Chapter 20
There are no homes left here for a funeral. Everything has been burned, and what hasn’t is torn to the ground out of love. All who are left strip Gyeosi of everything it was as if they can cleanse it. But there is too much blood and too much ash. Still, the living take their loved ones down to the creek to wash their bodies. There is no rice to give them before they are buried, so they are buried with orchids and lilies and yarrow growing from their mouths.
There are still villagers out there now, crying. An older sister lying atop her younger sister’s grave, clutching her chest, screaming. “Ya!” she sobs, clawing at the fresh dirt. “Answer me! Where are you going? Not without me—not without me, please,” she begs.
Basuin never cried, but when he brought Isaniel back with him in pieces to bury, Kensy gripped his shoulder so hard it smarted and bruised. Soldiers don’t cry. Soldiers move on, or they die in Valkesta, or they are sent across the sea to a new continent as punishment.
It wasn’t just punishment. Kensy meant to use him—to manipulate the only man he knew to still worship the gods. Kensy’s always used Basuin because Basuin’s always let him. And now, he fears what Kensy looks for in this forest. He fears what Kensy will do if he finds any gods left here.
He fears for Ren. Because if she knows where that godly artifact hides, then Kensy won’t hesitate to kill her, too. Kensy warned him the first time and Basuin didn’t listen.
Ren is weak. Her clothes are stained red and her magic wanes—he can feel the loss of it. He’s the one that took it, again. And again. And now—and again.
Among the remains of her village, Ren sits in the charred hollow of a tree that once held the homes of spirits, legs folded beneath her. Even when she couldn’t find the strength to walk the lingering spirits of the dead to the Winter River, Ren didn’t cry. She sits in her calm demeanor before those who are left, red mottled skin peppered with blisters and burns.
“You will leave,” she tells them, “and you will never come back here.”
There are gasps and tears among the villagers and Basuin swallows back bile.
“There is nothing left here for you,” she continues. “The army has come, and they will come again. They will destroy this forest if they aren’t stopped, so you must leave.” For a moment, Ren’s eyes drop, only to find the crowd once again. “There is still time. Go to the north—there are villages there where you will be safe. We will slow them down, push them back.”
“But will you stop them?” a woman shouts from the crowd, her face screwed up and stricken. “Must we die for this?”
Someone yanks on the woman’s arm, shaking her to stop. Bass feels his legs start to move, to shield Ren and to speak in her stead. It’s automatic; he won’t let another spirit hurt her for his crimes. But as if Ren senses it, her hand halts him.
“How are we supposed to believe going north will save us?” someone else, someone younger, yells. “You don’t even know how to stop them!”
“I’ve not led you astray before. But I can’t promise you anything, either,” she says truthfully. “All we can do is try.”
Behind the crowd, in the trees, Ko pulls Haaman into his embrace, folding them into his long swathes of sleeves. Bass should look away, but his eyes linger. From this distance, the image of them together is blurry. It makes something deep in his stomach ache.
There is silence, and no one moves until Ren speaks again.
“I am sorry,” she says, though it’s quieter than the rest of her words have been. A wave of crying ripples through the spirits, some bowing their heads and some hanging their heads and some leaned back and wailing for their dead.
One man stands, and he bows with his whole body to Ren. “Thank you, Am-sa.”
Ren closes her eyes and bows her head back to him. She doesn’t speak, but Bass reads her lips. The magic thread between them, linking their fingers from afar, pulses.
“Do not thank me.”
She sits there, even as people begin to leave. Even as the dead are brought from the creek and buried in the shallow graves that have been cut to size. Even when Ko and Haaman disappear into the forest, saying they’ll be back at dawn. Even when Yaelic stops crying after Hami’s grave is covered, Qia hugging him and helping him back to the hut.
She sits there, and Basuin stands beside her, a stone guardian at her side. He’ll be the last.
It’s only once the moon has risen to the center of the sky, a sliver of it left, to signal that the darkest night is on its way, that Ren unfurls her limbs from the hollow of the tree. Bass reaches for her hands and catches her as she stumbles on weak knees. Her fingers dig into his arms and her weary body trembles in his grasp.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” Ren whispers to him. It makes her seem so small, so vulnerable. Bass thought she would die at the Crying Trees when he left her. Even now, she’s pained, skin fragile and chilled to the touch. Only the places where she’s burned still hold a heat unlike any other.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says. “I told you that. We’ll figure it out, once you’ve healed.”
Ren laughs, cut and dry and sour and not at all sweet and church bells and starlight like he once heard before. “I may not heal this time,” she says. “I may never heal from this.” Her words are biting, coated in poison he could lick from her teeth.
“How were you hurt?” he asks, eyes drawn over the marks littering her body. He saw it before—the way she bled from her arm, the way blisters crawled across her skin.
“Gyeosi burned,” she says, as if it makes sense. As if all the times he’s seen her—cut and burned and bruised and hurt—should make sense. Wounds he could not place. Things she refused to say.
Gyeosi burned and Ren hurt for it.
