But it doesn’t keep the nightmares of his crimes away. It doesn’t make Isaniel stop shouting and screaming and pleading for Basuin to let them turn back. It doesn’t erase Isaniel shoving him across the tent, breaking the water pitcher, calling Bass a liar.
Men like us, Kensy once said, hand clapping Basuin’s shoulder blades, we can’t help it. There’s fight in our bones, in our blood. But we do it for good, even when it feels evil. That’s the ugliness of being captain.
He would hurt them, he decides. He would hurt anything if it meant he could go back in time and stop himself from marching to Valkesta.
Don’t look at me like that, Isaniel had said, arms tight around himself. You fucking liar.
From the edge of his vision, Yaelic darts in front of him, putting himself between Ren and Bass.
“Am-sa,” Yaelic cries out, bowing his head until it touches his knees. “We are so sorry, so sorry, so sorry…” The little wolf pup apologizes again and again, echoing in this little hut Basuin’s almost burned down. Just like the legion. Yaelic apologizes the way Basuin should’ve.
I never lied, he told Isaniel. But he should have just apologized.
Ren’s hand descends upon Yaelic’s golden locks, her fingers combing back the strands. She reaches to tip his head upward, to guide him to look at her. Now, her face has gone gentle, softening as she frowns down at him.
“You mustn’t apologize for him,” she tells Yaelic, and her hands move to cup his cheeks. Ren’s thumbs catch fat, hot tears that have started to stream down Yaelic’s face, and Basuin looks away.
Yaelic hiccups with tears. “But I bound myself to him, to serve him as his charge.”
“He is a god,” she says. “You are but a spirit. Children do not apologize for their parents.”
It feels like seventeen straps across Basuin’s back in quick succession—a number he can’t remember why he knows so well, but the lashes from his days in training are well kept in his mind. Punishment, to beat the gods out of him. How ironic.
Inside of him, finally, the wolf-man chuffs. It laughs at him. It scratches at his bones, wanting free. Basuin stands stiff and still, pulled into himself, gaze stuck on the floor. He doesn’t care. He didn’t ask for godhood, for magic. He doesn’t know these people, these spirits. He’s cared much less about many things. Soldiers can’t care—they can’t feel. It’s why he never looked at any of their faces, the men and women who fought for Grimmalia and their gods.
Guilt twists his stomach. Basuin is a soldier, not a god.
When Ren finishes wiping Yaelic’s tears away, she straightens and rolls her shoulders back, rising to her full height. Still small, but godly. Her eyes cut into him, icy and mean, but somehow burning hotter than the wild magic he’s unleashed upon the room. Then, she presses her hand to Yaelic’s back, leading him toward the doorway, and Basuin is alone again.
The hut washed in black soot stains doesn’t smell of blood or even gunpowder—only the remnants of something burned. But his brain twists it, alchemizes it into smoke wafting from the barrel of a gun beside his head. The smell of death is poignant and fickle, but it coats the insides of his nostrils like tattoo ink, embedded into his skin. Tangible, rather than memorialized.
This isn’t the first time Basuin’s hurt someone, woken from dreams that are too vivid to just be dreams. And the first time was much bloodier.
When Tehali held her face between her hands, red blood spurting from a gap between her fingers, repeating over and over again: It’s okay, it’s all right, you’re okay, you’re all right. And he could not hear her chants over his own screams.
He cringes now, slapping a hand over his mouth and dragging his nails through his tangled beard. It smells of blood in here.
Squatting, he reaches for the still-smoldering sheet strewn across his sleeping mat, but his hands are shaking. Panic shoots through him, icy and biting. So different from the fire that shot from his fingers in fear.
He never thanked Tehali. His pride has always been quick to spit like a venomous snake at anyone who dared lend him a hand. Tehali let herself be poisoned most out of them all—because she was the only friend he ever had. If she were here, she’d sweep up the mess herself. Tehali always cleaned up after him, on the wintry nights when he’d ask her, until his throat ran raw, why she didn’t leave him to die in Valkesta.
Movement from the doorway interrupts his thoughts, and Basuin turns. Ren stands among the wreckage of the hut, eyes scanning over the room all blasé. Her mouth is set in a hard, flat line.
He doesn’t speak first. The stubborn streak in him won’t allow his mouth to move.
“I’m not surprised,” she says. “I knew you were a danger.”
It makes his jaw tighten, but he doesn’t reply.
“You need to learn to wield it.” There’s no room for argument.
Basuin turns to face her now, eyes meeting her ever-dark gaze. What makes this woman a god? She’s so slight—nearly half his stature, thin-limbed and fragile and too pretty to be facing war with a legion like Kensy’s. But it’s the way she raises her chin and looks down the slope of her nose, the way her eyes steel over and spark with fire when anger makes her throat tighten, that makes him almost believe she would be a god.
The way she holds herself, standing in the treehouse, shoulders rolled back and one hand against her hip. All confidence, no room to be moved.
He can only bite back, it’s all he has within him anymore. “Learn the magic you think I’m stealing from you? Is that what you want me to do?”
Ren’s eyes narrow into knife-edged slits. For a split second, she makes like she might move. March over to him and rise to his height just to curse at him as she has before. But Ren stays planted.
