“Why didn’t you go home?” she asks instead. Basuin chokes. “Why did you let Kensy bring you all the way out here?” Her words slither around his ankle like a snake, a warning hiss before the strike. This isn’t a social visit.
He inhales through his nose. “I am a soldier.”
Tehali laughs. Short, blunt. “And when you die?”
“I’ll die a soldier.”
The waves have picked up, crashing violently against the cliff’s edge. The shore beneath them spells death.
“Then tell me,” she says, looking up at him, coal-black eyes meeting his, and Basuin snaps back into the present. “What does it mean to be a soldier?”
Cryptic nonsense. He doesn’t understand what Tehali is trying to pry at, though he knows her well enough to think she must be trying to pry at something. Tehali’s favorite thing in the world is taking logic and twisting it into a weapon that could kill a man in his own argument.
“To fight for your country. Your people. To be strong and loyal. To be brave, and courageous,” he tells her. “To follow orders.” The way he was always taught to follow orders. Even his mother taught him that. To follow the trail the gods blaze for you without question. “That’s what it means to be a soldier.”
Tehali goes quiet again, rolling his words around in her head. Basuin wouldn’t know what that’s like—to take a thought and simmer on it like a stew. Basuin thinks and then he does, the way he was always taught. The golden rings adorning Tehali’s ears glitter magnificently in the setting sun, and if magic still existed, she would’ve possessed it.
But magic no longer runs through this land; all that’s left are the bodies of forgotten gods.
When Tehali finally looks at him, her face is a blank slate, but her eyes are narrowed like the eyes of an animal readying to hunt. Basuin is not afraid. He meets her gaze with steel, stubborn and unyielding.
“And what if you were no longer a soldier?” she asks.
He recoils like he’s taken a blow to the chest. Crippling, because if he’s honest—to Tehali, and to himself—he doesn’t know the answer. His heart-bone, the trunk of his tree, is reinforced with militant commands and strengthened by break after break after break where his body had to regrow bone and heal again, organs reincarnating themselves after his blood painted every border that Grimmalia ever thought they had.
“Who would you be?” Tehali’s eyes bore through him. “When you take off your armor, who are you, Bass?”
No one.
“The same,” he answers instead, but his body feel heavy—like he’s strapped in plate armor, readying to run to the front again.
He expects her eyebrow to raise, the corner of her lip to quirk into a knowing smile, her eyes to soften in the slightest. That’s always how her countenance shifts when she’s played her opponents like they’re her own pieces from up her sleeve. A triumphant look.
But instead, Tehali looks away from him, eyes back on the sea beneath them. At the top of the world the sky is turning violet, the darkness bleeding into the light, edges blurred. She’s quiet, chewing on his words and mashing them between her molars before digesting them.
“But who were you,” she asks, voice low, “before you were the Black Wolf?”
The leather string around his neck tightens into a noose. If his mother weren’t dead, she would say: You were my son, strong and so brave, to go marching to a war you didn’t want to fight.
But she’s dead, and Basuin doesn’t know who he used to be. They must have beat it out of him when he enlisted. Only seventeen and primed to fight. Eighteen and promoted to a rank he should’ve never been given.
“Basuin of Ankor,” he says, and he knows it to be the wrong answer because Tehali pulls herself up by the railing of the watchtower and climbs to her feet. She wipes her hands off on her breeches, shaking her head.
“Do you want to know what it means to be a soldier?” she asks, but Basuin doesn’t answer. “It means you fought for your country.” Tehali pushes her hair behind her tanned shoulder. “Nothing more. Nothing less.”
“I know that, Tali,” he says, a snap of his teeth, a growl in his throat that he swallows back. “I know.”
“Bullshit. Because ever since Valkesta—”
Like glass breaking, something pops and shatters in his chest, puncturing the organs he’s worked so hard to keep.
“—I’ve watched you struggle. The memories—”
He shakes his head. Please, no.
“—and the nightmares—”
“Stop,” he pleads.
