“If you don’t learn to control it,” her voice seeps low, “you’ll hurt Yaelic next.”
That makes him freeze. All the fight wanes from his body in an instant, even as the bubbling broil of anger in his stomach heats molten. His whole body seizes, frozen in time, Ren’s words engraving themselves into the hard-rucked iron of his brain.
Basuin can’t stay. If he doesn’t learn to control his magic, next time, it could be Yaelic he burns. But he can’t leave, either. If he goes back, Kensy will kill him—and then he’ll burn the forest down anyway, Yaelic still within it.
The wolf-man rolls onto its back, paws twitching in the air and making lazy, clawed swipes at his organs. It chuckles at him.
“All right,” he says. Surrender. Basuin draws his shoulders up, hunching over himself.
“All right,” Ren repeats, and turns to leave. There’s blood speckling the left sleeve of her shirt, trickling down her arm in fine lines.
“You’re bleeding,” he calls out without a thought in his head, before he can consider the consequences. He hurt her, too. Somehow, he hurt her, too.
Ren stops in her tracks. “A scratch.” She jerks her sleeve down, the collar of her robe flashing the slope of her shoulder to him, and lets the white cloth stain red as she mops up her own blood. “It will heal in time.” Her collarbones are fierce, jagged, angry and sharp the way she is.
But the wolf-man snaps its teeth, and Basuin’s god mark itches, and he can’t find the words to apologize.
Chapter 11
The moment Basuin exits his ruined hut, running from the sharp smell of smoke, someone yells above the noise of the village. A war cry.
Basuin turns, but not quick enough to dodge the body that barrels into him. They go rolling in the dirt. He gasps for air, wind knocked out of him as he hits the ground. His lungs are so empty they ache with a fever.
Black spots blur out the face hovering over him, but he can feel the press of ten fingers wrapped around his neck. He’s choking. He is being choked by someone with skin ochre and dark, with eyes beady and black.
“I can kill a god,” his assailant says, but it sounds far away. “I can. I can do it. I’ll kill a god—I’ll kill anyone!” They snarl like something predatory with teeth gnashed together.
The wolf-man inside him presses up on its four paws, stretching up on its hind legs and clawing into Basuin’s flesh. Its hunched back grows into Basuin’s spine and it balloons within his body until the black of its fur consumes him. Until wolf hair is spurting out of his mouth, coughed from his lungs like smoke and ash. Until he feels like he is trapped inside the wolf-man like the wolf-man stays trapped inside him, like they have taken each other’s place within this prison cell of what used to be a heart.
The wolf-man howls, and then Basuin snaps like a broken neck and howls, too.
He shoves his knee straight into the stomach of whoever is on top of him. They wheeze, grip loosening long enough for Basuin to gulp down air. He kicks them off but they claw at his body and take him with them, rolling through the dirt. Basuin reaches for his sword but it’s too far. He fights for his life, and his assailant fights back.
It’s only once Basuin topples them and gets an arm pressed to their neck that Ren stops them.
“Enough,” she says, voice loud but not yet a shout. It’s cutting, firm as a command so that his attacker drops their hands and lies still against the ground. Basuin, heaving breaths above them, pulls back an inch to let them breathe.
Yaelic scrambles forward from the crowd of onlookers. His hands pull at Basuin’s shirt, tugging him away until he is sitting in the dirt. Basuin touches the tender skin at his neck. It’s skin, still. It’s not fur. He’s still himself.
Anxious, Yaelic’s eyes glance back and forth between Basuin and the other. His assailant digs their nails into the dirt, crumbling it between their fingers. Their dark hair falls haphazardly over their shoulders, ends sticking out every which way.
They hiss at him, scrambling back on the forest floor. “What of a god who hurts those he’s sworn to protect?” they spit out, beady eyes staring him down.
I swore nothing, Basuin thinks he says, but it comes out garbled. “You are nothing to a god, nothing to protect,” he rasps out instead, but it sounds more like the scratching of the wolf-man’s claws against his vocal cords. Nothing of him. None of him is left.
The assailant lunges again, eyes raging mad, but there’s a burst of blue light that hits them both. Basuin flinches away from its brightness. There is no heat to it, no pain as he had anticipated, and he’s left with his arm covering his eyes until the light fades from view.
There, between them and towering over them despite her stature, is Ren. She doesn’t look angry, but the cool slate of her countenance isn’t the same one Basuin’s seen before. Her cheekbones are knives that could pearl with blood but she doesn’t even sweat. Her eyes are darkened amber, fossilized magic threatening to burn out the sun in the sky.
“I said—” her hair whips on the wind, “—enough.”
Basuin stares at his attacker still sitting across from him, steeped in the same shock. But then, just as quick, their eyes narrow back into sharp slits directed at him, and their nostrils flare.
“What kind of a god are you?” the assailant asks, wiping their arm over their face and smudging what looks to be ash painted in stripes down their cheeks. “A god who kills others? A protector who hurts those weaker than him?”
Again, the word clings to him. Wraps around his body and shoulders like it’s trying to find his neck and strangle him. Protector. It makes the scar over his left eye ache with phantom pain. Basuin isn’t a protector. He’s a soldier.
A god, the wolf-man nips at him. It noses his insides, snuffing, pulling him toward Ren.
