Chapter 30
“Kensy’s not with the army,” Bass says, thumb soothing red magic over a burn on Ren’s forearm. He can’t look at her right now. He can’t hide the fear lurking in his eyes. “He’s moving north, alone.”
If Ren’s face changes, he doesn’t see. He busies himself with healing every new wound that crawls across her skin—the wounds he brought to her. This is the one thing he can control right now, as laughable as it is. Trying to find forgiveness in his own guilt and shame.
Godhood, it seems, is as despicable as being a soldier.
“For how long?” Ren’s voice is a tremble.
“I don’t know.” He inhales, running his fingers down the rivulets of her knuckles, only pulling away when the urge to slip his hand into hers grows too heavy.
“But I do know him, and this isn’t anything new.
Kensy’s always been crafty. We used to move ahead of the legion in the middle of the night together, just me and him, and bargain with whoever was heading the opposition in whatever city we wanted to take. We wouldn’t sleep, sometimes for days.”
His vision dims. Ren must think him a monster for such horrific things. But it’s true. All of it.
“And once we bargained,” he continues, “we’d kill whoever we’d just conned, and when the fighting started, the legion had already caught up with us.”
A chill crawls up his spine. Ren says nothing, nothing at all, and he chooses not to look at her.
“He’s outpaced us. He could be there right now,” he stresses.
Ren’s free hand draws up to touch the godstone she still wears.
She closes her fist around it, much like he used to do, and it makes his heart quicken.
He wets his lips, the ghost of her kiss setting a blaze of want through his mind again.
If only he could reach up now and cover her mouth with his.
Banish that worried look she tries so hard to hide from him, the one that creases her brows.
He has to get to the Winter River first. He has to go—now.
“Don’t worry,” he says instead, and brings her hand up to lay a kiss upon her knuckles. It’s the closest thing he can get. “We’ll figure it out.” He’s said that too many times now, but every single time, he’s meant it. He hopes Ren believes it, too.
“Let’s go, then.” Ren’s eyes meet his, but she blinks and they wander down to his lips. Then, her gaze falls completely. “The army has slowed down. The spirits are safe, for now.”
Right. Because he’s slaughtered every camp they had.
He squeezes her hand. “I’ll go, and you can stay and protect them.”
“No.” Her answer is quick and snipped, her nails biting into his skin. “You said we do this together.” Those eyes of hers are so dark and so sharp, so cutting, and so beautiful. So sad.
His heart is so full and so heavy in his chest.
“We’re partners,” she says harshly. Then, softer, she asks, “Right?”
“Of course,” he answers with no hesitation. “We’re partners.” Basuin clasps her hand in both of his, pocketing her away. He doesn’t want to let go of her. Ever.
Ren’s whole body eases, and she blinks what he thinks might be the blossoming of tears away. “So we go together.”
It makes his chest ache something foul. Basuin keeps hurting her, but she still believes him a partner.
Once, he thought he wouldn’t find another human as kind and gentle and patient as his mother was—she didn’t seem human to him in the first place, touched and blessed by gods.
But Ren was a human once, and she is more kind and more gentle and more patient than even his mother was.
Ren lets him heal the rest of her wounds with magic that feels like it belongs to him now.
The Wolf God. The acceptance tastes like rot and fester in his mouth.
But he tries to believe it’s worth something.
He’s a protector, and this magic allows him that.
An extension of this feeling he harbors for Ren—this affection, the need to protect her and steal away her pain.
“You are going to the Winter River.” Ko startles them both, a hitch in Ren’s breath that he only hears because she’s so close to him. Ko stands a few feet away, draped in his dark robes and looking as tired as ever. More, somehow. Bruised undereyes and mussed hair.
Basuin looks to Ren, who meets his eyes. What will they say?
But Ko doesn’t wait for them, tipping his chin up to look toward the sky with a heavy sigh. “I wonder if Ithika watches this unfold, and if she is saddened by it all.”
Basuin, too, wondered that. As he sat on the boat that brought him to this island, he wondered if Ithika might rise and swallow them whole in her seas.
“But she has long since been dead,” Ko says. “She cannot protect the Winter River, as she did before, from up in the godrealm.”
His eyes widen. “Ithika is dead?” Across from him, Ren closes her eyes and turns away.
Ko gives him a sad smile. “I told you before that gods cannot roam without a body or a host.”
“Yes,” Ren says before he can ask anything else. “We’re going to the Winter River.”
A sad silence covers them, then Ko nods. “Of course you are.” Then, he kneels beside them, letting his eyes fall closed and his shoulders droop as he hides his hands in his lap. “You make her proud,” he says.
“Who?” Ren asks. But her hand clasps the godstone at her neck. Can she feel the grooves that he’s worried into the jade stone—the imprints of his mother’s wishes and worries? Of his own fears?
“The Forest God,” Ko answers. “The one who lives in you.”
Ren’s eyes flash wide and bright, a mirror of the moon above them. “You spoke with her?”
Ko’s smile only gets kinder, but more somber all at once. “I knew her, before I knew you. The determination in you is the same that she bore. I know she feels pride in you, Am-sa.”
Ren bows her head, touching her forehead to her clasped hands—a prayer that goes unheard. Then, she buries her face in Basuin’s chest. His mother’s stone is a heat between them, the only thing that keeps the place where their hearts might be from pressing together.
Ren has a heart, he knows. The gods don’t speak to her because they let Ren keep hers.
Basuin startles awake. He can’t remember what he dreamed about, or what woke him at all.
His eyes scan their camp, trying to listen for any other sound—but there’s nothing but the whistle of the forest. Everyone is asleep in their tents.
He checks on each one, counts heads and bodies, lingers until he can breathe.
It isn’t enough. He pushes to walk the perimeter of the forest, too. Then, he’ll be able to sleep again.
He traipses into the darkness, thinking better of making light out of magic. If there’s something out here, he’ll hear it before he sees it.
But there’s nothing out here. Only the dawning light of day, rays of light beginning to color the sky as he makes one final round through the trees. He’s tired—his eyes are starting to ache and his joints are stiff in the cold morning air.
Bass slows to a stop, ready to turn back and go check on Ren again. Then, he sees it.
Movement, in the forest. A flash of color. A glimpse of someone. Bass is pulled underwater in an instant, drowning, the rush of waves too loud in his ears for him to hear anything at all.
He drops to a crouch, creeping forward. Whoever is in the forest doesn’t make a sound, disappearing behind a thick-trunked oak into another throng of trees.
Bass rushes them, leaping out—but there’s no one there. No one at all.
He breathes, hard. A trick of the light. He turns to head back to camp.
There, a flash of golden hair. Isaniel.
No, fuck. It can’t be. It wouldn’t. Paranoia trickles in like ice water in his veins. Bass whips his head around, looking at all angles of the forest. Isaniel.
But when he looks back, Isaniel is gone. There was nothing ever there.
He’s been fooled by his own mind. Again. Nothing at all.
Basuin sinks to his knees in the middle of the woods, breathing heavy and quick. That space in his chest is buzzing, like it’s been set aflame. He’s been through this before—seen it before in the darkness of his quarters, from his bed in the healing bay. Isaniel’s ghost come back to haunt him.
It will never end.
There’s an ache filling him as he trudges back toward camp. The feeling of Ren’s hands on his face, calling to him, waking him from what she believed was a nightmare. If only he could feel that again. The softness of her. How is her skin so honeyed, still? After all the fires in her forest?
He falls to his bedroll, lying beneath the stars, catching his breath. It’s over now. It’s just a memory. Isaniel is buried beneath the snow on the Valkesi Mountains, never to return. He’s at the Winter River. Basuin must get to the Winter River, before Kensy can.
Basuin has to get there first.
He’s the last to fall asleep, still wracked with worry, and the first to wake, mouth dry and back aching. He sits up with a quiet grunt, rubbing his scar until the itch is gone, wiping the crust of sleep from the squinting crack that blurs his vision.
When he stands to stretch his legs, turning to head into the woods, he’s stopped with a pit sinking into his stomach.
An oak tree stands shrunken before him, no leaves on its withered branches.
A large, uneven square has been cut into its trunk and stripped of bark.
And in that trunk, words have been burned into the flesh.
YOUR GODS CHOSE WRONG.
Basuin chokes. He steps forward, placing his palm to the marred trunk—but it collapses, the tree shattering into dead wood to reveal a broken heap of a man dressed in long robes. Ko’s long hair is stringy along the forest, matted to his face with blood.
He drops to his knees, hands hovering over Ko’s body. “Ren!” One hand to Ko’s face, the other searching for a heartbeat. “Ren!” he calls again, voice ragged.
Movement starts, quick and chaotic, as Bass’ shouts make it across the camp. And then, a scream. Agonizing. Pure unfettered pain. It rings out so terribly that even Basuin flinches with the ache.