For their next adventure in the Kingdom Beyond, twins Kiya and Kinjal must help the flying horses with a sudden invasion of their lands.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Sayantani DasGupta’s The Ghost Forest, which releases on April 2nd 2024.
The Kingdom Beyond is overrun with bhoot (ghosts who live in trees), and Kiya and Kinjal are the best hope of finding a solution. The ghosts are angry and dangerous-with one look they can steal your soul-so the twins must be extremely careful and use all their wits to help their flying horse friends and the rest of the inhabitants of the magical land so important to them. But what if the bhoot are angry for a reason? What if it’s their very own home trees that are being cut down, leaving them with nowhere to go?
This time, Kiya and Kinjal face danger from even those they are trying to help. Can they find out who is destroying the ghost forest?
Chapter 2
Ghost Ladies in Trees
THEIR PAKKHIRAJ HORSE friends were at the far corner of the backyard, near a bunch of trees their gardener, Baba, had planted last year. At least the trees gave them a little cover, because what their neighbors would think if they looked over and saw a giant black and giant white winged horse in their yard, Kinjal had no idea.
“Raat! Snowy!” Kiya called as she ran toward them,Thums‐Up right at her heels. “What are you doing here?”
“Nothing wrong in the Sky Kingdom, is there?” Kinjal was excited to see his friends but more than a little worried that them showing up meant that Kiya was right—there was some trouble happening in either the Sky Kingdom or the Kingdom Beyond, and because of that, he would have to miss the big party at the bookstore for Ghost of the Sloth King. “Everything’s fine, right? You’re just here to hang out or something? Maybe celebrate bhoot chathurdoshi?”
Raat shook his mane with so much vigor, he created a little whoosh of wind. “I am not a fan of those fourteen kinds of greens. They make me gassy.”
Kinjal remembered why he loved the sometimes-ornery horse so much. He reached up to pat his friend on the shoulder. “Same, bud. Same.”
Thums‐Up yipped and jumped around, as if agreeing with them.
“Greens are delicious! I don’t know what’s wrong with both of you!” Snowy said with a snort. He nudged Kiya with a snow-white muzzle. “Surely you agree with me, little Kiya?”
Kiya looked startled. “Oh! Yes! Love ’em! Greens! Can’t get enough of them!”
Tilting her head side to side, Thums‐Up studied Kiya’s face, then whined, her ears down, like she could tell Kiya was lying.
“But we’re not here to celebrate any holiday, or eat any greens,” said Raat, adding in an undertone, “Thank goodness.”
Kinjal felt his stomach drop. The last two times Raat and Snowy had shown up in their backyard, the pakkhiraj horses had needed the twins’ immediate help. Kinjal, his sister, and Thums‐Up had flown off with their friends to the Sky Kingdom to solve first a problem they were having with pesticides and dying bees, and then with water pollution making the oceans poisonous for water pari—the winged and finned mermaids of the Kingdom Beyond.
“Maybe you’re here to finally catch up with our parents?” Kinjal suggested hopefully. “Tell our baba how much you’ve missed him?” He and Kiya had recently found out that the two pakkhiraj horses had been the steeds of their father, Arko, and one of his younger princely brothers before they’d been exiled by their youngest brother, Rontu. Kinjal was still holding out hope that this wasn’t some kind of “we need your help right away” emergency after all, and he’d somehow be able to go to the bookstore and get his early copy of Ghost of the Sloth King.
But his hopes were pretty much smashed to smithereens at Snowy’s shake of the mane. “I wish we were here on a social call. I know last time we said we would try to spend time with your parents soon.”
“So you’re here because you need our help?” Kiya’s face was practically beaming with joy, her eyes shining like headlights from behind her glasses. Honestly, Kinjal thought, for someone who liked everything organized and logical and planned out, his sister was way too fond of intergalactic adventure-making. “Is it Sesha and his storm snakes? Are they making mudslides and floods again? Or forest fires?”
Sesha, the snake king, was as evil an evildoer as Kinjal had ever heard about, or read about. The last time they were with Raat and Snowy on a mission, they’d had to help a bunch of villagers who had been displaced from their homes by Sesha and his storm snakes, who were running around making disasters happen everywhere they went. Just for the fun of being evil!
“No, it’s not Sesha,” Raat said, adding, “surprisingly enough. He and his storm snakes seem to be taking a break with their mudslide and flood making. At least for the time being.” The big horses snorted, peering into their faces. “What do you know about bhoot, little foals?”
“Ghosts?” Kinjal groaned. “That they’re lactose intolerant?”
Snowy gave him a puzzled look and Raat out-and-out guffawed. “I suppose they could be, but I’ve never heard of that.”
“He’s joking, don’t listen to him.” Kiya rolled her eyes. “Baba’s read us ghost stories from Thakurmar Jhuli,” she said, mentioning the magical old book of Bengali folktales their father sometimes read to them from. The stories in that book were powerful, but they didn’t just connect them to the land their parents had come from—the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers—the book itself had also saved the twins a bunch of times on their recent intergalactic adventures.
“He read to us about all the different kinds of bhoot—petni, shakchunni, mechho bhoot,” Kinjal added.
There were a lot of Bengali folk stories about ghosts—who held on to the qualities of the alive humans they’d once been. So petni were the ghosts of unmarried women; shakchunni, ghosts of married women; mechho bhoot, fish-eating ghosts; and so on. Kinjal particularly liked the idea of greedy ghosts who craved a certain kind of food.
“Remember the story was about a ghost lady who lived in a tree?” Kiya wrinkled her nose as she tried to remember. “She tried to take the place of a mom in her family byjamming the woman into the tree trunk, then taking over her life?”
Snowy whinnied in recognition. “Yes! In that story the shakchunni gets caught because she gets too lazy to do her housework, and so she extends her arm out the window to pluck a lemon rather than go outside and get one like a normal person.”
Even as Snowy said this, Kinjal remembered how he had only a few weeks ago spotted their own Ma extend her arm to catch and then release a flying bee. It was the first time he’d realized that their mother might be more than just a regular ordinary suburban mom.
Excerpted from Secrets of the Sky: The Ghost Forest by Sayantani DasGupta, Copyright © 2024 by Sayantani DasGupta. Published by arrangement with Scholastic Inc.
