But then, Ren wraps her arms around herself and cries, turning to hide her face. Basuin stretches his fingers out, unable to name if it’s grief or guilt.
The walk to Gyeosi is slow and metered, when Ren finally turns her back on the clearing. Time ticks away for an eternity and he lets it, unsure of what he can say. I’m sorry the legion is destroying your forest. I’m sorry my people are killing your people. I’m sorry I didn’t die the right way.
In the end, neither of them say anything at all.
He can’t even remember what the legion would tell the Grimmalian refugees when they came and conquered. It all blurs together, all of it the same. Comfort is a lie manufactured to make the winner feel better—and he’s always been on the winning side.
By choice, he reminds himself. By choice.
Something tightens in his chest, and it’s not the wolf-man’s claws in his lungs anymore. Even now, he’s making the same choice. Giving up godhood. Giving Ren’s magic back so she has a fighting chance against the army. He’s choosing to stay on the winning side.
Or, abandoning the losing side. What a haunting thought. What a cowardly decision.
“Why?” Ren’s voice, quiet and flat, makes him jump. It’s like she can read his mind.
He wets his lips. “I don’t know,” he answers, in truth because he doesn’t know what she’s asking.
“No.” Ren slows to a stop and it sends a chill trembling through him. “Why are they leaving the bastion?”
Basuin turns to look at her. “What?” She said it so solemnly. Alarm bells, war cries, screams of help ring in his brain.
Ren meets his gaze. “The army is moving. Before you arrived, they stayed close to the bastion. Now, the camps keep changing. They’re moving north. I don’t understand why.”
His stomach curls until he’s out of breath. It aches, the realization born of Ren’s words. Of Kensy’s visitation, of the threat he laid between himself and Basuin. Ren thinks it was Basuin’s arrival that changed things, but it wasn’t. It’s Kensy’s.
She doesn’t know—and he doesn’t know what Kensy’s looking for. Basuin opens his mouth, searching for the right words.
But then, a voice calls out, “Hello?” It comes from his left, deep in the woods, cutting through the darkness. “Is anyone out there?” a woman calls, but Basuin hears no footsteps on the ground. No movement, just the ghost of a voice. “I need help,” she calls meekly, a needle of fear piercing her throat.
It must be a soldier. From one of the camps moving, pushed up from Shaelstorm. But they shouldn’t be this far out in the forest alone. Ren is paces ahead of him now, looking back at him in wait. But Bass stands still, at attention, locked in place by the siren call for help that only he seems to hear.
The voice warbles with panic. “Captain?”
He knows that voice. He knows her. Basuin breaks into a sprint through the forest, racing toward her.
“Aless!” he shouts. The foliage is a blur around him. “’Less!” he yells again, until he bursts through a gap in the trees and sees her—back facing him, still armored, cloak missing. Her blonde hair is strewn from the braid pinned to her neck, mussed and frizzy. And when she turns around, she’s exactly the same as she always was. Deep-green eyes and worried brow and smatterings of freckles along her nose.
Basuin skids to a stop in front of her, chest heaving. “’Less,” he calls again, eyes searching her body for wounds. But her head—her head is still intact. No cut mars her neck. She looks exactly as she was before they climbed those mountains. He breathes hard, especially when Aless’ face brightens with a streak of hope among the fear as soon as she sees him.
“Can you help me?” She rushes forward three steps in a familiar canter, hands pressed together at her chest. “I’m lost. I don’t know how I got here. I need to get back,” she says, her eyes widening as if she’s realized something. “I have to go back—they need me.” She raises a trembling hand to her mouth, panic coloring her eyes.
“It’s okay, ’Less,” he says, taking two steps forward to meet her. “It’s over now. We can go back together.” Basuin holds a hand out to her. They can go back to Shaelstorm, mourn over a pail of cold ale, get on a ship back to Ha’riste.
But Aless stares at his chest as if looking through him. “Do you know where we are?” she asks.
“Aless,” he repeats, something ripping through the hole where his heart used to sit.
“I’m looking for the Winter River,” she says. “That’s where they told me to go—but I’m lost. Please,” she begs. “Can you help me?”
Everything in him—every shred of hope and every star he could have wished on and every prayer he could have made—turns to rot in his organs.
“I can,” Ren says from behind him, and his body goes shock-still, limbs rigid and shoulders back as he stands at attention. He stares down at Aless, her face flooding with relief.
“Thank you,” Aless sighs out, and then her lips peel back to reveal that nervous smile she would always wear when she spoke with someone new. When the spotlight fell on her with her next promotion. And when he asked her to go to Valkesta with him. All thin lips with the press of her tongue behind her teeth.
Ren moves to stand next to him, her head at his chest, extending her hand. Aless takes it, but the skin of her fingers turns to a ghostly white where her palm meets Ren’s.
“I don’t know how I got here,” Aless says, her voice growing watery and weak. “I really need to get back to them. I can’t let them be alone.” Tears begin to fall from her glassy green eyes, but she doesn’t wipe them away. She lets them careen off her chin.
