Basuin shakes his head. Hou-tou smiles, and Basuin feels like he’s walking into a trap. He knows it, this time. But this isn’t Valkesta. He’s already dead.
“In the middle of this forest, there grows the elder tree. He is the biggest tree of them all, and the oldest. And it’s said—” her voice dips down low, “—that if asked, his branches can sever godhood.”
Basuin’s eyes widen, but he looks away swiftly. He doesn’t want Hou-tou to know how desperate he is, though he has a feeling Hou-tou already knows the depth of his wish to escape. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be here.
The wolf-man lunges and sinks its teeth into Basuin’s throat, puncturing his vocal cords. Basuin chokes, struggling for breath again, swallowing back the taste of blood. The wolf-man growls, but Basuin shakes it off and narrows his eyes at Hou-tou instead. Her lips are painted with the stain of crushed mulberries, and she runs her tongue over the top in wait.
“It’s been done before?” he asks, words careful.
“There has never been a god who wished to try.”
“Where is the elder tree, then?” he asks, and it makes Hou-tou’s grin widen into something devious. Her whole face brightens.
“Oh, my good gods,” Hou-tou hums. “I can show you the way.” Another stream rises from the river, curling up her thigh and wrapping around her waist. She wades closer to shore, closer to him, and it takes everything in Basuin not to step away.
“I can go myself.” He keeps himself tempered. River or not, Hou-tou sings like a siren. Basuin doesn’t trust her.
Hou-tou stops with a giggle. “The elder tree is the biggest tree of all—his roots are what feed us, what made us. The grove at the center of our forest is where it makes its home. They call it the Crying Trees. How sad.”
“If I go to the Crying Trees and seek out the elder tree to sever my godhood, what will happen?” Inside him, the wolf-man burrows somehow deeper into his chest. “Will it kill me?”
“No,” Hou-tou laments. “But Sa-cha might, if that is what you wish.”
The very mention of Sa-cha has Basuin leaning forward. “What do you mean?”
But Hou-tou draws back. With a twirl, she sinks back into the river. Her eyes lose their light as the playful act she’s put on fades. Her dark tendrils of hair float atop the surface of the river. Only her eyes, blue and clouded, peek out of the water at him. Her sudden withdrawal feels strange.
“I thought Sa-cha lived in the godrealm,” Basuin says, because it’s what he’s been told. Always what he’s been told. Sa-cha, the god of all gods.
He didn’t know gods could roam the land freely. All the stories his mother told him, they were just that—stories. Fairytales to pass the time, fables to put fear in him. Keep him out of that damned forest he was always coming home from bloodied.
Home to that little shack on the edge of the village, bordering the forest, hammering nails into the wooden boards he’s built and rebuilt to house him and his mother, patching the leaking roof with big palms he’s collected from the woods and woven tight together. He’s there again, back there, with her.
“Son!” she calls for him, voice thin with weariness.
“Yes, Ma?” She’s where she always is—in her bed, patchwork quilts pulled up her body, her frail hands working on something she shouldn’t be. Darning a pair of breeches for him.
“Son,” she says, eyes not meeting his, “don’t go to the forest today.”
“Why?” Basuin pulls up the little stool that sits beside her bed. “I’ve got traps to check. The other hunters will get to them first if I don’t.”
His mother lowers her sewing to her lap, hand reaching for the jade stone she wears, fingers closing over it. She bows her head, and outside the window next to her, the wind picks up, rushing through the trees and sending leaves spiraling downward.
“They’ve told me,” his mother says, voice low. “You can’t go to the forest, my son.”
“Who?” he asks her, but he knows the answer lies inside her clenched fist.
“The gods.” Her dark eyes are glassy from pain or from sickness or from something else. “They say you cannot go. Something is rotting inside the forest, and blood is the penance. You cannot go.”
Basuin clasps his hands together over his mouth, elbows on his knees as he leans closer to her. His mother’s fingers rub at the stone, wearing it with the warmth and oil of her skin.
“Okay,” he says. “I won’t go today, Ma.”
From the Winter River, his mother told, there arose a god, and that god was Sa-cha, and he was good.
Hou-tou shrugs, her voice yanking him from the memory. “Perhaps you could go back to your bastion,” she offers. No more mention of Sa-cha at all. “Turn yourself over to your godless soldiers. You’re a big god now, aren’t you?” She blows a whirlwind of bubbles his way.
Tongue between his teeth, Basuin barely breathes before Hou-tou bares her own sharp bite at him.
