“Then what will you do?” he asks, and the wolf-man snatches a rib from Basuin and splinters it. “Because this won’t stop them. Do you truly believe you can starve out a whole militant bastion and send them home?”
Ren’s eyes flash with something half malicious as she cuts her gaze to him. “Are you asking me to fight your legion?”
“No,” he says first, because he doesn’t think. “But you have to protect the forest. Isn’t that your duty?”
And what of you? the wolf-man mocks him. What will you do, Basuin of Ankor, to save the forest?
He’s giving up godhood. Giving his magic back to Ren. That’s all he can do.
“I can’t fight an army,” Ren says, and while it should sound like an admission, a weakness, she makes it sound like something already decided and at peace. “I won’t fight a war I cannot win.”
Ren pushes off the tree as if she might walk away, but she only paces two steps before stopping. He doesn’t understand it—that she won’t fight a war. There’s never been a time that Bass hasn’t been in war.
Always a war you can win, the wolf-man reminds him with a painful nip.
That’s true. Xalkhir has never had a bad hand in the war. They’ve always held high ground. Aggressive, always the one to start the fight and always the one to finish it, too. Even when Bass stood at the bottom of the Valkesi Mountains and stared up at their frozen peaks, even when he knew that it would be a lost mission, they were stronger.
But only because they made sacrifices.
What of the innocent? Basuin once asked Kensy as they stood across from one another, war plans on the table between them. These bombs—we can’t control the blasts, Commander.
And Kensy looked up at him, eyes iced over. What of them, Captain? This is war. We make the sacrifices that we make. Otherwise, we’ll lose. Then what will we have left?
Bass chose to climb those mountains. He chose to sacrifice himself and his men to the icy hellscape of bloody Valkesta.
“So that’s it?” Bass feels the simmer of anger in his bones. “You won’t fight them and the forest will die?”
“I am doing my best,” she snaps at him. “Before you came, I had more power. Their crops withered and their weapons jammed and their men woke from nightmares that made them fear the woods. But you’ve taken that from me.”
“Weak nightmares won’t stop any man,” he growls. He would know that best. “You’re not protecting anything with your god magic, your games.”
He expects her to respond with heat. But her shoulders only draw up, defensive, her eyes blank. Ren doesn’t look at him.
“Then tell me, what would you do? What is your plan to fight them, Basuin of Ankor?”
Gods, stop saying his name like that. Say it like anything but that.
But he doesn’t have an answer. Ren is right. The legion is massive compared to them, with weaponry and fire. They can’t answer that. Basuin was supposed to find a way to protect them, but all he can do is give Ren back her magic. What she does with it, that’s not on him.
But Ren will die. Yaelic, and Qia, and Hami, too. Once again, there are lives in his hands. Once again, he has nowhere to run but head on—toward the elder tree. He bites back the sting of selfishness he feels sitting on his shoulders.
Get it off of him. The magic, take it back. Drag it out of him with teeth and with claws, and take the wolf-man, too. He doesn’t want this. He’s never wanted any of this. If anyone would have listened, they would know that all Basuin ever wanted was to die up in those mountains, in Valkesta, honorably and unrecovered, with no war story left to bring home.
He doesn’t want to care about people dying anymore. He shouldn’t be here to care. This is Ren’s forest, and these are Ren’s spirits, and this is Ren’s responsibility—and fuck the guilt that he tastes in the back of his mouth because it’s her responsibility, not his.
Won’t someone just let him die? For good, for once?
And when he looks at Ren, those dark eyes of hers and that flat nose and those high cheekbones, he doesn’t see a woman right now. He sees a god with god magic trying to save her forest, her people, by weaving his biggest wound into her enemies’ minds—and still failing, alone.
Chapter 15
On the way back from the camp, Ren sucks in a hard breath and presses her hand to her chest. When he looks, there’s a red mark crawling over her collarbone, peeking out from the neckline of her robe. Did he burn her?
He doesn’t have a chance to ask. Ren picks up speed toward the portal, no words shared. But once her hands touch the gnarled bark around the portal, she looks up at him, lips parted in shock.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. A fear shutters over him—he’s drained all her magic. They can’t get back.
Ren looks back down, where the blue, swirling magic pools in the tree’s trunk. “One of my portals, I can’t access it. It’s gone. That’s never happened before.” Then, she turns her head, upward to the sky. “Something’s wrong.”
