dreamslingers to produce bloodcurdling noises unbearable to the human ear. It would be impossible to focus on the Trial with that in the background.
“Anyway, I was coming out of the Floratorium when I saw these, so I might’ve just stolen them”—she coughed—“well, borrowed them for you. Argh. Quick, take them!” Junghee shoved two knots of green moss in Aria’s hand as if they were balls of fire.
“Condensemoss!”
Aria had studied this just a few days ago. A type of moss from the Asleep that was excellent at sucking up high decibels in its fibers.
She stared at Junghee. “You stole these for me?”
Junghee shrugged as she made her way to the door. “I can’t have my guinea pig disappearing on me before trying my entire season’s collection. Aaand I might still feel a little bad about that rash. Anyway, let’s go, or else you’ll miss the Trial.”
Aria fought the urge to run after her maid and hug the daylights out of her. “Maybe I can try another design tomorrow?” she offered instead. “The rash has cleared, so probably time for a fresh flare-up.”
Junghee’s eyes twinkled. “I’ll bring the salve!”
The Knowing was being held at Autumn Palace, where rows of floating desks had been set up in a courtyard facing the Tree of Judgment—a towering giant with a complicated web of gnarly roots protruding above the ground. A set of wooden scales was carved into the thickest part of the trunk, and its branches were adorned with amber leaves so sharp they gleamed like blades under the morning light.
