Chapter 9
Without a second to digest it, another cannon is fired and shakes the grass beneath Basuin’s feet. She falls into a crouch, hands clasped over her ears. In a bloom of green lights, shrieking like something dying, he can see fear painted on her visage in a way he’s never witnessed before.
Inside him, the wolf-man makes some half-growl, half-snarl sound and punctures Basuin’s stomach with its claws.
He reaches, but she’s quicker. She darts back into the forest and something yanks him forward.
He chases after her—the wolf-man lunges at his organs and he’s forced to move.
She finds the nearest tree and begins to climb, fast, faster, and he lags behind.
By the time his foot is braced against bark, she’s already in the branches above his head.
Basuin scrambles up the oak in pursuit. She’s too quick for him.
Another firework explodes in the air. Red, again. And then another right after, bright white. The colors of the Xalkhan kingdom.
He wheezes as he pulls himself up over branch after branch, scaling the tree.
His chest aches, muscles weak and weary.
But finally, he reaches her. The Forest God stands rigid and upright on the topmost branch, extended out toward the south where the lights come from.
Her head tipped up, mouth agape as she watches the fireworks gleam across the sky.
When Basuin catches his breath, he doesn’t watch the show. He watches the Forest God, face alight with all different colors, and the horror spilling over her countenance.
“What fire is this?” she asks, her voice barely heard over the whistle of explosions and the boom of cannons. “I’ve never seen violence so colorful.”
“They’re fireworks,” he says, throat dry as he swallows. “Haven’t you seen any?”
In Ha’riste, they were popular. Common, even.
Kingdom celebrations always held elaborate shows, new colors and new designs that would light up the dull skies of the city.
Queen Ye’suite was a fan, someone once told him.
But even street rats could buy tiny sparklers to light for a couple coins, kids running around trying to set fire to one another’s hair or mark their skin with a burn.
But she answers, “No.” Her voice choked and twisted. “No, I’ve never. What have you brought to my forest?”
Basuin cringes. He didn’t bring them. But the legion did.
He remembers the vivid displays that sprang from their victories, the smell of blood at camp mingling with the sharp scent of gunpowder packed into paper hand cannons. The laughter of his men who lit the tail-end of the fuses and tossed them into the air.
Their greatest victory, in Ulenski, Grimmalia’s last unoccupied trade city.
When he couldn’t wash the ash from his skin, blackened by death and sin and triumph.
Kensy ordered a couple of soldiers to load the cannons, to shake whoever was left in Grimmalia and remind them of who held power—Xalkhir. Always Xalkhir.
Why the long face? Kensy had asked him, a burn in his sharp blue eyes. You should be proud.
But Basuin had flinched away from the cannons and held his head in his hands. Kensy clapped a firm hand on his shoulder.
You’ve freed them, Kensy said. Unshackled them from gods who didn’t bother to save them.
And lights, the color of blood and fire, burst forth from their camps long into the night, punctuated by cannons that shook the earth and the oceans and Basuin’s body as he lay on his cot, wracked with violent shivers. And Isaniel, who laid a blanket over him and left him to his demons.
“It’s a celebration,” Basuin says, voice as quiet as hers under the thundering of explosions. “The fireworks are harmless, mostly. They fizzle out, won’t burn anything.”
The fear that drenches her skin, the horror in her eyes, doesn’t change. “What are they celebrating?”
My death, he thinks selfishly. But it’s not true. He knows what they celebrate. He’s watched it, city after city, the display of power and arrogance.
“Conquest,” he says.
She whips around in an instant. The fear is replaced by an anger fueled by insolence. In two steps she’s nearly toe to toe with him, head level with his chest, neck craned back to look at him with a glass-edged glare. Not evil. But a threat all the same.
But Basuin doesn’t waver, doesn’t lean back. She’s too small for him to back away, pride licking at his nonexistent wounds. He won’t back down, not to her.
It’s not his fault. He didn’t bring the army here—Kensy did.
“Do you think you’ve already won?” the Forest God seethes, low and steady. “How arrogant are you?”
His nostrils flare in anger. “I have won nothing. I’m not the one celebrating. I’ve lost everything. Again,” he bites back, looking down at her. Another shower of sparks in the night sky, another display of impudence.
There’s the slightest tremble in her mouth, lips silvered in the blue sparkle of another firework.
“I could never imagine someone so cruel,” she says. “Cruel enough to celebrate the death of my people.”
He can. And the cruelest of them all just set foot on this island. It’s barely been two days and he’s already slaughtered innocents—and killed Basuin, too.
His hesitation leaves time for her mouth to set in stone, for her brow to harden and for her eyes to narrow once more. A breeze wanders through her hair, blunt edges of her bangs shadowing her face until the next firework rolls overhead.
“Spare me your woes,” she says, disgust coloring her tone. As if she’s read his face and spun up whatever fortune she thinks. “Your self-pity can’t stand against the destruction your army has brought here. I won’t listen to it.”
Basuin clenches his entire body to stop from leaning down to her and barking back. Even the thought has the wolf-man snarling inside of him, growling, snapping its teeth in warning. He breathes in, deep through his nose, and back out. The anger in him simmers despite it.
“You know nothing of me,” he says quietly. Restrained.
The scream of another firework, like paint splattering across the canvas of night, makes her spin to look. He can’t see her face, but he knows from the way her fingers curl into fists by her side—slowly, controlled, but raging all the same—that anger runs through her veins.
“I’ll teach them,” she says, voice low and tempered. “They won’t celebrate a victory they haven’t earned.”
She raises a hand to the sky, pointed toward the bastion, and a blue glow encases her hand. Bright in her palm, between her fingers, then wrapping around her wrist and trailing down her forearm like growing vines. It pulses, alive.
Magic. Real and true and vivid and so close he feels it in his heart—no, he doesn’t have a heart left. So what is this feeling?
Then, with a breath, the Forest God shoots a beam of blue into the night, the force of it blowing her hair back.
But the force of it hits him too, tugs on his heart-bone and staggers him, nearly brings him to his knees.
Basuin chokes on his tongue as a new pain grips him.
He feels like his organs are being ripped out of his body.
It hurts in the same way a flashbang hurts—sudden and bleeding without a drop of blood at all. Burning.
Her magic arcs toward the bastion, but fizzles out immediately.
She inhales hard, glowing hand now clutching at her chest as if she feels the same thing Basuin does.
The blue lights rain down into the forest below them in a sparkling of glitter, flitting away on the wind. A pitiful version of a firework.
She twists her fingers in her shirt, looking back at him. Her countenance speaks to confusion and surprise, knotted together by that look of horror.
“My magic,” she whispers. “It’s gone.” Slowly, she unfurls her fingers, searching every line and divot as if for answers.
There’s a mark upon her palm, a series of white lines like scars.
It makes his own palm pulse in tandem. Then, that same thread of blue magic twined around her wrist appears, glowing against her skin, and leads straight back to him.
The wolf-man scratches at the floor of Basuin’s organs, making itself a nest inside him.
The Forest God turns to look at him, her eyes gone wide. “You’re stealing my magic.”
When he looks down, a thread of red is wrapped and knotted around his left wrist. Basuin, wheezing, upturns his hand.
There, on his left palm, is a series of lines he’s never seen before.
They feel familiar, like they belong to him, but the edges are raised like a healing wound.
It’s black, like ink. Engraved into his skin.
He stares at it, long enough that it almost flashes red like the color of the wolf-man’s eyes.
“What?” He can barely breathe, barely cough out words.
“You didn’t have magic,” she says, but it sounds like a cry for help. Her chest unhinges with every breath she can’t catch.
Magic existed. His mother spoke of it like a fairytale. Or perhaps a memory, he realizes now. Magic existed, and it ate the world as you know it. Swallowed it up until there was no one left who believed in it.
Then how are we still blessed to be alive? he asked with his teenaged snark.
The same way we always were, she told him, and he hated it. If you kill a king, you take his castle.
“They gave you mine,” she says, a look of betrayal marring her face. “You’re taking it.”
If you kill a god—
They don’t speak after the fireworks end.
Surprisingly, after she jumps from the branch she perched on, she waits for Basuin to climb down with her.
Dawn is approaching, the sky colored in dark tones of lavender and periwinkle.
She doesn’t tell him not to follow, and Basuin doesn’t ask if he can.
Even when they reach the portal, they stay cocooned in silence until they are so far away from the bastion again that Basuin breathes without gunpowder stuffed in his nose.
She should have left him behind. Part of him would’ve preferred it. But it was he who followed—a searing need to know more, to understand what’s become of him. Of them. Their magic, a frightening link. And it’s he who speaks first, unable to keep himself from it.
“What’s your name?” he asks, after all this time.
She doesn’t glance at him. “The Forest God.”
Basuin almost laughs, but he can only huff a breath of frustration. “That’s not a name.”
“I don’t have a name,” she says.
“Everyone has a name,” he presses. If he can just prove that she isn’t a god—if he can find something human in her—then maybe he can convince himself that it isn’t real. Magic, and godhood, and duty. None of it is real.
Why did Kensy choose to conquer an island with magic running through its veins?
She pauses, one foot in front of the other.
The Forest God looks at him from over her shoulder with dark eyes.
There’s something alive in them, slant and narrowed, as her gaze flicks over the length of his body.
Perhaps it’s the first echo of light, glittering through the canopy overhead, illuminating their color.
Or maybe it’s the way her cheekbones strike him like a weapon.
“Ren,” she finally answers. “My name was Ren.”
He thinks it to be sort of lovely—the way she speaks her name as if it does not belong to her. It silences him, and he chooses to taste the back of his teeth with his tongue.
“I know your name,” she says before he speaks. “I know the name of every thing, living and dead, in this forest. The forest lives in me.”
Just as the wolf-man lives in him, he understands. Not deification, not really. But possession.
I am your god, the wolf-man had told him first. You are my possession.
“We’re all connected—Qia, Yaelic, Hami,” she names. “And now you, too.” She spits it like it’s something souring in her mouth.
They linger outside of Gyeosi. She might not let him inside this time. But then she moves closer, reaching her hand out toward him. Her palm comes to hover over where his heart should be, and Basuin inhales sharply. But she doesn’t touch him.
“You can’t feel it?” Her brows furrow.
There’s nervousness dripping down his throat and into his stomach. “No.” The absence of it makes him believe they’re not connected at all—that this is still just a dream he’ll wake from.
And why him? Why him at all? Gods are never bound to one another, so why does it ache like a leash around his neck that leads back to her hand?
Gods don’t belong to one another. The only ones he knows, the rare instance of a bond, are the sun and the moon. The push and pull of night and day. The rise and fall of sky.
But a forest god and a wolf god; they aren’t bound. They never would be. So why him?
Whatever this connection is between them, the magic they now share, he doesn’t know. His ma wouldn’t even know what it is, he’s sure.
For a moment, Ren stares at her hand just above his chest. Her visage doesn’t change. Then, she nods and pulls away. All she leaves behind is that leash-tight ache he can’t name, and then she releases the village’s barrier and heads inside.
“You’re letting me back in,” he says, but his words are as weary as they are wary. It feels like a trick. He’s too tired to discern whether it is or not.
She doesn’t turn to meet his eyes. “You’re taking my magic now.” Only the fist she makes at her side gives away that she’s capable of feeling anything at all. “I can’t let you go back to the army. I need my magic—here, in Gyeosi.”
His mouth is dry. “I don’t want your magic.” Silence, and then he wets his lips. “You can’t keep me trapped.”
“You’re a danger here and you’re a danger there.” Her voice is rueful, withering. But her shoulders slump, and the way she relents makes him sick. “Fine, then. It’s your choice—stay, or go.”
Basuin is tired. He is so, so tired, and he has been for so long. So, without a word, he stumbles in behind her, choosing Gyeosi—for now, until morning, like he was promised.