The same way we always were, she told him, and he hated it. If you kill a king, you take his castle.
“They gave you mine,” she says, a look of betrayal marring her face. “You’re taking it.”
If you kill a god—
They don’t speak after the fireworks end. Surprisingly, after she jumps from the branch she perched on, she waits for Basuin to climb down with her. Dawn is approaching, the sky colored in dark tones of lavender and periwinkle. She doesn’t tell him not to follow, and Basuin doesn’t ask if he can. Even when they reach the portal, they stay cocooned in silence until they are so far away from the bastion again that Basuin breathes without gunpowder stuffed in his nose.
She should have left him behind. Part of him would’ve preferred it. But it was he who followed—a searing need to know more, to understand what’s become of him. Of them. Their magic, a frightening link. And it’s he who speaks first, unable to keep himself from it.
“What’s your name?” he asks, after all this time.
She doesn’t glance at him. “The Forest God.”
Basuin almost laughs, but he can only huff a breath of frustration. “That’s not a name.”
“I don’t have a name,” she says.
“Everyone has a name,” he presses. If he can just prove that she isn’t a god—if he can find something human in her—then maybe he can convince himself that it isn’t real. Magic, and godhood, and duty. None of it is real.
Why did Kensy choose to conquer an island with magic running through its veins?
She pauses, one foot in front of the other. The Forest God looks at him from over her shoulder with dark eyes. There’s something alive in them, slant and narrowed, as her gaze flicks over the length of his body. Perhaps it’s the first echo of light, glittering through the canopy overhead, illuminating their color. Or maybe it’s the way her cheekbones strike him like a weapon.
“Ren,” she finally answers. “My name was Ren.”
He thinks it to be sort of lovely—the way she speaks her name as if it does not belong to her. It silences him, and he chooses to taste the back of his teeth with his tongue.
“I know your name,” she says before he speaks. “I know the name of every thing, living and dead, in this forest. The forest lives in me.”
Just as the wolf-man lives in him, he understands. Not deification, not really. But possession.
I am your god, the wolf-man had told him first. You are my possession.
“We’re all connected—Qia, Yaelic, Hami,” she names. “And now you, too.” She spits it like it’s something souring in her mouth.
They linger outside of Gyeosi. She might not let him inside this time. But then she moves closer, reaching her hand out toward him. Her palm comes to hover over where his heart should be, and Basuin inhales sharply. But she doesn’t touch him.
“You can’t feel it?” Her brows furrow.
There’s nervousness dripping down his throat and into his stomach. “No.” The absence of it makes him believe they’re not connected at all—that this is still just a dream he’ll wake from.
And why him? Why him at all? Gods are never bound to one another, so why does it ache like a leash around his neck that leads back to her hand?
Gods don’t belong to one another. The only ones he knows, the rare instance of a bond, are the sun and the moon. The push and pull of night and day. The rise and fall of sky.
But a forest god and a wolf god; they aren’t bound. They never would be. So why him?
Whatever this connection is between them, the magic they now share, he doesn’t know. His ma wouldn’t even know what it is, he’s sure.
For a moment, Ren stares at her hand just above his chest. Her visage doesn’t change. Then, she nods and pulls away. All she leaves behind is that leash-tight ache he can’t name, and then she releases the village’s barrier and heads inside.
“You’re letting me back in,” he says, but his words are as weary as they are wary. It feels like a trick. He’s too tired to discern whether it is or not.
She doesn’t turn to meet his eyes. “You’re taking my magic now.” Only the fist she makes at her side gives away that she’s capable of feeling anything at all. “I can’t let you go back to the army. I need my magic—here, in Gyeosi.”
His mouth is dry. “I don’t want your magic.” Silence, and then he wets his lips. “You can’t keep me trapped.”
“You’re a danger here and you’re a danger there.” Her voice is rueful, withering. But her shoulders slump, and the way she relents makes him sick. “Fine, then. It’s your choice—stay, or go.”
