A sound like a sob comes from Haaman, their nose pressed into the dirt. “I’m sorry, Am-sa. Truly, I’m sorry. Please, forgive me. I am loyal, I swear it.”
“Stand up,” she commands, and Haaman scrambles to their feet. “Wipe your face, sparrow. Look at me.”
Though her voice is soft, light and airy and spoken with such a calm cadence, her words hold no room for argument. Basuin almost stands at attention under the spell of her voice.
Haaman does as she says, wiping their face on their arm. Then, they take a breath and look at her, eyes full of shame. Basuin knows the feeling. That look. He knows it well and he knows he would have done the same as Haaman.
He did, at one point. Fight an army for Isaniel, to protect him. But he still marched Isaniel to Valkesta in the end.
“You are free to leave, Haaman,” Ren says. “You are not bound to this forest and you are not bound to me. I have never asked for your loyalty. The Wolf God has not either.” Ren speaks so gently that Basuin isn’t surprised when Haaman’s eyes fill with fat tears.
She speaks like a mother would. Scolding with love. Disappointed.
I’m doing this for you! he once roared at the top of his lungs at his mother, until his shouts shook the very roof he built for her. I have no choice but to go. Don’t you understand that?
And his mother, calm and gentle like Ren, but with sad eyes, looked at him from her bed and asked, Do you truly have no choice? Is there no path but the one you see in front of you?
Basuin takes his godstone into his hand and curls a fist around it. She was right. He had a choice, and he chose wrong.
Haaman cries into the crook of their elbow, hiding their face from the Forest God. Ko places his hand on their shaking shoulder.
“We are ever grateful to you, Am-sa,” Ko says. “Even if you do not tie us to you, we are loyal.”
Then, Ko turns to face Basuin, and he bows his head slowly and shallowly. Basuin doesn’t mind it. In fact, he bows his head right back, quickly retracting to stand up straighter. There’s the smallest quirk in Ko’s mouth, as if he’s amused.
“I apologize, Ko,” Basuin speaks first. “God or not, I have much to learn.”
“All is forgiven.” Ko draws his hand from the sleeve of his robe to wave Basuin off. “I am glad that no one was seriously hurt. I hope you will forgive my little bird as well, Wolf God.”
“Basuin,” he corrects. “My name is Basuin.”
Now, Ren turns her head. He can feel her stare on the side of his neck; she stands just outside the reach of his peripheral vision. What is she thinking? She’s unreadable, has been since they met. But he’d burn to know what she thinks of him.
Haaman’s dark skin has turned a shade warmer from their crying, but they wipe their face again and face Basuin. They hang their head, not quite a bow, but heavy with the same shame coloring Basuin’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” they say, shifting from side to side restlessly.
Yaelic, hands dirty, clings to Basuin still. His golden hair is mussed, and Basuin resists the urge to fix it for him.
“Myself, as well,” Basuin says, but it sounds awkward. In all his years given to the legion, Basuin’s never surrendered. He’s never had to—he’s always been victorious. Until he wasn’t. And even then, in failure, Basuin didn’t surrender. And look where that brought him.
None of this belongs to him. Not the land, and not these people. Not the gods who speak to him now, after he’s prayed for decades with no answer. Not the magic he never asked for.
Not even his own hands. He unfurls his fingers to reveal the scarred mark burned into his palm. Basuin couldn’t even control his own hands—he hurt someone else, again. Shame is the tongue of the wolf-man that licks up the walls of his esophagus. And Basuin bends to its will, this thing, this wolf-man, that’s possessed him. Like any soldier would.
He’s just that—a soldier.
A bad one at that, the wolf-man laughs at him.
He agrees. A bad one at that.
Chapter 12
Ren leads him to a grassy field outside the village, far enough that he can’t hear the murmuring of the spirits any longer. Close enough that the birds above the canopy sing down to them. It’s bright here, the sea of trees parted wide enough for him and Ren to stand twenty feet away from one another. The shadow of Ren’s hair darkens her face and obscures the color of her eyes, until she rolls her shoulders back and faces him with all the grace of a god.
“It comes from inside you,” she says, holding her right hand out toward him, palm faced up. The curl of her fingers hides the white lines he knows decorate her skin the way the black scars do his. Basuin copies her, with his left hand, eyes tracing the lines he’s studied before. He flexes his fingers.
He tries to picture it, the way Ren uses her magic so easily, effortlessly. He tries to remember the way that her blue magic coiled around her skin, dug into the earth of the Shaelstorm fields, burst from her fingertips like a firework shooting across the sky.
