Chapter 6 #2
He reminds Basuin of the young boy, only nine or ten, who watched his father march off to war.
Of the young boy, only twelve or thirteen, who buried his father’s shield—or what was left of the dented metal.
Of the young boy, only sixteen or seventeen, who had to join the legion so his mother would receive the medicine she needed to keep her heart beating.
Of the young boy he still sometimes sees in his dreams, floating away from his outstretched hand, hair shorn close to his ears. The one he still looks for in the mirror.
So he turns on his heel, facing away from the little spirit named Yaelic, and walks away.
“Go home,” he calls over his shoulder, gruff and demanding. “Get out of here.”
All he needs to do is get back to the bastion—he’ll figure it out from there. Basuin isn’t interested in picking up strays. He takes all of five steps before Yaelic is scrambling to catch up, his tiny boyish hands tugging on Basuin’s belt and reaching for the edge of his shirt.
“Please! I’m begging,” Yaelic cries out, the green of his eyes drowning in panic like sailors drown in the sea.
“You beg to serve me?” Basuin questions him, brows drawn. Something deeply painful settles in his stomach. Those who follow him, who serve under his command, always end up dead. Even his mother, whom he loved so fully, died at his hand.
“Yes,” Yaelic says. “Please. I don’t have anywhere else to go.
There’s no home I can go back to anymore.
” This poor little wolf pup, abandoned by his brother, dressed in a robe too long for his short, skinny legs.
He needs to eat, put meat on his bones and grow muscle.
And he needs warmer clothes, a good wash too.
He needs to not be alone, Basuin realizes, as the boy’s fingers tremble where he grasps at Bass’ shirt.
I’ll send you home, Kensy had told him. Basuin remembers thinking, what home? There’s nowhere to send him back to.
Back to Ankor, Kensy said.
Home, where his mother’s bones might be buried in the back of that little shack on the edge of the woods. Maybe the villagers burned it all to the ground instead, like the army burned their church. Maybe she was still inside.
His godstone, hanging around his neck where it hung around his mother’s once, pulses and thumps in a rhythm that might match his heart if he still had one.
He’d do anything just to have his mother here, to tell him what to do.
But Yaelic, his head bowed to Basuin, shudders a sob and chokes it back. The sound makes him ache.
“All right,” he murmurs, hoping it will not be heard among the ambience of the forest. But Yaelic’s head shoots up, his eyes as wide as the moon when the month is grown and beginning to shed its skin for the next.
“Really?” Yaelic’s emerald eyes almost glow. “Thank you!” he shouts up at Bass, too eager for his own good. “Thank you, Wolf God, thank you!”
Before Basuin has a chance to take it back, Yaelic’s knees hit the damp, spongy earth beneath their feet.
His hands sink into the forest floor as he bows his head to the ground, and Basuin takes a step backward, but it’s too late.
The green light of Yaelic’s spirit bursts forth from the ground, spidering out like a crack opening the earth up, and breaks for Basuin.
It races up his limbs and hits him at the junction of his ribcage and his sternum, sending something warm through his entire system.
It’s nothing like when the wolf-man forced itself into Basuin’s body; there’s no pain and no struggling, no suffering and no endless noise.
It’s just warm, like the water his mother used to heat over the open flame of the fire for them to bathe in.
Basuin cries.
There’s no sound, but tears burst forth from his lashes without permission and something thick creeps up his throat. His lips pull back from his teeth as if he might laugh, hit with this uncontrollable urge to wrap his arms around himself and fall to his knees the way that Yaelic kneels to him now.
Warm, wet tears run down his face as he clutches his chest, at the very point where Yaelic’s spirit floods into his own—a braid of their threads, a connection—and Basuin cries.
I’m sorry, someone says. That little white wolf pup, who sits in the dark and looks up at him with sad green eyes. I didn’t mean to make you cry.
“I’m not,” Basuin struggles to say, choking on this foreign feeling. “I’m not crying.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, wiping them with the heel of his palm, and when he looks down again Yaelic is crying as well. Yaelic sobs into the sleeve of his robe, wiping at his face that’s gone wet and runny with snot. Basuin shudders a breath.
His hand descends on Yaelic’s hair, brushing through it gently, ruffling it with his fingers. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s all right now.”
But Yaelic cries and cries as a child does, without any shame at all. “My mother,” the little wolf pup sobs, the sound echoing in the forest so empty and yet so full of life. “And Hami, too. Everyone’s left me.”
Without hesitation, Basuin pulls Yaelic to him, wrapping his strong arms around the boy.
Yaelic clings to him, hands reaching for someone that no longer exists in this life—his mother is on the other side, at the Winter River, where he hopes Sa-cha received her.
He hopes Sa-cha washed the blood from her fur, rinsed it out of her cotton dress when she walked through the river.
In time, the smoke and fog of the fire dissipates, leaving behind the smell of burned remains and decaying birth.
He is sure he smells the same—char and ash from a graveyard and something made only to be destroyed.
There’s blood on his skin. He can’t see it, but he feels it. Basuin needs to wash it away.
“The village isn’t far,” Yaelic tells him. “That’s where Hami went.”
Basuin doesn’t mention the bastion again. He’s felt the weighty shame of being called a soldier before, but it’s never quite scratched the way Hami’s clawed words did. That boy will never forgive Basuin for taking his brother. Even if it wasn’t Basuin’s choice.
He doesn’t want to go to Yaelic’s village, but damn, he’s tired.
He drags his feet as they walk, breathing hard and grunting in pain.
His whole body aches, especially where the wolf-man has carved out Basuin’s heart and made his ribcage into a home.
A day of rest will be all he needs to get back to the bastion.
Anywhere would be better than here. He’s told himself that before, when Kensy brought him to this continent. Anywhere would be better than home. Now, he’d rather die than stay here with a wolf or a man or a god in his chest.
Yaelic looks back when Basuin falls behind. “Are you all right, Wolf God?”
Gulping down a painful breath, Basuin looks up with a sharpness in his eyes. The poor boy doesn’t cower one bit, too cheery to notice the storm that’s overtaking Basuin’s face. Wolf God. He is no such thing.
Black Wolf, Black Wolf, Black Wolf, the wolf-man snickers.
“Don’t call me that,” Basuin says, tone tempered.
“What should I call you?” Yaelic asks, blinking his jadeite eyes.
“My name is Basuin.”
Yaelic chitters, his shoulders shaking and his gold-white hair swaying in the breeze that dances through the trees. Basuin frowns.
“I can’t call you that,” Yaelic says. “You’re a god. The god I serve.”
“Then I command you not to call me that.”
Basuin pushes off the tree and strides past Yaelic. He’s not a god. He’s not even a man anymore—this thing inside him polluting him. Mocking him with every step. Shut up. Just shut up.
Yaelic trails behind him, trekking forward like a pup whose paws are too big for its body. It’s not the most coordinated. A childish gait, but one with purpose and spirit.
“Weren’t you a soldier?” Yaelic asks, kicking a stone out of his way and running ahead of Basuin. He turns to skip backward as they talk. “What did your soldiers call you?”
“Basuin,” he answers.
“They must’ve called you something.”
Black Wolf, Black Wolf, Black Wolf, the wolf-man jeers.
He stumbles, left boot catching on a thorned vine in dense brush he didn’t see. Tangled, Basuin catches himself on the nearest oak tree, bark scraping his hands as he pants for breath. It feels like he’s losing his mind. Basuin doesn’t know who he is anymore.
There’s movement to his left. He can hear it. But when he looks up, head turned toward the foliage, there’s nothing but a flash of white. A trick of the light.
Something tugs on his sleeve and Basuin lashes out, ripping his arm away in a flash of fear. It broils in his stomach, a fire that the wolf-man breathes life into. The smoke is filling his lungs but when he turns, it’s only Yaelic who looks up at him, eyes lost.
Aless had eyes like Yaelic’s—as green and golden as gems, marbled with loss and a plea for guidance.
Captain, she looked at him with those same damned eyes, I want to go home. I didn’t want this, didn’t think it’d be like this.
We’ll go home, he lied. We’re gonna go home, ’Less.
But Aless never made it home, head still frozen stuck to the ground.
None of them made it home, but only Basuin made it out of Valkesta.
If he sheds his armor, if he tries to be anything but a soldier like Tehali said, what will happen to them?
The pieces of them—the memories, the faces, the words—that he carried with him?
He’s a soldier. Not a god.
“Captain,” he tells Yaelic, not meeting his eyes, as green as Aless’ were. “That’s what they called me.”
Yaelic takes a step back from where Basuin struggles for breath, bowing his white-gold head until those eyes of his disappear. “Captain,” Yaelic calls him, voice boyish and flickering between a wolf pup’s whine and Aless’ cry for help before the sword swung down and beheaded her.
From muscle memory alone, Basuin’s head tilts toward the boy. “What?”
But Yaelic just gives him a toothy grin, child cheeks grown round and chubby. “Nothing,” he says, and then he continues to run forward. A pit of ache festers in Basuin’s gut.
The wolf-man rumbles awake. You’re a god now, it tells him. Someone belongs to you.
Basuin wishes he didn’t. He wishes that Yaelic didn’t belong to him, because the people that belong to him always die.