Basuin is tired. He is so, so tired, and he has been for so long. So, without a word, he stumbles in behind her, choosing Gyeosi—for now, until morning, like he was promised.
Chapter 10
Bass.
There’s a whisper in the dark.
Bass!
A hand moves across his face. “What?” He sits up in his cot, rubbing sleep from his eyes. When he turns to his left side, there’s no one there. Basuin fists his hand in the sheets.
What if they surrender to us?
He kneels in the snow, helping ’Less with her boots. She smacks at his hands, but he laces them tight. So tight she grunts when he pulls the knot. At the fire pit, Mekal covers the smoldering embers with snow. The smoke smells like roast meat, and when he looks over, Mekal’s torch has been set aflame.
“Put that out!” he yells. The enemies will find them. It’s too late. Mekal snuffs out the light in the snow and it all goes dark.
It’s too late.
“I know,” he sobs. In the cover of night, Basuin climbs the face of the mountain. His foot finds a hold, but it crumbles beneath his weight. His palm splits open as he slides down the sharp rocks.
Curk catches him by the strap of his bag.
Fuck’s sake, you’re soft.
He pulls himself over the edge of the mountain, lying half-dead in the snow.
Gods’ sake, Cap’n.
Basuin scrambles forward, looking for Tomaas. Shit, shit, shit—Where is Tomaas? Fucking ginger head, it’s brilliant in this white fucking hellscape, isn’t it? But there’s so much blood. Red, fucking red. He’s drowning in it.
“Tomaas!” he screams. The wind is his answer.
Basuin charges forward, sprinting across the ice. Something grabs his ankle and he goes down, chin hitting the ground and blood bursting in his mouth. When he looks back, drooling red, Isaniel’s hand is wrapped around his leg.
Will you defy your orders?
“Isaniel—” he chokes. “Isaniel!” he screams to the blizzard that swallows him whole. The white drowns everything else out. The snow floods his vision and Basuin holds his face in his hands.
Isaniel stands before him. Blood dribbles from his mouth.
Don’t look at me like that, Isaniel says, his eyes black. You fucking liar.
Basuin sits straight up, clutching his heaving chest. Isaniel, Isaniel, Isaniel—his nails scratch his skin as he scrambles to hold his mother’s godstone in his shaking hand.
Isaniel, again. Basuin clenches his eyes closed, trying to catch his breath. Gods, Isaniel will never leave him alone. He deserves it.
He’s sweated through his sleep shirt, the cotton soaked all down his back. Basuin strips it from his skin, rubbing his eyes open. A sigh of relief leaves him as his vision returns. This isn’t Valkesta and he isn’t a captain anymore. He’s in Gyeosi, the spirit village—and Yaelic is gone, blanket mussed where he laid. Slivers of light cut through the gaps in the cloth door. It’s past morning.
Basuin lies back again, staring up at the oaken ceiling. He wipes the dampness from his eyes and rolls onto his side, but when he tries to sleep again, Isaniel flashes through his mind like a goddamn wraith.
He can feel the rage as it creeps up the back of his neck. It poisons his tongue and swells it until he can’t swallow, steals his hands away from him. It’s not often it shows up like this anymore, a slow crawl through his body that turns his flesh hot and his head hotter instead of a flash, like lightning that scorches the earth and cools as quickly as it came. His mother called him a stew pot, once. Put on to boil and even once the fire is put out, the cast iron bottom would burn skin at the touch.
Kensy always loved it when Basuin got heated like this. It made him the perfect warrior, a monster of rage. The perfect little soldier boy to do all of Kensy’s dirty work—no questions asked.
Basuin doesn’t plan on boiling over, but he feels it now. The urge sinking into his bones that scar them with char and soot. The palm of his left hand itches something rotten, like the unending itch of guilt under his skin when he feels sorriest for himself rather than the rest of his comrades he left lying in snow so red it no longer looked like snow.
When he unfurls his fingers, the black mark cut into his palm, bubbling with an angry red against the grain of his lifeline, stands out. It makes him want to vomit, looking at it. It makes him sick with a fury that starts in his stomach like the very stew his mother made out of him.
