“Because I am too weak.” Her voice is strong, even as she admits her faults. “The army will come if we don’t stop them.”
“You didn’t stop them before they destroyed our village.” Now, Hou-tou bares her teeth, slides her eyes over to Basuin. A mouth full of calcium weapons, all serrated edges and sharp points to rip into something.
“When this forest falls,” Ren says, eyes narrowing, “you’ll lose your home, same as we will. You won’t remain unscathed. They will burn everything, like they burned Gyeosi—and they won’t spare you.”
Basuin feels like he’s choking on thick, cloying air. This isn’t a conversation. It’s a negotiation, and Ren is winning.
Hou-tou’s grin falls and her blue-clouded eyes turn sharp and cold. Like a lake iced over, brittle and deadly. She’s lost, and she knows it. In an instant, she sinks back into the water, backing down.
“Yes, Am-sa,” she cedes. The river bubbles and babbles and Hou-tou drops like dead weight into the water. Then, she races back up to the surface, body made of luster current and quick-moving streams. Her shape is outlined only by the moon, eyes clouded and blue, glowing pinpricks of light stemming from her body of water.
Hou-tou holds out a hand, but water pours from it. “Come, then,” she says, voice all river babble. “I hope you can swim, Wolf God.” Her eyes flicker to Ren.
Bass takes one step into the water, current flowing around his boot, hand outstretched toward Ren. But Ren hesitates, body rigid for a moment too long, before she places her hand in his. Her grip is shackling. Terrified. She takes two steps, wading into the cold stream with nothing but bare legs. As she moves to take her third, her fingers close over the jade godstone linked around her neck. It sends something in his chest wild.
Especially when she turns and looks at him, gaze holding a childlike fear. Ren has always been afraid of water, and this seems no different. Though her eyes are dusted silver with the moon’s light, there’s an innocence in them that reminds him of snow. Fresh, powdered, and something he, too, fears.
It makes him squeeze her hand and steady his arm and say, “I’ve got you.” Ren’s eyes widen, and he repeats it like a promise. “I’ve got you.”
And she moves toward him, each step dragging through the river and cutting through the current as they approach Hou-tou. As they get closer, hand in hand, foamy water builds around their legs until they can no longer move. Beneath them, a surface that looks like ice constructs itself around them, a glowing platform the water anchors them to.
“Go with grace, my gods,” Hou-tou says, and then she blows a kiss made of bubbles and they rush forward as if the river has burst through a dam, the trees blending and bleeding into nothing but blackness around them, wind blowing their hair back as they ride toward the north.
Basuin doesn’t know what’s more magical—the speed at which the river carries them with, or the way Ren clings to him in an embrace as they brave the gale that crows, Go back, go back, go back.
Chapter 33
The forest sounds like bells—like the ringing of the bells in Ankor. They rang when his mother fell ill. They rang when his father returned from war as nothing but ash. They rang when the villagers burned the church down and drove Basuin and his mother to the outskirts of the forest. Gods, they tolled, don’t exist.
They never did rebuild upon the ashes of the church. Sometimes he wonders what might replace it now, if Ankor still stands. If they built more little village houses, or if they built a casern.
He can feel it again—the press of the wolf-man against his body. The smell of singed fur as it grows along his skin. The blood of his nails as they sharpen to claws. They’re merging into one, he and the wolf-man. The hole in his chest is filling up with red magic and burgeoning anger.
The moon, silver soldered to the sky as they run through the woods, begins to blur into the wisping lavender of dawn. The sun hangs just below the earth and the first streaks of light—not even knowing that it’s light yet—begin to creep up on the shadows of the forest.
He hears them, the bells. They ring loud in his ears. His grasp on Ren’s hand tightens.
“What will you want to do?” Ren asks, breath steady even after all the land they’ve crossed. “When the army leaves.”
Bass, struggling to catch his breath, asks, “What do you mean?”
“Will you want to leave?”
It almost makes him stop in his tracks, halt their movement. He hasn’t thought of it. Ren can’t leave the forest—she’s a god. And not just any god, but the god of this forest.
“No,” he answers. “There’s no place for me in Xalkhir anymore.” If Ren isn’t with him, it doesn’t matter. Basuin can’t imagine a world where she isn’t beside him anymore. He doesn’t care that he’s bound to her. He would still go wherever she goes.
Ren nods, but doesn’t say anything else.
“We could rebuild Gyeosi,” he says then. The image of it is familiar. His hands, scarred, working to thatch a roof. Carving large oaks who no longer have a spirit into a home. Something on the outskirts of the village. He’s done it before.
“We could,” Ren says, a twinge of wonder in her voice. “Would you live there?”
“With you?” he asks.
“With me.” Her twilight eyes meet his and something warm runs through him, like a heat that belongs to him. Giving life to his veins. Damn him, he should kiss her. If he took two steps he could.
“Then, yes,” he says. “I would build a home.” A home for the two of them.
