The Gods Must Burn

Chapter 1

War stories are the best stories to tell, since any story is true when you’re the only one left to tell it.

At least, it’s what the rest of them must think as they sit around the glass-housed candles flickering against the moonlight, dented tin mugs full of ale, making merry with tales of battle and blood and brutality.

Basuin sits alone, away from the lanterns and the rest of the fleet, and listens to the thrash of the waves against the hull instead. The ocean is cold here, even many moons away from the glacier and ice he was last sent to occupy—and sent away from in defeat.

But for as cold as it is, the ocean burns mean. It sprays sea-salted water at him. Flicks her fingers at him and says, Go away. Your ship does not belong here, soldier. As if he doesn’t already know that.

The ocean is much more unforgiving than war.

“Captain!” one of his men calls with a hiccup, raising his mug to Basuin. “Won’t you join us, sir?”

Laughter rumbles through the crowd gathered on the deck, rough and drunk and melodic with cruelty.

From here, Basuin can recognize a handful of shadowed bodies belonging to his fleet, adrift on liquor and treacherous seas.

A squadron sergeant of Ariche’s Fleet sits in the orange glow of a lantern, face all lax and loopy, gesturing wildly for Basuin to come and join their misshapen circle of cargo boxes and supply barrels.

Basuin’s hand, pink scars illuminated by the moon hanging low in the sky, reaches for the collar of his cotton shirt. There, his fingers trace the outline of the stone he keeps hidden beneath his clothes.

The rest of the men, he’s sure, do not wish him to come any closer than he already is.

“No,” he answers, more gruffly than he intended.

“Not tonight,” he adds in an attempt to sound less bitter.

Not that it matters anymore. These men know who he is.

They fear his anger. In the dawn of day, they speak to him in respectful, quiet words; yes sirs and of course Captains.

But in the dark, like tonight, they whisper unkindly, grinning with teeth pearly and warm in the candles’ light.

Everyone on the Ha’ria Drokha knows his story. Basuin doesn’t need to sit around and tell it again to ears that have heard it over and over, in all different genres—horror and tragedy and comedy and error.

Some stories, like war stories, are best left untold.

The hatch is kicked open with a squeaking hinge and Kensy steps out of his quarters and onto the deck.

He’s dressed for the cold still, or perhaps he has no other attire in his wardrobe but the long cloak of a black panther’s coat and tall, hare-lined leather boots.

Perhaps it’s a status symbol. A reminder that, surrounded by his men huddled under cheap yak furs and wool-socked hands and feet, Kensy is the commander of this legion.

His sharp eyes, a calculating blue caught in the light shared between men, survey the deck as if it were a battlefield.

An ocean breeze blows through, ruffling the loose hairs that have fallen from the worn tie at Basuin’s neck. He reaches up to tuck the dark strands behind his ear, and the small movement has him pinned under Kensy’s wandering gaze.

“Basuin,” Kensy calls to him, voice not unkind but not kind, either. If it wasn’t for how his smile stretches thin over his lips, Basuin wouldn’t know if it was a call to share a pint or if it meant the ship was under attack.

“Commander,” Basuin greets with a curt nod, not moving from where he stands leaning against the bulwark. The throng of men has grown quiet. Some shuffle to refill their tin mugs with more ale. Others, too drunk to keep their tact, look on at him and Kensy curiously.

“You must be bored, sitting there alone,” Kensy says, showing a flash of his teeth. He takes five steps toward Basuin, slow and metered. “I’m sure Ariche’s would welcome hearing the Black Wolf’s tales of battle.”

His heart stutters at the moniker, like his lungs might stop working.

An ache shatters through his spine, breaking bones on its way through.

He shivers under the cool night, the roar of the waves begging him to come back as he pushes off the wooden bulwark.

Black Wolf, the waters whisper to him as he takes rigid, mechanical steps toward the lamp light. Black Wolf, won’t you come with us?

Captain, the dead still whisper to him, choking on their own blood and spittle and fear. Will you take my body back home, to my wife—in Ilham? My girl, she’ll be waiting on her da, so will you take me home to her?

Kensy’s smile widens until the sharp line of his teeth peek out from the crack and curl of his lips.

The men are still as quiet as they were before, staring Basuin down like predators hunting their prey.

To them, it must feel opposite. For the same reason the men of Ariche’s Fleet find that their only stories to tell are war stories, Basuin’s sure these soldiers must feel like he is the only predator roaming this ship.

They are all soldiers, but only one of them is a murderer.

His boots come to a stop outside the scattered, uneven ring of drunken men, fingers curled into clenched fists at his sides. Basuin stands tall, taller than most, and looms over them with his broad figure. Behind his lips, his teeth cut into his tongue.

“You want to hear my stories?” he asks them, eyes cutting from the crowd to land back on Kensy.

And Commander Kensy, blue eyes hardened beneath the flickering light of flames that hide behind their glass walls, nods his head.

Basuin bears the brand of that name and becomes it—a hero of war, scars tattooed over his body by battle. Like a good soldier, he follows his orders and begins to spin a tale that only Captain Basuin of Ankor, the Black Wolf, can tell truthfully.

Because war stories are only best when you’re the one left to tell them, and Basuin knows this best of all.

After the First Fleet have all stumbled off to bed, some drunk on tales of battle and some sobered on tales of blood, Basuin wakes wracked with pain, too breathless to even scream.

One hand covers his left eye, a burning, searing flesh wound beneath his palm.

Another clutches his chest, fingers scrabbling beneath his sweat-soaked cotton undershirt to find the stone he wears on a worn leather string around his neck.

He pants, barely audible under the creak and groan of the ship as it rocks back and forth on the water.

Pathetic. Worse than a child, awoken from a nightmare and crying in fear for their mother.

Basuin’s fingers dig into his skin as he holds himself, choking on dry sobs alone, wrapped up in his damp bed sheets.

In the dark, when he wakes from the visions of Valkesta frozen in hues of black and white, it still feels fresh. Real. Flesh crawling, as if something’s slipped under the sheep’s skin he wears like a wolf in disguise.

Basuin kicks his sheets off from where they’ve tangled around his legs and falls out of bed, stumbling to the mirror hanging on his wall above his wash basin.

There is no light, but his hands know where the matchbook sits near his oil lamp.

With clumsy, panicked fingers and a seared thumb, the match strikes and his quarters illuminate in a faint glow, light enough for him to peer into the mirror.

When he removes his hand from his left eye, there’s no wound.

No blood or fester or rot. Just a jagged scar running from above his brow down past his cheekbone.

He can still taste the pain in his mouth like someone ran their sword through his tongue.

As though he were chewing the copper coins of beggars, tarnished from rain.

Hanging around his face in limp, tangled strands, his hair is a mat of sweat, dirt, and blood. But in the dim light of the lamp, he can see what seems to be the dark, dried flecks are simply shadows from the darkened room fading into the long locks of raven that tumble over his shoulders.

Every night, he sees them without fail. The broken bodies of dead men, hacked and slashed into pieces like a king might saw through a raw steak, their blood lit up on the snow.

Basuin had never seen a color as brilliantly red until he saw the remnants of his squadron laid out and screaming for help, rubies spilled across the ice.

Captain, they called for him, hands still twitching. Those gods you believe in… Will you ask ’em to take me to the Winter River? I’d like to meet my sister again.

He plunges his face into the shallow wooden basin, the water as cold as the snowfall felt when he laid in the berm, waiting for death to come and send him away from this world.

He stays there, not breathing, until his lungs burn.

And then he pulls back up with a gasp, drinking down air, water running down his copper skin with a shiver.

On nights like these, Basuin wishes for things he knows can’t come true.

To scream, or to cry. To sink to his hands and knees in his private quarters and sob until his throat is raw and his voice is nothing.

To go back and change it all. To go back and tell himself that Valkesta is a trap—before they march to their death.

His hand darts underneath his cotton sleep shirt, yanking at the leather tie around his neck and pulling it free.

The stone, light and weighty all at once, sits in his palm as he closes his fingers around it.

The uneven edges, smooth from something before his time, are familiar against his skin as he squeezes it tight.

If he could see his mother again, he would tell her that he loves her.

Staring at the ceiling, rolling the old jade stone between the ridges of his palm, Basuin lays in his bed and doesn’t sleep. He moves and shifts with the waves rocking the ship and replaces the images of that snowy battlefield—that icy graveyard—with the last memories of his mother.