The sole reason he enlisted was because they swore his mother would get the medicine she needed so desperately. The medicine they couldn’t afford, Basuin without work and his mother too weak. The villagers didn’t trust them anyway. Not after the legion came and burned the church to the ground; not after they forced Basuin’s ma out for speaking to outlawed gods.
If she was going to die anyway—if they were going to refuse her the medicine—Basuin would have stayed in that tiny shack with her until she passed, her hand wrapped in his.
A rustle through the brush. Basuin picks it up before Kensy does, who trudges forward with no care. The quick rustle of leaves against one another peaks in his left ear. But when he looks, there’s nothing.
And when he looks again, Kensy has moved on without him.
With a curse, Basuin creeps forward, but he’s never been good at keeping silent. His footfalls are too heavy. The clanking of his gear too loud. Out here, he carries only his sword and a dagger, but they still jingle with the shift of his body. The sound of whatever animal stalks them disappears under his movement forward, but it couldn’t have gone far. It wouldn’t have. Whatever it is, it’s a predator.
He needs to regroup with Kensy. But he doesn’t make it far before he hears it—a gunshot rippling through the forest. Basuin flinches, eyes shut tight. The moment will pass. It always does.
But then he smells it. First, the gunpowder. Then, the blood.
When his eyes flash open, it’s Isaniel’s face, stained with dark blood, that stares at him. His dear Isaniel, clay-colored eyes wild and wide open. The floor of dead leaves underfoot has morphed into cold snow. They aren’t laying in Basuin’s bed, naked bodies pressed together. They’re still in Valkesta, and Isaniel’s hand grips the heavy fabric of Basuin’s undershirt, refusing to let him go this time.
You’re coming with us, he says, eyes unblinking, lashes frozen with blood. To the Blacksalt Sea, Captain. You’re coming with me.
Basuin clenches his eyes shut again—tighter, tight, aching—and then blinks awake. Isaniel is dead. Isaniel is dead, and so is he.
No, fuck. No, Basuin’s not dead. Basuin could wish for death, but it would not come. He’s alive, in this forest, and there’s blood and gunpowder.
Basuin charges forward, following the smell perfuming from where the shot echoed. He runs after Isaniel. If he’s fast enough this time, he can save Isaniel.
The sharp tang of a fresh wound flowers in his nostrils just as he arrives at the body. It runs a shudder through him. There is blood spilled among the snow. Red, splattered across white, oozing from a lead bullet.
A wolf, fur tinged pink, lays among the dead foliage of the forest floor. Dark blood pools around its body, leaking from the fat hole lodged in its neck. There’s sulfur in the air. It chokes Basuin, watching the wolf’s back legs twitch in death. Why are there battlefields in the land of gods?
A bark of laughter bounces off the oaks as Kensy’s boots approach, his rifle still gripped in his right gloved hand. Kensy shot this wolf dead. It lies at Basuin’s feet, metal still bloodletting it even as the spirit leaves its body.
“See, Captain?” Kensy says. “This is why we have these.” He taps the barrel of the flintlock rifle against his calf, but his finger still sits to the side of the trigger. “Would your sword have drawn quick enough?”
New guns—new technology. It bled his men in Valkesta. But it was still a blade that scarred his face.
Basuin crouches there, laying one palm on the wolf’s snow-white fur, and grasps his mother’s godstone. Even animals should go to the Winter River. Basuin presses the jade to his lips, infusing some of his own soul in the stone to act as a vessel. It’s what his mother told him to do. It’s what he did in Grimmalia, even when the bodies he culled were torn ragged and in scattered pieces.
Except Valkesta. In Valkesta, he wasn’t given the chance to.
“What was it protecting?” he asks Kensy, wiping the wolf’s blood on his boot as he stands.
Kensy raises a brow. “Perhaps it was hunting its dinner.”
He shakes his head. “That’s not what it felt like.”
“Did your gods tell you that?”
Anger prickles under his skin. Simmering, Basuin strides forward, hand on the hilt of his sword hanging from the leather straps crossing his back. Kensy moves behind him, slower, the sound of brush beneath his boots much quieter than Bass’ loud steps. There’s something else in this forest.
An unfamiliar sound, one he can’t recognize at first, cries over the crow of the forest. Pealing, bell-like, painful. An animal whimpering. Two, maybe three—he draws nearer. Young. He shoulders his way through the trees.
Sunlight shines through the canopy above his head, raining down on a thick, gnarled tree. Knobby and twisted, as if it grew wrong. He hears them, under the earth. Basuin leans his hand against the bark of the tree, a shimmer of light striking the worn, scarred skin of his fingers. No—he feels it. Something moving, squirming, beneath the tree. Basuin crouches at the base of the tree just as Kensy catches up.
“What is it?” Kensy calls.
The twisted tree, branches growing out of its trunk in all different angles, thick and old, sits upon a raised mound of dirt. There’s a natural gap where the trunk meets the ground. Someone’s dug underneath it, between the roots this tree has sent into the earth. There are animal tracks leading from it.
Basuin runs his fingers down the bark of the tree. “A wolf den. She was protecting her pups.” And Kensy killed it. They got too close. Basuin should’ve stopped Kensy when he heard the mother circling them.
Behind him, Kensy approaches the tree with metered, swaggered steps. “A wolf den.” He chews on a piece of stripped bark he cut earlier in the day, crouching down at the base of the tree. “Well, isn’t that perfect?”
