The wolf-man snaps its teeth around his rib and Basuin feels all the force of it. The sharp pain throws him and he almost falters as he guides Ren toward the creek. He’s stupid. He’s so stupid—all fight and no strategy, Kensy said. But my hand will guide you steady into the battle, and we will find victory together, Basuin.
“The forest,” he says, looking at her. “It hurts you.”
Ren doesn’t look back at him. “The forest and I are one.”
It makes him ache. He’s frozen, and Ren takes it upon herself to take a step forward without him. But she falls, catching herself on a tree before he can sweep her back under the stability of his arm. Now, she looks at him, and her eyes are silver in the light of the moon above them, something precious. Ren holds out her hand, and he takes it, and then she presses her right palm against the bark of a tree and a burst of blue magic fills the night.
Ren burns a hole through the tree, sap dripping like lava from its orifices. A burn, red and angry, crawls over the skin of Ren’s forearm.
“I told you.” Her face is grim. “When the forest dies, so will I.”
Kneeling at the bank of the creek, Basuin washes Ren’s burns with a fraying rag. He tries to be gentle—as gentle as his big, clumsy fingers can be—but anger simmers in his blood. Ren is quiet and still, watching as he cares for her wounds.
“Don’t do that again,” he scolds.
As he turns to dip the rag into the clean water again, Ren says, “I won’t.”
The wolf-man is restless inside him and Bass feels it. His fingers twitch under the pressure to be soft and caring, which he hasn’t practiced for a very long time. Bass isn’t soft, he isn’t sweet. He is strong, and he is a soldier. But right now, he would rather be nothing at all.
When he fishes out a roll of bandages from his pack, fumbling with it as he unrolls it, he tries to remember who always wrapped his wounds. Sometimes, he ripped the gauze with his own teeth. Other times, it was the nurses in the healing huts.
But when Isaniel shared his tent, slept in the same cot, he always turned his back to Bass. He never watched when Bass rinsed blood from his hands in the water basin and wrapped his sprains out in the field. No matter what it was, Isaniel did not look at him.
His fingers shake from the work of being gentle as he wraps white bandages around the burn Ren suffered from her own hand.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she says.
“Liar,” he says, jaw tight and aching. How stupid he was, stubborn. It’s what burned Gyeosi down. It’s what killed his squad, in Valkesta. His own boar-headedness. Regret tastes like whiskey and smoke and blood, and it makes his head swim.
Bass runs his thumb over the gauze, over the burn he hopes won’t scar. Her body doesn’t carry the white lines marking his bronze skin, the remains of war. She’s fragile, but smooth like silk. Tough, then. Delicate but strong. He feels it in the muscle running under her skin, sinew and bone.
“We have to stop him,” Bass says, turning to wash his hands in the creek. It’s cold against his hot palms, against his burning god mark.
“Him?” Ren asks, falling back to sit on the rocky shore.
Bass curses at his thoughtless wording. He should’ve said the legion. “My commander.” He does the same, sitting on the bank with a grunt. “The legion’s. Commander Kensy.” Bass can’t help but say his name with something violent in his voice.
Ren draws her knees to her chest. “He brought the army here?”
“Yes.”
“He brought you here, too.”
Bass picks up a rock and skips it over the surface of the water. “Yes.” But it’d be so much easier if he could say it was the ocean. That Ithika carried him here. It would feel better than to say that a godless man dragged him onto a godless boat which sailed to a god-full island in search of quest and conquest.
Ren is quiet, so he speaks instead, skipping another black flat rock. “Kensy is the one who wanted us to sail here. Colonize the land and turn it into another Xalkhan territory. As if we haven’t taken enough land for the queen already.”
Kensy’s search for this godly artifact—it makes his mouth taste rotten. He should tell Ren, and his tongue runs over the back of his teeth trying to come up with the right words. But he fears for Ren. Basuin fears implicating her, more than he already has by being here.
If Ren were to know—if she were to try and stop Kensy—she’d end up dead.
Bass thought there would be no more bloodshed after Grimmalia. Naivety, or maybe exhaustion. Maybe he thought the world would stop when he died, and then he did not die, and then the world did not stop. Pity, that. Both the not dying and the not stopping.
The world felt like it stopped when he shook the godstone out of the letter wrapped in twine that wrote condolences. His mother was dead. But the world did not stop, for the legion nor for him.
Let me go home, to Ankor. Just to bury my ma, he pleaded with them.
And when they denied him, molten metal crawled through his veins, a slow drip driving him into insanity with every step he took, fleeing into the forest. Like plunging his whole hand into a bucket of liquid iron until it was so dead and numb that each pinprick of pain was drawn out, until he collapsed on his hands and knees as the rain came down on him, and he bowed his head against the ground, forehead to the tree’s roots in prayer.
