It was, of course, about treasure. The Garden of Mordamo was an island lost in the ocean and Keridian had found it. His crew set anchor off the coast, surf rolling with white silt blinding in the sun, and his handpicked few rowed with him to shore.

The Garden was not orderly, it was not serene, it was not paradise. It was a roughly tangled mass of brambles and thorns and poisonous fruits, growing like revenge over the island's rocks and choking pools of water. It was, Keridian thought, what being in love felt like. They hit the small crescent of packed sand and disembarked in the low-spilling light of evening. The shore was white gone brown with forest soil, leaf mold, and decaying fruit husks.

Silence permeated the Garden. No animal grunts, cheeps, or twitters. A silence that made the slightest rustle of dry leaves like a crack of thunder or the crash of a mighty ship against stone.

"What d'you think they'll call you after this?" Mogswallow asked, his knife-scarred eyebrows expressing his excitement. "Keridian Thornslayer. Keridian, Wooer of Witch-Goddesses, Stone Seducer, Survivor of the Isle of Beautiful Death."

"Shut up, you twit." Danna smacked him in the arm.

"Keridian," said Keridian dryly. "That's what they'll call me. Come on now, we strike out right away."

"No fires, sir? The sun'll sleep soon." Danna fidgeted with her hat, which perched on her nest of rusty braids.

"No fires." Keridian was firm. "The island doesn't like it."

The island didn't like them either. As they walked, the vines grew closer, the leaves bristled, and the fruit, well, the fruit began to glow as the dark shuttered down. Things that were stone—watching eyes, lifted arms that could've been branches, a half-concealed face swathed in moss—began to move. Keridian could hear them, hear their first breaths of night as the ending of the day freed their lungs, could hear their hisses at the presence of intruders.

"Piss off," he muttered, and lifted his sword high. No ordinary cutlass, this blade had once been struck by lightning at the top of a desert mountain, though Keridian had found it in a cavern below sea level. It was said to be the only blade that could ward off the Garden's touch. He didn't dare touch its edge to the creeping branches, not yet, but kept it aloft as a warning.

They trekked through the night, winding through tunnels and footpaths the Garden barely left open, a tease, he knew. It was leading them on, but Keridian let it, knowing the Garden's trick was to offer you exactly what you wanted before killing you. He just needed to not die.

But when morning came, and light broke through leaves, a woman appeared where a rosebush had once stood—directly in their path. Green leaves in pale pink hair, skin brown and smooth and turning to the fresh young green of new shoots at the extremities. Both thorns and flowers bloomed along her arms, and she wore a woven circlet of slender boughs upon her head.

"You must not go further," she said. "You will die of hunger."

"Well, that's nonsense," said Mogswallow. "There's food aplenty." He reached for one of the fruits, silver and plump, its night glow fading from the perfect geometry of its stippled skin.

Keridian slapped his hand down, eyes on the rose girl. "Poison, idiot."

The rose girl smiled, her eyes a deep, unsettling green. The green of old and ancient things and things that shouldn't be called "girl" at all. "Not your hunger, my friend. The island's."

Mogswallow swallowed.

"Please," the rose girl continued, "return to your ship. You will not find what you seek unless you seek death."

"I do," said Keridian. Death didn't scare him. Not when he had it coming anyway.

Her deep eyes shifted to his face. She took his hand, the thorns of her own hand piercing his palm. Kerdian's blood filled the creases between fingers.

"I see," she said. "Let me show you what you don't know. What my mothers keep and do not give back. What kind of death," her ancient eyes blinked slowly, a gesture made emphasis, "that perhaps should scare you."

Keridian started forward, but she shook her head. "Only you. Your friends must go back."

He nodded at Mogswallow and Danna's disappointed grimaces, but knew they'd both be glad.

"They will have safe passage," said the rose girl. "My mothers sleep with the light and I will guide them through the thorns." The sentiment of being two places at once didn't seem to bother her, so Keridian did not question it. There was a point in life where you learned to take the unbelievable at its word.

Once his crew members departed, the rose girl beckoned him on. They walked deep into the Garden's heart. The fruit grew bigger and more frequent, globes now the size of Keridian's head, bending branches with their weight. The Garden soil became troubled underfoot, divots and tumbles of overturned earth as if desperate hands had dug here. The stone faces of the witch-goddesses watched him sightlessly from the shadows, watermarks on their cheeks not tears of sorrow but frustration at his continued life.

Keridian saluted them. They weren't the first to feel that way about him.

The rose girl led him into a glen, sequestered from the sun. Halos of pale white flowers grew in grasses untouched by thorn or bramble.

"This is the easiest place for you to understand," she said. "Many have come for treasure, but none have left."

"So why help me? Why tell me?" Keridian asked.

"Because none of the others have come with poison already in their veins. Your power becomes the island's power and the island will thrive on yours." The rose girl crouched down, and placed her hand in the dirt among the flowers. "Come, see what lies beneath."

Keridian crouched beside her and dug his fingers into the earth. He didn't have to look far before he found something. Skin. A face. He brushed away more soil and found the withered skull, shrunken features tortured, mouth open, roots crawling through teeth.

A single golden seed lay in the back of the corpse's throat. The fruit was poison and treasure both. Ingenious, Keridian thought with a bitter smile. His horror was a distant creature, its howls small and muted, as he continued to dig. More bodies and more. A veritable garden of bodies beneath the dirt, wrapped in each other's arms, limbs tangled with roots, flowers bursting from the seeds in their mouths.

"If I don't take this treasure," said Keridian, "I'll die."

The rose girl looked at him solemnly, cradling the head of a cadaver that might've still been breathing. "If you take this treasure," she said, "the Garden will grow its poison across the ocean and everyone will die."