And, as if intended, the wolf-man inside him howls as loud as Isaniel did. Magic pulses hot and alert in his hands. He can feel it, for the first time. He can feel it strain against the rough and scarred skin of his palms, wanting to escape. Wanting to hurt something, to create something. To be wielded.
He makes his fists so tight his blunt nails dig into his flesh, caging that panicked magic away.
“We’ll be at the Crying Trees before the sun sets,” Ko says, ripping Bass out of his own head. “We’ve kept good pace.”
It hasn’t felt like good pace. It’s felt like a fight at every step. Maybe that’s the wolf-man’s fucking claws in his fucking ribcage, or maybe it’s the leash that keeps him dragging behind Ren.
He needs to focus on bigger things. On getting to this goddamn elder tree and cutting the wolf-man out of his breast. On dragging his dead, broken body back to Shaelstorm and begging Kensy to get out of the forest.
He needs to focus on anyone but Ren who walks, so confidently, through the forest. If he looks at her, she’ll know. Somehow, she always does. But he can’t stop himself from looking at her anyway.
She knows his greatest weakness now. His best failure. It’s only fair for her to tell him why no one else calls her Ren. Why her name doesn’t seem to belong to her. What her greatest failing was, or is, or will be.
But Basuin will never know.
It’s Yaelic, in the end, who rips him away from Ren. Bouncing to him, tugging on his breeches, complaining that they left Qia in Gyeosi to help the refugees. It keeps him from the spiral of thoughts Bass gets locked in so easily. Yaelic’s a child, just a child, really. Not so unlike Bass, before he grew big and tall and had to duck through the door of their little hut—the doorway he built when he was much smaller.
But Basuin wants Yaelic to grow up strong, like he did. Not because he’s alone, but because he has Basuin and Ren and the forest to help him grow stronger. Only, Basuin won’t be in that image much longer.
Funny, how fate works. But the wolf-man growls, chewing on his bones, and it isn’t so funny then.
Chapter 18
The Crying Trees are somehow sadder than he imagined. Somehow grand, still. Like Gyeosi, it’s made up of a huge network of trees. They branch out to their brethren as if holding hands, standing tall enough to block out the sky. But they weep. Every tree’s head is bowed, back broken, leaves falling like tears all over Bass. The crowns all connect in some spiderweb of a way, as if a mother has braided all her daughters’ hair together.
He can’t stop looking upward. Who are they crying for? It makes something deep in his chest ache like his teeth did when he first bit into a peach pit.
“They are grand,” Ko says, standing at his side. He raises a hand and gestures languidly toward the center of the Crying Trees. “From where we began.”
And where he ends—a reminder of why he’s here. Basuin shudders a breath. “They must be powerful. What magic do they hold?” Even here, where he is soon to die, Basuin tries to figure out Kensy’s next steps. If the artifact he’s searching for is here at the elder tree.
Ko hums. “Power only matters to humans. Here, we give life. The trees are full of it.” When Basuin looks at him, Ko gives him a lazy smile. “There’s no magic here for mortals. The elder tree only answers to gods.”
Power only matters to humans. How true, and yet how ironic it is all the same. Did he ever care for power when he was human? When he was a soldier?
Basuin stares up at the Crying Trees and loses all sense of time, barely noticing when Ko begins his slow walk back. He wants to cry with them. He misses his mother, and there’s nothing here for humans like him—like he used to be. No power, no magic. And nothing here for Kensy to find and break and steal.
Fear grows thick and fuzzy in his throat with each step further into the trees. Guilt, and shame, and—if Basuin was still just a soldier, knee bent to Kensy, would he have come here with hand cannons too? No Ren to stop them, no Ko to tell them there is no power here for mortals? It grows hotter in his chest until Ren approaches his side and everything stills in the radius of her presence.
“I love this forest,” Ren says, out of nowhere. A declaration, but softer, said with her full chest. He’s always known it. And more than that, this forest loves her back. She’s lucky in that way, to love something so fully and to have it love her in the same way. More than loyalty. Less than self-sacrifice.
Her eyes shine with something right on that thin line of love and hatred when he meets her faraway gaze. Basuin didn’t know eyes could be that dark and that bright all at once until Ren.
“Are you coming?” Ren asks, shaking him from solitude and forcing him to look. She’s standing in that way he’s come to know as familiar—her shoulder facing him, turned halfway, eyes locked on him. She’s a waif of a god, thin from the side. As sharp as her mind seems to be.
He hates that she’s so damn pretty.
“To where?” he asks instead of answering.
Ren stares at him, as if thinking for a hard minute. Then, her gaze falls and her chin drops as she turns her back to him. “I’m taking you to the elder tree.”
He freezes. Right. That’s what they came here for. All this way for him to see the elder tree, to ask for his godhood to be severed. This isn’t a field trip; it’s a funeral march. There’s nothing left for him here.
If Basuin dies, where does Yaelic—motherless and scared and lonely—go? He’ll have to get on his hands and knees and beg Ren to take Yaelic as her charge. If Yaelic doesn’t run off into the forest and leave Hami without a brother again. The thought makes his hands sweat, his fingers curling into fists only to stretch out once again to feel something.
He begged for death before, same as he’ll go to the elder tree. When Tehali sat by his cot in the healing huts, listening to Bass scream—in pain, in anger, in grief, in rot. She told him he would tear his stitches. He told her to fuck off.
Even now, he tastes blood in his mouth. This time, it’s from his teeth biting into his tongue as he stares at Ren. She hasn’t moved forward in his hesitance. Gods, he could take her by the shoulders and shake her. Ask her if she feels superior. Ask her if she knows everything, named and bloodied and dead.
