“Please,” Yaelic begs. His voice is scratchy and raw and aching. “Don’t leave me.”
“Last chance,” Hami repeats.
Basuin’s head swims. It happens too fast for him to catch ahold of. He’s chasing something he doesn’t know the shape of. Then, in a flash of bright green that blinds the forest, Hami morphs and changes. When the glow dies, in his place stands a small wolf pup, shoulders hunched and hackles raised. A pup he’d held—a pup he’d saved from Kensy’s fire.
A spirit; a boy who lived in these woods until Kensy stormed them.
“No,” Yaelic whispers, a shake in his voice. He outstretches a small hand. “Don’t leave, Hami.”
But his words are lost under the shuffle of paws on bark as Hami turns heel and leaps into the distant trees, leaving his brother behind. Something inside Basuin aches like rotting flesh, oozing acrid pitch and swallowing his insides with it.
All is quiet until Basuin calls his name. “Yaelic,” he repeats, and the boy with golden hair nods. When he turns to look at Basuin, there are tears dampening his cheeks.
“You should go,” Basuin says. “Before he leaves you behind.”
Sharp and quick and unexpected, Yaelic’s whole countenance shifts into something firmer. He mops up his tears with his sleeves, sniffling.
“I won’t,” Yaelic says. Instead, he bows his head. “I owe you my life.” When he straightens, there’s a fire in his green eyes. It smothers the pain of his brother abandoning him. “Please. I won’t take no for an answer.”
He reminds Basuin of the young boy, only nine or ten, who watched his father march off to war. Of the young boy, only twelve or thirteen, who buried his father’s shield—or what was left of the dented metal. Of the young boy, only sixteen or seventeen, who had to join the legion so his mother would receive the medicine she needed to keep her heart beating.
Of the young boy he still sometimes sees in his dreams, floating away from his outstretched hand, hair shorn close to his ears. The one he still looks for in the mirror.
So he turns on his heel, facing away from the little spirit named Yaelic, and walks away.
“Go home,” he calls over his shoulder, gruff and demanding. “Get out of here.”
All he needs to do is get back to the bastion—he’ll figure it out from there. Basuin isn’t interested in picking up strays. He takes all of five steps before Yaelic is scrambling to catch up, his tiny boyish hands tugging on Basuin’s belt and reaching for the edge of his shirt.
“Please! I’m begging,” Yaelic cries out, the green of his eyes drowning in panic like sailors drown in the sea.
“You beg to serve me?” Basuin questions him, brows drawn. Something deeply painful settles in his stomach. Those who follow him, who serve under his command, always end up dead. Even his mother, whom he loved so fully, died at his hand.
“Yes,” Yaelic says. “Please. I don’t have anywhere else to go. There’s no home I can go back to anymore.” This poor little wolf pup, abandoned by his brother, dressed in a robe too long for his short, skinny legs. He needs to eat, put meat on his bones and grow muscle. And he needs warmer clothes, a good wash too. He needs to not be alone, Basuin realizes, as the boy’s fingers tremble where he grasps at Bass’ shirt.
I’ll send you home, Kensy had told him. Basuin remembers thinking, what home? There’s nowhere to send him back to.
Back to Ankor, Kensy said.
Home, where his mother’s bones might be buried in the back of that little shack on the edge of the woods. Maybe the villagers burned it all to the ground instead, like the army burned their church. Maybe she was still inside.
His godstone, hanging around his neck where it hung around his mother’s once, pulses and thumps in a rhythm that might match his heart if he still had one. He’d do anything just to have his mother here, to tell him what to do. But Yaelic, his head bowed to Basuin, shudders a sob and chokes it back. The sound makes him ache.
“All right,” he murmurs, hoping it will not be heard among the ambience of the forest. But Yaelic’s head shoots up, his eyes as wide as the moon when the month is grown and beginning to shed its skin for the next.
“Really?” Yaelic’s emerald eyes almost glow. “Thank you!” he shouts up at Bass, too eager for his own good. “Thank you, Wolf God, thank you!”
Before Basuin has a chance to take it back, Yaelic’s knees hit the damp, spongy earth beneath their feet. His hands sink into the forest floor as he bows his head to the ground, and Basuin takes a step backward, but it’s too late. The green light of Yaelic’s spirit bursts forth from the ground, spidering out like a crack opening the earth up, and breaks for Basuin.
It races up his limbs and hits him at the junction of his ribcage and his sternum, sending something warm through his entire system. It’s nothing like when the wolf-man forced itself into Basuin’s body; there’s no pain and no struggling, no suffering and no endless noise. It’s just warm, like the water his mother used to heat over the open flame of the fire for them to bathe in.
Basuin cries.
There’s no sound, but tears burst forth from his lashes without permission and something thick creeps up his throat. His lips pull back from his teeth as if he might laugh, hit with this uncontrollable urge to wrap his arms around himself and fall to his knees the way that Yaelic kneels to him now.
Warm, wet tears run down his face as he clutches his chest, at the very point where Yaelic’s spirit floods into his own—a braid of their threads, a connection—and Basuin cries.
I’m sorry, someone says. That little white wolf pup, who sits in the dark and looks up at him with sad green eyes. I didn’t mean to make you cry.
