Chapter 3
Shaelstorm looks out over the water they arrived by.
Standing at the top of the southern watchtower and holding his mother’s jade stone as he looks over the balcony, the view is the one good thing he’s found since beginning the journey to Yesua.
From up here, the ocean can’t draw him back.
The salt in the wind isn’t enough to pull him into her depths.
After scaring off the soldier on watch duty, it’s quiet. The sun sinks down, melting into the horizon, as his fingers fumble with the stone sitting atop his sternum.
Captain, Aless reached for him with hands stained red, am I going to die?
Sa-cha, he prays now, to the god of the Winter River, please tell me that Aless has found peace at the mouth of your body.
But there is no answer to his prayer. There never is.
Some people deserve to go to the Winter River—kids like Aless, who died honorable, horrific deaths—and rest undisturbed in sanctuary. The beautiful afterlife; the peaceful death, where Basuin’s mother went. And then there are people who don’t deserve to go to the Winter River, like Basuin.
When he was a child, his mother used to try and teach him. She explained her connection to the gods as a tree still growing its roots, reaching far down into the groundwater of the earth and searching for sustenance, unfurling and extending until it found its life source.
Your heart-bone is the tree, she told him, tracing a line up his sternum and tapping against the hollow of his throat. You must reach and stretch and grow, my son.
But no matter how tall Basuin grew, no matter how much he stretched himself thin between his duty to his mother, to his deities, and to his country—the gods eluded him.
And still, even as he carries his mother’s godstone and prays on every sun dawning and every moon waning, they do not call for him. He listens, but they do not speak.
He misses his mother.
The sound of footsteps, quick but steady up the stairs of the watchtower, makes him tuck the warmed jade back inside the collar of his shirt.
Basuin stares out at the water as his visitor comes to stand beside him.
All is quiet again for a moment, sans the crowing of birds in the trees that have yet to be cut down.
Then, his visitor grabs onto the balcony bars, slipping their legs through the holes in the wooden banisters to sit dangerously on the edge.
The familiar sight of Tehali’s many piercings, hair braided tight along the side of her head to show off her golden trinkets, makes him sigh, shoulders slumping.
“This island is grayer than mine, but still feels like home.” She stretches out, breathing a noise of relief out through her pierced nose. “I miss it. Don’t you miss home, Captain?”
A prickle of annoyance hits the back of his neck, but he brushes it off. The air between them is left unchanged, unending. He doesn’t answer.
“Why didn’t you go home?” she asks instead. Basuin chokes. “Why did you let Kensy bring you all the way out here?” Her words slither around his ankle like a snake, a warning hiss before the strike. This isn’t a social visit.
He inhales through his nose. “I am a soldier.”
Tehali laughs. Short, blunt. “And when you die?”
“I’ll die a soldier.”
The waves have picked up, crashing violently against the cliff’s edge. The shore beneath them spells death.
“Then tell me,” she says, looking up at him, coal-black eyes meeting his, and Basuin snaps back into the present. “What does it mean to be a soldier?”
Cryptic nonsense. He doesn’t understand what Tehali is trying to pry at, though he knows her well enough to think she must be trying to pry at something. Tehali’s favorite thing in the world is taking logic and twisting it into a weapon that could kill a man in his own argument.
“To fight for your country. Your people. To be strong and loyal. To be brave, and courageous,” he tells her.
“To follow orders.” The way he was always taught to follow orders.
Even his mother taught him that. To follow the trail the gods blaze for you without question. “That’s what it means to be a soldier.”
Tehali goes quiet again, rolling his words around in her head.
Basuin wouldn’t know what that’s like—to take a thought and simmer on it like a stew.
Basuin thinks and then he does, the way he was always taught.
The golden rings adorning Tehali’s ears glitter magnificently in the setting sun, and if magic still existed, she would’ve possessed it.
But magic no longer runs through this land; all that’s left are the bodies of forgotten gods.
When Tehali finally looks at him, her face is a blank slate, but her eyes are narrowed like the eyes of an animal readying to hunt. Basuin is not afraid. He meets her gaze with steel, stubborn and unyielding.
“And what if you were no longer a soldier?” she asks.
He recoils like he’s taken a blow to the chest. Crippling, because if he’s honest—to Tehali, and to himself—he doesn’t know the answer.
His heart-bone, the trunk of his tree, is reinforced with militant commands and strengthened by break after break after break where his body had to regrow bone and heal again, organs reincarnating themselves after his blood painted every border that Grimmalia ever thought they had.
“Who would you be?” Tehali’s eyes bore through him. “When you take off your armor, who are you, Bass?”
No one.
“The same,” he answers instead, but his body feel heavy—like he’s strapped in plate armor, readying to run to the front again.
He expects her eyebrow to raise, the corner of her lip to quirk into a knowing smile, her eyes to soften in the slightest. That’s always how her countenance shifts when she’s played her opponents like they’re her own pieces from up her sleeve. A triumphant look.
But instead, Tehali looks away from him, eyes back on the sea beneath them. At the top of the world the sky is turning violet, the darkness bleeding into the light, edges blurred. She’s quiet, chewing on his words and mashing them between her molars before digesting them.
“But who were you,” she asks, voice low, “before you were the Black Wolf?”
The leather string around his neck tightens into a noose. If his mother weren’t dead, she would say: You were my son, strong and so brave, to go marching to a war you didn’t want to fight.
But she’s dead, and Basuin doesn’t know who he used to be. They must have beat it out of him when he enlisted. Only seventeen and primed to fight. Eighteen and promoted to a rank he should’ve never been given.
“Basuin of Ankor,” he says, and he knows it to be the wrong answer because Tehali pulls herself up by the railing of the watchtower and climbs to her feet. She wipes her hands off on her breeches, shaking her head.
“Do you want to know what it means to be a soldier?” she asks, but Basuin doesn’t answer. “It means you fought for your country.” Tehali pushes her hair behind her tanned shoulder. “Nothing more. Nothing less.”
“I know that, Tali,” he says, a snap of his teeth, a growl in his throat that he swallows back. “I know.”
“Bullshit. Because ever since Valkesta—”
Like glass breaking, something pops and shatters in his chest, puncturing the organs he’s worked so hard to keep.
“—I’ve watched you struggle. The memories—”
He shakes his head. Please, no.
“—and the nightmares—”
“Stop,” he pleads.
“—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.