“—I still hear you screaming in the middle of night and it’s been months.”
He wants to lunge for her. To throw her over the goddamn watchtower and into the ocean. Fall to his knees and beg her not to say anything else. To pretend as though she’d never seen a thing. To act as though he’s still the same, as if Valkesta never happened.
He wants to ask her if she is still his friend, after Valkesta, or if she blames him too.
Basuin’s hand comes up to clutch at his chest, where beneath the skin and below his mother’s godstone, his heart is racing faster than light. In front of him, Tehali’s eyes have turned gentle again, alight with concern, but still the familiar dark irises he’s always known.
“You aren’t just a soldier,” she murmurs, as if trying to soothe him. “You aren’t Kensy’s puppet to string along for another ten years. You are more than that, Basuin of Ankor.”
Then who is he? If he isn’t Captain Basuin of Ariche’s Fleet, the Black Wolf, if the scars the war braided into his skin don’t distinguish him, if he sails back to Xalkhir and drags himself back to that small hut in Ankor where his mother was laid to rest alone, then who is he?
If he leaves this war with nothing but a comrade casualty count and a bruised reputation, then what was it all for? Basuin couldn’t save his mother, so what was it for?
Tehali’s hand rests on the banister of the stairs. There’s a look on her visage that he so rarely sees—guilt. “I just needed you to know that,” she tells him, somber and quiet. Then, she descends the steps, and he watches until her head disappears and all he can hear is the tap of her boots on the granite.
There’s nothing more that Basuin can learn, nothing that war hasn’t taught him. It’s been fifteen years and Basuin knows it all. How to march, how to kill, how to follow orders. The legion beat the boy out of him like a blacksmith beats the curve out of a sword. For fifteen years, he’s learned. For fifteen years, he’s been a soldier.
Tehali might think he’s more than that, but she’s wrong. What would she know of a failure so brutal it took human lives?
Tehali waits for him outside the big tent pitched for the commander’s meeting, arms crossed over her chest and dressed in the most clothes he’s seen her wear since they left Ha’riste. She dons her lightest armor, a chest piece and her weapons belt, hair pulled up high on her head. Basuin dresses similarly, a hand on the hilt of his sword.
It’s twilight now, the sun melted beneath the horizon—his favorite time of day. A shade of sky that can’t be named, in swathes of blue and black and purple and brown.
Basuin nods, and Tehali nods back, and together they duck inside.
The rest of the captains are already there, their lieutenants standing beside them. A captain from the Third Fleet meets Basuin’s gaze with sad eyes. Another, from the Fifth, glances at Basuin and then away, staring down at the floor. The tent is very, very quiet for a Commander’s meeting.
Kensy stands behind a circular table covered in maps and military orders, his hands clasped at his back as he looks through Basuin. His smile widens into a grin, his blue eyes sharp and bright. Kensy raises his hand, gesturing to the pair of them.
“Everyone, meet Ariche’s new captain.”
Basuin looks at Tehali, but Tehali stares blankly ahead.
“Welcome,” Kensy says warmly, “Captain Tehali of Jankri.”
“You replaced me,” Basuin seethes, voice booming in the silence of the tent.
Leaning back in his chair, hands clasped together in front of his mouth, Kensy stares at him. The roar of the ocean outside the bastion walls isn’t loud enough to cover Basuin’s roar of fury.
“I gave the legion near fifteen years,” he says, palms pressed against Kensy’s oak desk. “I gave this war ten of them, and I gave you the better half of those. And this is what I get?”
There is begging in his voice. He hopes Kensy doesn’t hear it.
“You brought me across the sea, leagues away from my home—” his words are heavy, breaths shuddering through his flaring nostrils, “—just to kick me out and leave me here for dead.”
Fitting, he supposes, through the heavy fog of anger. That he should die on an island ripe with gods he doesn’t know the name of, dishonorably, rather than on the godless, bloodied battlefield strewn with pieces of his men and his broken faith in honor and glory.
Kensy looks at Basuin through narrowed eyes. “Are you done?”
His nails claw at the wooden desk, fingers curling into fists alight like the fires they set upon the piles of dead enemies, bodies souring. No, he’s not fucking done. But as he’s rearing to go again, opening his mouth, Kensy holds up a hand with a snapped, “Enough.”
And like the good, dishonorable soldier boy he is, Basuin’s jaw clicks shut.
Kensy rises from his chair, shoulders rolled back and spine straight as he stands at full height. He is only a few inches shorter than Basuin, but twice as menacing. A spark of respect, an ember of fear, begins to burn in Basuin’s chest as he meets Kensy’s icy eyes.
“Don’t you think,” Kensy begins, and Bass feels his body slink back to stand at attention, “that if I was discharging you, I wouldn’t have bothered bringing you here?”
No, he doesn’t think that. He thinks Kensy is out to punish him in any way possible.
