For a while, nobody said anything at all.
Jin lay on his back and stared up at the three dokkaebi, waiting for one of them to explain, attack, or at least grin the way they always did. None of them did. The two smaller ones stood slightly behind the tall one, hands folded, looking at the floor like students who'd been caught doing something they shouldn't.
The tall one crouched down, robes pooling around it in soft folds of red and gold, and looked at the three of them the way someone might look at a vase that had fallen off a shelf and somehow not broken.
"Sorry about that," it said.
Its voice was warm and smooth, with a lazy kind of amusement underneath it, nothing like the flat cold of the Warden.
Areum pushed herself up onto her elbows. "Sorry about what, exactly? The part where we almost froze to death, or the part where that thing tried to kill Jin?"
