Ren recoils, her sharp eyes going wide at Bass’ declaration. He’d give anything to know what she’s thinking, what images he would find in her mind. What does she think of him? Behind that steel-forged gaze and those onyx eyes.
Isaniel wasn’t like that. He wore every emotion on each facet and plane of his face. Basuin read him well—always.
“You won’t go,” she repeats his words, slowly, savoring each letter and rolling each word over her tongue.
“No,” he says. And he means it this time. He’s said no more than he has said yes, which is ironic. A soldier’s only words are “Yes” and “Sir.” There is no room for “No.” And yet, Basuin has said it so many times.
The first time he killed someone. The first time he held someone dying. The day his dagger took the life of a child.
When Isaniel called him a liar. And when Aless asked if they could turn back.
No, no, no—no.
But when he says it now, to Ren, it feels different. They stand, on equal footing, together against the same tide threatening to roll in. With no one else has duty felt so much like a burden, and yet a relief all the same. He’s drowning—but he’s ducking down under the waves to grab her hand and drown with her.
Ren can’t stop Kensy alone.
This is the closest they’ve been, he and Ren. She doesn’t smell of the dirt coating her legs or the blood which once stained her shirt. It’s sweat and it’s white lilies and it’s something else he can’t name. Ren’s face, once blank, shapes into something new. Confusion, laced with anger.
“I took you all the way here, and now you won’t see the elder tree.” Her voice is steady, but the cadence of it leaves him uneasy.
As if Ren did it out of the kindness of her own heart. He almost says it to her. Baits her response. But he locks a fist around it and hides it away.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he says.
“And why is that?” Ren says, voice coated in venom.
Bass doesn’t even know the answer. It’s all jumbled up inside him, and if he could reach into his chest and force his hands into the wolf-man’s cavity, maybe he could unravel it all and answer her.
He hangs his head, unable to hold Ren’s intense gaze any longer. “I won’t be the cause of someone else’s death,” he says. Not again.
It’s so quiet, this moment between them, despite all the life that lives in the forest. Things that live are loud. Things that are dead speak in whispers, and he and Ren both speak low.
“You won’t come back to life,” she tells him.
“I know,” he says.
“You will still be the Wolf God.”
“I know.”
“And you would accept such a sentence?” she asks, as though it were heavier than death. But Basuin is already dead, and he should’ve died many moons ago, and he still dreams of dying. But his death means Yaelic’s. His death is the death of Ren.
“I’m a soldier,” Bass answers. When his gaze finds Ren, her visage has fallen into something that makes him ache. Raw confusion, unmasked.
Softly, Ren says, “You’re a god.”
Bass’ lip curls in a smile. “That, too.”
Once again, Ren rears back, but this time it’s completely different than before. Her twilight eyes hold something new—the smallest hint of fear. She shifts from foot to foot as if something has uprooted her.
Before she can say anything, or dance away as she so often does, Bass speaks. “I’ll help you.”
Ren bristles, her shoulders rising like the hackles of a caged dog.
He takes another step forward. “You told me that you can’t fight an army. But I can—and I have. The sabotage—it won’t keep them at bay forever, Ren.”
The taste of her name is biting but sweet, almost as much as the shock that strikes her face. It’s the first time he’s thought to use it. To call her that. But by now it feels familiar, and it feels right.
