Chapter 23
It takes him a long while to work up the courage to apologize. Far too long. Basuin spends a whole day contemplating what he might say to Ren, how he can gain her forgiveness again. How to convince her that it was not betrayal, but ignorance—and he doesn’t wish to be ignorant any longer.
He doesn’t have time to be wasting like this.
The army is moving. Haaman returned, early in the morning, with news that the legion is marching toward them still.
Whatever used to be his heart is steadily buzzing and his stomach keeps churning.
He tried to speak with her then, but couldn’t get his words together.
Panic, whether at the army or at the apology, made him hesitate.
Then, after lunch, when Yaelic caught him to ask what their next plans were, since Ren said they’d be leaving soon. His last attempt was after dinner, but Ko swept her into a conversation before Bass had any chance at all.
Excuses, anyway. Basuin is scared shitless that Ren won’t accept his apology.
How pathetic. A war hero, scared of a woman refusing to forgive him. Basuin considers, for far too long, whether he should go looking for some wildflowers to give her.
That’s a memory he hasn’t unearthed in so many years. Of his mother, before she was too sick to walk, who cut fresh flowers from the garden every week to set in the windows of their village home. Before they were cast out into that hellish shack Bass built, shoddy windows and his ma bedridden.
“What are you doing stalking around out here?”
Bass spins around, face to face with Ren, her arms crossed over her chest and annoyance sprawled across her countenance. He hadn’t realized how far he’d paced away from their camp, on the outskirts of the abandoned village—almost as if he were walking to that little shack in Ankor.
And here Ren stands in the darkness with him. This is the first she’s spoken to him.
Ren looks away, pursing her lips. “Are you leaving?” But she says it with a heaviness, a pit of sorrow in every vowel. The distance between them suddenly aches. No, it’s always ached, but he feels it now.
The wolf-man whines, nosing at Basuin’s flesh, pawing toward Ren.
“I’m sorry,” he says like he’s drowning.
Ren’s eyes snap to his, burning golden in the moonless night.
“I’m sorry for hiding what I knew.” Bass steps closer to her and she doesn’t move away. “It wasn’t malicious. I didn’t mean to betray your trust, but I know I did. And I’m sorry.”
His hands feel so empty at his sides, flexing and grabbing at his pants and then hiding behind his back so Ren won’t see how he wrings his wrists.
Ren takes a moment before she responds, watching him. “You’re sorry.” Confusion lurks in her voice.
“I am.” He sighs, glancing away from her. “I am ignorant, but I won’t be anymore. I need to learn more magic. I want to,” he says. Then, he looks up and meets her eyes. Holds their gaze steady. “Will you help me?”
Ren looks completely taken aback at his request, eyes gone wide. “You want to learn more magic?”
He swallows hard. “I want to save the forest.”
She turns away, hiding her face from him. All he sees is a peek of her neck when the breeze blows her hair back and a still-healing series of cuts on the back of her arm. If only he could see her face, try and read her ever-unreadable emotions.
If only he could save her the pain.
“I’m sorry, too.” Ren’s voice is quiet. “You said you would help, and I should trust that, after everything.”
Relief floods him, washing away all the fear and guilt that once coated his insides. Ren’s gentle hand finds his, her face shadowed by the night, and she tugs him toward the trees. Further into the forest.
She feared that Basuin was leaving. The thought sends a twisted thrill through him, the idea that Ren didn’t want him to leave again. But her touch grounds him as they weave through the woods together.
Ren nestles into a bed of roots, back pressed to the trunk of an oak.
It looks like she belongs there, right in the heart of the forest. As if this tree built its home to welcome her, to shelter her.
The choppy ends of her hair blow across her face, hiding her lips as a cool night breeze coasts over them.
He sits across from her, lumbering a bit to get his legs in order. Too long, too big, too bumbling. If Ren is grace, then he is crude. She is balanced, he is clumsy.
But once he’s situated himself, legs crossed beneath him, there’s too much distance between them still. He feels the emptiness, the stretch of space separating them. Bass wants to recreate their closeness from before, somehow.
It feels so good to be close to her. The wolf-man’s doing, he’s sure.
Inside him, the wolf-man laughs and it echoes in the chamber of Basuin’s chest where his heart is missing.
“I want to teach you something,” Ren says, hand outstretched toward him. And as if she’s the sun in the whole blessed sky, Basuin leans closer to her, seeking out her light and warmth. “Hold my hand.”
He swallows hard. Then, he slides her hand into his from underneath, keeping her palm face up.
No god mark ruins her left hand, and none wears his right.
Like this, they’re a mirror image of one another.
As the wind rustles her hair again, it tangles with the long curls of his that have unraveled from the low bun he knots at the nape of his neck each morn.
Ren holds his gaze for a moment, but when her eyes drop away, his return to the stark white of her palm, milky in the dregs of light falling from the stars in the dark sky.
And then a knife slashes through her skin, drawing red blood to the surface, bubbling up hot.
Bass scrambles forward, fingers hovering over the gash in Ren’s palm. Her eyes are unreadable, face smooth and even when he looks up. Her bone dagger gleams in her god-marked hand where she flips it in her grasp.
The cut is deep and it runs with the smell of rust.
“Heal it,” she says, and Bass freezes.
“I can’t,” he says in one big burst. “I can’t do that.” His hands aren’t for healing. They are for hell, and hell only.
“You can,” she says instead, but when Bass presses his thumb to the cut to staunch the bleeding Ren winces. Her wrist twitches with pain and he can feel the icy grip of panic rise and curl in his throat. “Like I showed you, with the weapons. Imagine—”
“I can’t,” he snarls, louder, with an edge so harsh he could break a blade on it. Snap it, brittle and mean. These hands have never healed anything. Haven’t saved a single soul, man or not-man. All they have done is killed.
The wolf-man sinks its teeth into him somewhere, but he can’t even feel it. All he can feel is panic as dark blood oozes from the wound Ren’s made in her own damned palm.
Like she can read his mind, Ren tells him, “It’ll scar.”
A curse falls from his lips. There’s a shake in his fingers. Anything but that. She’s too delicate to scar.
“Imagine threading your magic into the cut,” she says, softer this time. Lurid, somehow, in the darkness of the forest. “Imagine using it to stitch the wound. You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”
Bass clenches his eyes shut. Pulling a tin needle through Tehali’s calf with thick thread as she chewed on a leather bit. Fishing a bent needle out of his own shoulder with trembling fingers, hoping to god someone would come and save him from himself.
No one ever did, and the nightmares never fucking stopped.
The nightmares only stopped when he came to this forest—this godsdamned forest where Ren sits in front of him and bleeds until he can dredge up some half-hero, half-killer courage that sprouted up inside him and withered to death in Valkesta.
“Basuin.” She says his name quietly. Blood is crawling down her arm.
“Fuck,” he curses again, culling his shallow breathing and shaking his head.
“I don’t know how to.” It comes out more whine than words, like a kicked wolf pup.
He sounds defeated, but he hasn’t even tried.
He thought he could do this; he needs to do this.
But this is just a reminder that Basuin’s hands cannot fix. They can only break.
“Listen to me,” Ren says, and her voice draws his eyes to her face again. Unreadable, still, but softer. “Imagine your magic as needle and thread. Stitch it up. Use it as a balm. Mend it.”
He swallows again. Her blood is smeared across her palm and sticking to his thumb.
“Mend me,” she whispers, and Basuin shudders a breath.
Just as she’s taught him—with the light and food and supplies and guns and weapons and the almost nightmares—Bass calls the red pinpricks of his magic into his mind. The pressure under his thumb lessens, but the weight of Ren’s blood doesn’t.
They can all heal her; Qia and Ko and Hou-tou. It’s only him, the Wolf God, the guardian of the Forest God, who cannot.
But he has to. She’s cut herself open for him, trusting that he’ll save her. A second chance, to prove her wrong. She can trust him again.
Bass snaps the thread of his magic from where it’s wound around his soul.
Then he weaves it through the gash, the rift Ren has cut into her own palm.
With his eyes closed, Bass moves his left hand over the wound, the heat of his magic sinking into her skin.
He pictures it, stitching it closed. Using the string that’s tied his spirit to hers to fix her hurt.
“Open your eyes,” Ren asks of him, and he does. The gash is gone, leaving unmarked skin behind. The blood she wore has disappeared, like it never existed. All he can see anymore is the smile on her face.
It’s so fucking gentle and so bright and graceful and fuck. He feels shattered by it. Like the light of her is bracing against the darkness caged inside of him, trying to slip through the cracks forming in the carefully crafted armor he bears on his back. She’s trying to undo him. Break him.
Basuin would beg her to, if she’ll keep looking like that. More a woman now than a god, with perfectly shaped lips and a soft sloped nose and kind slants for eyes, who was human enough to ignore him out of anger. Human enough to fear that he would leave her.
He could cry, she’s so beautiful. Gods damn him.
“You’re funny,” she says, and it’s so startling that he blinks. But she’s wearing that soft, downy look still as she stares at him.
“What?”
“I thought, at first, that you were selfish.”
That strikes him. Painfully. Then, honestly. “You would be right,” he says.
But Ren shakes her head. “I was wrong. You worry so much for others, care for them so much, but you hide it. You fear it—being afraid.”
Bass rears back. “Is that what you think?”
“I do.” Slowly, Ren pulls her hand away from his and he watches her flee. He wants to snatch it back, to intertwine their fingers, even now. “You claim to not be a protector, that you don’t want to be—but you do it anyway. Every person you try to protect is another fear to carry. Isn’t it?”
His hand tightens into a quick fist, bones aching. “Very funny of me, then.” Bass stopped trying to protect people a long time ago. The only reason he even cares to protect Ren is because of this godsdamned thing in his chest—
He beats his fist against his heart at the exact moment the wolf-man lunges, teeth bared, at Bass’ ribs to crush them. That’s not true. That’s not true at all. He knows it.
And just like that, the light she’s been projecting cuts off. He closes his eyes to pretend it’s been dark this whole time.
“I just don’t want you to fear me,” Ren finally says, her voice low.
Fear for you, he almost says. He fears for her. But maybe that’s the same as fearing her.
Instead, he presses his thumbnail into one of the lines of his god mark. “You’re the same way.” He can feel Ren’s eyes on him. “You try to keep everything at a distance. Even the forest.”
Eventually, his nail breaks skin and Basuin bleeds.
“But I don’t fear you,” he says. And he means it—even when he opens his eyes and sees the wrecked countenance Ren wears like a white flag.