The storm didn’t seem to be so bad that night.  Seoyeon stayed up late, carefully finishing up the leather pack she was making and wrinkling her nose at the scent the numerous candles were giving out.  She would have blown them out if she hadn’t needed them to see what she was doing, and if they hadn’t been too high up for her anyway.  She was going to have to ask Jieun if there was a candle snuff on a pole that she could have.  Still, they were burning low enough not to be too much of a nuisance on the eyes when she finally lay down to go to sleep, and while the wind howled, it for once didn’t blast the windows open, and that was comforting, especially since she now knew that the gale wasn’t even from the same world that she lived in.

That did keep her up for a little while longer — how was the gale able to affect a solid building in a different world?  How was it able to open her windows like that, but leave the rest of her room untouched?

Fortunately, she was too tired to care, and she’d forgotten about the question by the next morning.  Jongdae didn’t raise the subject of the Neuma again.  Either he didn’t know any more about it than he’d already told her, or he was waiting for her to ask questions if she had any.  The closest he got to broaching the topic was three days later, when he remarked that it looked like she’d been sleeping better since the bags under her eyes had gone.  Beyond that, he kept her busy with sewing all different kinds of materials, coming up with different dishes, and identifying the usefulness of various different concoctions of herbs, alongside budgeting and accounting, literature and (at her request) banquet hosting and seating plans.  A week before her birthday, he took her completely by surprise when he placed a small vial of poison in front of her, described how it worked, and then asked her to come up with an antidote.

“I-I-I’m not a physician,” she stuttered out in shock.

“I know,” he said.  “But this one isn’t hard.  You’ve used everything that would be needed in the antidote before.”

Dubious, she looked at the notes he’d made her take on the poison and then at the vial itself.

“When am I ever going to need to know how to make an antidote?”

“You’d be surprised.”  Gathering his stuff together, since it was time for him to leave, Jongdae stood up.  “I hear there’s a lot of, uh, politicking on the sly in the capital.”  He winked at her before making his way out of the room.  Seoyeon gulped.  She sincerely hoped that this was not knowledge she would ever have to put to use.

Nothing, though, had managed to put the Neuma completely out of her mind.  What she really wanted to know was whether or not the stories about the spirits moving on and the ghost fires were true, because that had to have something to do with the Neuma.  If she could feel the Neuma because of her mother, then it stood to reason that she ought to somehow be able to communicate with her mother, and Seoyeon really wanted one last chance to talk to her, or even just to see her.  Just one.

She tried asking the soldiers about the ghost fires again over dinner, to see if there was anything reliably concrete in the stories.

“Where does that story come from?” she enquired, careful to phrase her words as innocently as possible so that nobody would be able to divine her intentions, just in case.  Oh Sehun, who was sitting next to her, shrugged.  The other soldiers turned to Lieutenant Do, who was the officer seated with them that night.

“No idea.  It’s older than the hills,” he mumbled, much more interested in the lamb shank in front of him.

“The first night I ate here,” Seoyeon went on, “one of the soldiers said that if you go out at the right time and look for the ghost fires, you’ll meet the spirits of the dearly departed.  Has that ever actually happened?”

Lieutenant Do contemplated his lamb shank, cutlery poised as he looked out the best place to take his next chunk of meat from.

“If it has,” he said, “it’s not in living memory.  I can’t imagine anyone would want to test it in the dark, either.  The Borderlands are dangerous.”

“Lieutenant,” said Sehun, “the ghost fires are much closer to Ximo now than they used to be.”

“There are some very close to the back gates,” agreed one of the other soldiers.  “It could probably be done without leaving the fortress.”

Lieutenant Do finally looked up from his food.  “I don’t think it should even be tried,” he said firmly.  The topic of conversation soon shifted.

It didn’t stop Seoyeon from wanting to discover more.

Since Jongdae had first told her about the Neuma and she’d latched onto the idea of potentially seeing her mother again, Seoyeon had insisted on riding into the Borderlands more with Jongin when they took the horses out.  He didn’t particularly like it, much preferring to go the other way (especially when dusk was beginning to approach), but he never refused her.  She was getting better at riding astride, too, and so he ten