Chapter 10
Bass.
There’s a whisper in the dark.
Bass!
A hand moves across his face. “What?” He sits up in his cot, rubbing sleep from his eyes. When he turns to his left side, there’s no one there. Basuin fists his hand in the sheets.
What if they surrender to us?
He kneels in the snow, helping ’Less with her boots.
She smacks at his hands, but he laces them tight.
So tight she grunts when he pulls the knot.
At the fire pit, Mekal covers the smoldering embers with snow.
The smoke smells like roast meat, and when he looks over, Mekal’s torch has been set aflame.
“Put that out!” he yells. The enemies will find them. It’s too late. Mekal snuffs out the light in the snow and it all goes dark.
It’s too late.
“I know,” he sobs. In the cover of night, Basuin climbs the face of the mountain. His foot finds a hold, but it crumbles beneath his weight. His palm splits open as he slides down the sharp rocks.
Curk catches him by the strap of his bag.
Fuck’s sake, you’re soft.
He pulls himself over the edge of the mountain, lying half-dead in the snow.
Gods’ sake, Cap’n.
Basuin scrambles forward, looking for Tomaas. Shit, shit, shit—Where is Tomaas? Fucking ginger head, it’s brilliant in this white fucking hellscape, isn’t it? But there’s so much blood. Red, fucking red. He’s drowning in it.
“Tomaas!” he screams. The wind is his answer.
Basuin charges forward, sprinting across the ice. Something grabs his ankle and he goes down, chin hitting the ground and blood bursting in his mouth. When he looks back, drooling red, Isaniel’s hand is wrapped around his leg.
Will you defy your orders?
“Isaniel—” he chokes. “Isaniel!” he screams to the blizzard that swallows him whole. The white drowns everything else out. The snow floods his vision and Basuin holds his face in his hands.
Isaniel stands before him. Blood dribbles from his mouth.
Don’t look at me like that, Isaniel says, his eyes black. You fucking liar.
Basuin sits straight up, clutching his heaving chest. Isaniel, Isaniel, Isaniel—his nails scratch his skin as he scrambles to hold his mother’s godstone in his shaking hand.
Isaniel, again. Basuin clenches his eyes closed, trying to catch his breath. Gods, Isaniel will never leave him alone. He deserves it.
He’s sweated through his sleep shirt, the cotton soaked all down his back.
Basuin strips it from his skin, rubbing his eyes open.
A sigh of relief leaves him as his vision returns.
This isn’t Valkesta and he isn’t a captain anymore.
He’s in Gyeosi, the spirit village—and Yaelic is gone, blanket mussed where he laid.
Slivers of light cut through the gaps in the cloth door. It’s past morning.
Basuin lies back again, staring up at the oaken ceiling. He wipes the dampness from his eyes and rolls onto his side, but when he tries to sleep again, Isaniel flashes through his mind like a goddamn wraith.
He can feel the rage as it creeps up the back of his neck.
It poisons his tongue and swells it until he can’t swallow, steals his hands away from him.
It’s not often it shows up like this anymore, a slow crawl through his body that turns his flesh hot and his head hotter instead of a flash, like lightning that scorches the earth and cools as quickly as it came.
His mother called him a stew pot, once. Put on to boil and even once the fire is put out, the cast iron bottom would burn skin at the touch.
Kensy always loved it when Basuin got heated like this. It made him the perfect warrior, a monster of rage. The perfect little soldier boy to do all of Kensy’s dirty work—no questions asked.
Basuin doesn’t plan on boiling over, but he feels it now.
The urge sinking into his bones that scar them with char and soot.
The palm of his left hand itches something rotten, like the unending itch of guilt under his skin when he feels sorriest for himself rather than the rest of his comrades he left lying in snow so red it no longer looked like snow.
When he unfurls his fingers, the black mark cut into his palm, bubbling with an angry red against the grain of his lifeline, stands out. It makes him want to vomit, looking at it. It makes him sick with a fury that starts in his stomach like the very stew his mother made out of him.
Isaniel is dead, Isaniel is already dead—
Captain? Isaniel says in that slick, slithering voice of his that Basuin would swear was poisoned like a snake’s fangs, tongue rolling over his teeth, and Basuin whips his head around so quick that the vertebrae in his neck crack.
For a moment, for a flash, Isaniel is standing there.
In the middle of the small village hut, the leather straps of his back scabbard crooked and hanging too loose—Basuin always laced it up tighter for him, tighter.
So it wouldn’t slip from his shoulders, less broad than the other men.
If only he could tighten it now, grab the laces again and pull Isaniel to him, feel his breath ghost along his neck.
To fumble with the belt of Isaniel’s harness that was always more work to get off than it was to buckle around his trim waist.
He’d do anything for Isaniel to laugh that haunting, sultry laugh he always saved for when he snuck into Basuin’s bunk during shift change, when the other soldiers wouldn’t catch them.
He’s desperate for it—and then blood pours from the holes in Isaniel’s armor, drenching his tunic and running between the cracks of his mail. No, not this again. He can’t touch Isaniel again. Basuin’s hands are dangerous. He has to apologize before Isaniel dies again.
Then, Isaniel’s hand grabs his shoulder. Touches him.
Basuin lashes out—all that anger, that hurt, that fear.
He lashes out, fist curled. Swings, all air.
Something hot and rotten bursts from him all at once.
It smells of sulfur. Of blood and ash. Like fire ribboned between his fingers.
A wave of red magic, pulsing and splashing, jumps from his fist and fills the hut in a bloom of panic.
Don’t touch him. Don’t touch him, Isaniel.
But it never was Isaniel who reached for Basuin first. And as the red glow of magic wanes, Basuin remembers Isaniel is dead. The body who stands a few feet away is too tall to belong to Isaniel. Nor to Yaelic, nor to Ren.
A man, hair long and trailing the floor, flinches away from the red god magic that’s exploded from Basuin’s heaving body. The sleeve of his robe has burned to smoldering cinders, revealing a stretch of pale skin beneath with a muddy-red burn. Basuin’s mouth goes dry.
“My apologies for startling you, Wolf God,” the man speaks, but Basuin’s scrambling to his feet.
“You—” Panic laces his throat. He can hardly speak. “Are you all right?”
Basuin doesn’t know what to do. He moves toward the man, reaching to tear the still-burning sleeve from its wearer, but the man jerks back. It sends another shot of icy panic through Basuin.
Shattered ceramic on the tent floor between them. Blood dripping from his fingertips. Isaniel flinching away from Basuin’s red-stained hand. Eyes full of disgust.
He snaps his fingers into another fist—and another burst of uncontrolled magic floods the room awash in the same color as new blood.
The man is quick. Prepared enough this time to dodge.
But the sparks of magic catch on Basuin’s sleeping mat.
The black mark in his palm burns like the wound is fresh as he chokes.
“I’m sorry,” he tries to say, but it’s swallowed up by pure panic and rage coursing through him.
His nonexistent heart beats and squelches in his ears.
His hands are so hot now, like he just touched the still-cooling iron stew pot.
He needs to beat the fire out of that pot.
Drink the stew until it boils this feeling in his belly.
Kick and scream until that pot cracks down its side, until the stew seeps out from it and sizzles on the fire, steam filling the house with something awful.
But the man in front of him is still burned, more red and angry than even Basuin is now, as he backs toward the wall.
“I haven’t come to harm you,” he says, voice somehow still calm as he pulls the tatters of his sleeve away.
“I didn’t mean to—” Basuin can’t even speak. “I don’t know how to—”
Cap’n, we oughta stop! Curk shouted, so far away underneath the screaming of the wind. It’s not worth our lives, too!
You’d leave your brother behind? he shouted back, digging his heels into the frozen earth. You’d give up on Tomaas?
He isn’t there, Bass! Isaniel yelled again, again, and again. He isn’t fucking there! Stop!
Basuin grabs his own shaking arm, digging his nails into his flesh in the real world, not in his glass-blown memory.
Panic is still building within him, a sob bubbling up in him.
Smoke fills the hut. It smells so much of death and he doesn’t know what to do.
He’s trapped, halfway in a dream and halfway in a memory, and the man in front of him has paid for it.
Once more, Basuin reaches out toward his victim.
And then a small hand catches his wrist, gripping it like a shackle, all bone and twist. In the blue light of god magic, Ren’s eyes are narrowed into sharp obsidian.
It could cut into him. Though he cannot see her mouth from behind her arm reaching out to clip his wrist in her hand, he knows her lips are set in a harsh line of fury.
Behind him, her magic stamps out the fire he’s started. He isn’t breathing—no one seems to be. All he can do is stare into Ren’s dark eyes, which sear into him with judgment and distaste.
“You’re just like them,” Ren seethes. “You hurt the forest, you hurt my people—just like your people came here to do.” She doesn’t release his wrist.
Basuin flounders, biting his tongue. “It was an accident,” he says in lieu of an apology. He thinks he should, but it doesn’t slither out of his mouth. He can’t make himself say the words.