Chapter 2
They arrive three days later, but Basuin has been watching the forest amass on the line where the sky and the water meet for two nights at least. The island makes him uneasy; the stone he wears around his neck creating indents in his skin from how tightly he holds it in his fist. It makes him nervous.
But it’s better than going back to a country he can no longer call home.
Once they lower the boats and begin to row toward shore, the men all cheer at the sight of land and jeer that they were certain they would never make it here. After so long on water, solid ground seems precious.
“I could cry!” a soldier from the fifth squad shouts, wading through shallow water and onto the beach. He falls to his knees, running palms over the dip and crest of the rocky shoreline.
“And Cap’n Mitros would have you scrubbing latrines if you did. Quit with yer sniveling!” another yells back, laughing, tossing a handful of stones to pelt upon his comrade’s back.
Basuin rows himself and his lieutenant toward the new land, grunting with every stroke of the oars as they drag through the water.
Here, the foam is snow white as it glimmers under the sunlight.
He could strip off his clothes and jump in, lay out in the pebbled sand and feel the earth against his back again. But it would look shameful.
Across from him, her tanned, golden skin radiant in the warm sunshine, Tehali grins.
“Lighten up!” Unlike him, she’s already stripped out of her shirt, wearing nothing but a black band that runs tight around her chest and shows off the muscles rippling through her shoulders and arms. “You still look like you want to die, Captain.”
He grunts again. They’re close enough to jump out and wade further in. “I wonder why that is.”
Tehali laughs, full and just, the golden rings lining each of her ears twinkling as she shakes. Seeing her look so free makes the corner of Basuin’s lip quirk up in something that could maybe be a smile.
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re dramatic?” Her fingers drag through the water, creating soft lines and ripples.
“Tehali,” he warns, but she twists her wrist and flicks water toward him.
Flecks meet the sun-warmed skin of his cheeks and he hates that it feels like such relief.
He hates that she looks so pleased with herself, because when glee stretches across her mouth like that and boisterous, booming laughs escape her, it’s always harder for Basuin to frown at her.
“I said it before, Captain. Lighten up!” Tehali throws her arms up in the air, gesturing to the land behind her, the land Basuin has been staring at for many nights now. “Aren’t you happy to see land again? My feet ache for mud and dirt.”
After forty nights spent on the Ha’ria Drokha, he should be. But he can’t look at the rocky shore they approach by rowboat and feel anything but dread and shame. Basuin tried to pray, but the gods have yet to answer him the way they would’ve answered his mother.
“No,” he says. Not if it’s land that doesn’t belong to them. A new island to conquer and colonize in the name of the queen, may she be well.
Tehali lets them fall into silence instead of pushing him.
The gentle waves, lapping against their boat as Basuin rows through them with a grunt, don’t help to carry them toward land.
It almost feels like Ithika and her oceans are trying to keep him away from the island.
Basuin would rather be anywhere but here, his mother’s stone heavy around his neck.
Tehali jumps out of their boat first, her breeches turning heavy and dark with water.
She gestures to Basuin to do the same, offering an outstretched hand for him to take.
It’s a simple, kind gesture, and one he should take.
When he stands, the boat beneath him rocks unsteadily, threatening to tip him over.
He refuses her hand and misjudges the depth between the boat and the ocean as he hops out. It nearly lands him and his pack of supplies in the shallow water. Graceless. Frustration fills his chest like molten metal, tangy and searing hot.
Tehali is kind enough not to say anything.
They wade through the water, waves catching his legs and pulling him back. He’s slower than Tehali, who forces her way through the shallow seas like a knife cuts through flesh.
Ithika, he prays to himself as they make their way onto the new island. Thank you for your guidance and safekeeping.
As the last rowboat meets the rocky shore, the men gather their things and start down the marked path. There, at the end of the trail outlined by piles of rocks the other fleets marked for them, the bastion awaits on the other side of the tall, thick oaks.
There’s an undercurrent of something running through the island. It prickles the dark hairs on his arms, like how the air grows thick and charged right before lightning calls home and strikes. In the hollow of his throat, the stone he wears is humming.
Basuin doesn’t know which god keeps this forest, because the gods don’t speak to him the way they spoke to his mother. But he feels it—familiar, but inexplicable. From a memory.
The soldiers march into the forest together as if on their way to war, but behind Basuin, Kensy stops on one of the massive rocks lining the shore of the new land, scratching his beard as he stares into the unending trees stretching toward the sky.
A breeze blows through, off the ocean and into their hair, ruffling the light collar of Basuin’s shirt.
In the light of the sun, his mother’s jade stone glints softly, dully.
“Welcome to Yesua, Bass,” Kensy says, his voice honey but his eyes steel. Then, he turns on his heel and starts down the rock-marked path. “May your gods bless it, or what have you.”
Basuin’s feet feel fused to the ground. He doesn’t know why Kensy’s brought him here; why Kensy sailed five fleets of men to an island that should be uninhabited. He cranes his neck back and stares up at the dark, verdant canopy that shelters the island Yesua from the smoldering sun above.
There is no going back from here. Basuin cannot go back home.
The only home Basuin knows anymore is war—and the smell of it isn’t just the burn of the hearth and food that cooks over a flame.
It makes his eyes shut and his fingers tighten into fists at his side, ocean water easing down the length of his forearms until he shakes it from his knuckles.
And when he opens his eyes again, there’s a flash of something white outside the left field of his vision. He turns his head in a snap, but when he looks through the gaps between the trees, there’s nothing there at all. Just a trick of the light.
Underneath Basuin’s cotton shirt, his mother’s godstone burns hot.
It isn’t a long walk before the forest becomes sparse, charred and burned and dry where Atun’s Fleet cleared way for the bastion and began to build.
The southernmost watchtower bursts through the treetops, made of basalt bricks and wood harvested and stripped from the new island.
With its height, the tower clears the entirety of the beach they arrived on and a long stretch of the ocean they sailed.
Basuin’s sure it can be seen from the godrealm, wherever such a realm may be.
“Shaelstorm,” Kensy calls from behind him, a hint of pride, or maybe something poisonous, in his voice. “Welcome home, soldiers.”
Basuin almost laughs, but his teeth spear his tongue instead.
He could be anywhere but here. Anywhere.
Still in the freezing tundra of Grimmalia, fingers rotting black and toes raw as he marched his men into occupied territory and back out, carrying bodies that belonged to them on their backs.
Where he saw the frost on his lashes in the reflection of his tin mug, warm from cider as they sat in wait on the border of enemy territory.
But here he is, at the Shaelstorm Bastion, five men dead and only scars to show for it.
Five men whom Basuin sent to the Winter River, to the afterlife of the blessed and holy and kind, to be received by their loved ones in the wake of gods. Those five men are the reason that Basuin’s here at all.
Kensy said Shaelstorm was a second chance, but Basuin knows it’s punishment. No one goes from being a war hero on the front lines to tagging along on an expeditionary crew, colonizing a new continent, if not in punishment for graves and grave decisions.
But it’s still better than going home. Still better than looking for the little shack on the outskirts of Ankor that he built with his own hands and hoping to find his bed still warmed by the fire and his mother still sitting by the window, awaiting his return.
He squashes the image and swallows it back, tongue pressed to the back of his teeth.
As they get closer, the smoke he saw from the shore becomes thicker and hangs heavy in the air. It smells of roast meat, of industry and machines—and then it smells of gunpowder.
Basuin claps his hand over his mouth, index finger pressed against his nostrils to block out the stench.
He can smell it anywhere, recognize it before it’s left the barrel, before the striker has hit the flint and fired it.
It wraps around him like a thick blanket, suffocating him.
His lungs curse at him, begging for air, but Basuin can’t breathe.
He can’t breathe that scent in, can’t let it coat the back of his throat the way that blood might.
Blood. He can smell that too, from the edge of a memory.
No, no. He can’t do this right now. He can’t do it. He has to get out of here.
His head shoots up, looking from side to side, searching for a way out.
In front of him, men still march down the path toward the bastion within sight.
Behind him, Kensy and the captain of the Ha’ria Drokha linger at the back of the pack, discussing something he can barely make out with the blood pounding in his ears.