It shatters over his head like glass, his eyes wide, staring down at her. She’s right. Why didn’t he kill Kensy when he had the chance?
Ren’s hand locks around the fabric of his collar, pulling him down to her height. He lets her. Until her nose is nearly touching his. Until her breath burns against his mouth. The smell of ash still lingers on her skin.
“I was wrong about you,” she hisses. “You are everything I thought you were. I can’t trust you.”
But there’s a moment, a breath—three breaths, even—of hesitance. She lingers, their eyes locked, and searches for something within him. He wishes he could help her find it. Every breath they share in tandem, a rhythm.
Then, she lets him go. Basuin flounders backward as Ren storms away.
“I am,” he says. “I’m everything you thought I was—but it’s different now.” He catches up in three long strides, pulling ahead to block her way. Ren winds around him. “I didn’t know, I swear it to you.”
“How could you not?”
“I’m not very smart,” he barks back. “I don’t understand any of this. I’ve admitted that to you before. I’ve been honest.”
Ren whirls on him. “Have you? Is hiding this not dishonest? You’re a traitor. You are a danger to my people and I trusted you not to be.”
“Must you always be a god?” It fizzles out, less angry and more desperate. “Are you not human, too?”
“No,” Ren snaps. “I’m not. And neither are you anymore.”
“But I was.” He thumps a fist to his chest. “I was human, before I was a god. Weren’t you?”
A shiver of rage runs up Ren’s spine, her fists tightening at her sides. The nape of her neck peeks out at him when the breeze pushes her hair like a child’s swing, revealing something of her to still be soft. She is soft, he knows. He’s felt it before.
“No,” she answers again, voice low and dark. “All I know is how to be a god, just like all you know is how to be a soldier. We’re even, then.”
His mouth feels dry and tastes rotten. “Help me understand.”
The glare of her eyes is icy and mean when she looks at him over her shoulder. “Do you know what this island really is?” Ren asks, a tremble of something not quite anger and not quite fear threaded in her voice.
“No.” They were sent to colonize it, told it was an uninhabited island that needed to be claimed for the queen. But then Kensy pulled Basuin’s rank and set him loose in the forest, commanding him to find something instead.
Basuin didn’t have to follow that command—but he would’ve been sent home if he didn’t. He doesn’t know which one would be worse.
Ren turns, and the golden light of her eyes has cooled into the sharp obsidian he can no longer read. Her palms open, her god mark lighting up blue. In turn, Basuin’s mark glows red and hot.
“This forest guards Sa-cha’s shrine,” Ren tells him. “The entrance to the Winter River.”
Chapter 22
The story of Sa-cha is a bloody one, like most stories he knows. It’s a story of creation, but the way his mother told it, a story of peace. Stories of peace, he knows, are bloody in the same way that stories of war are. Because peace can only exist on the back of war.
How are gods born? Sa-cha bled them into existence. Out of his wounds, he created new life. The Winter River began as a place of birth, but once mortals were created and things could die, it became a place of rest.
Creation and extinction; life and death. What could something so sacred give to mortals?
Basuin has to find out. He made his choice, he stayed to protect the forest. Now, he needs to figure out why Kensy came to this island so he can get there first.
Otherwise, Kensy might do the unfathomable—the only option Basuin can assume from all these guessing games he’s been playing since he arrived in Yesua.
If Sa-cha’s shrine is what Kensy searches for, and Sa-cha’s shrine guards the Winter River, then Kensy’s out to destroy it. Without the Winter River—without Sa-cha himself—gods might cease to exist altogether.
Who built man? Kensy asked him in Shaelstorm.
* * *
The abandoned village, at the very least, is the perfect place to camp for a few nights. It’s not as well built as Gyeosi is—was—but it’s familiar. In the fire pit, huge flames made of magic roar across the small village. Bass doesn’t know if the sweltering heat of the night is from that or from the anger and shame burning him up from the inside.
