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KISSEN HAD REALLY HOPED THE NEXT TIME SHE MET A god she would be paid to kill it.

Not this time. They were here for Satuan, and despite her better judgement, she could not deny that Lessa was right. How could they fight a god like Hseth without a greater power at their backs? Without Osidisen, Kissen would only have hurt Hseth by dragging her into the sea, not killed her.

But what kind of offering would it take, to bring a god with enough power back to Middren? Even Inara had to make an offering to draw a divinity away from its shrine. True, Satuan could not love the gods, to have found a way to sink bridhid ore into the earth and tell humans how to make briddite.

But caution had saved Kissen before. She hoped Lessa knew what she was doing.

They left Inara in the pools with some crew watching over her, and Kissen followed Lessa back to the boat and jetty to dress.

There, she carefully adjusted her new prosthesis while doing her best to look anywhere except the shape of Lessa’s back, the clinging of her dark hair to the smooth brown of her neck, the strength and grace of her hands.

Her infatuation with Inara’s bloodthirsty pirate mother had to stop.

It made Kissen more aware of her own body.

Too aware. She felt, despite the years and self-love that she had put between herself and her pain, the pang of her childhood fears: that she was too ungainly, large, loud and scarred to be looked at with anything other than pity.

She didn’t mind the doubt. It reminded her that she was still human, still alive.

And, from the way Lessa also carefully averted her gaze, Kissen suspected that pity was the last thing on her mind as well.

She had her own scars, a long, jagged line up her left thigh, a few more cut across her ribs, a knot in her shoulder that must have been from an arrow.

No. Not looking.

Kissen belted on her cutlass and her only briddite throwing knife, then followed the lady’s sure stride along the jetty to the bank.

There, the vicious rock of the ground was pitted and overhung with ragged stone that looked about to fall from the cliff above.

Uncaring folks were squatted in the shade, boiling eggs in the steaming rockpools, fishing them out with grass baskets.

A lean old woman was stuffing thick leaves with red berries and bits of meat seared on a nearby fire, tying them with a deft knot of coarse hemp and lowering them into the pool by the thread.

She had a coin bag at her side and gave them a large gap-toothed grin as they came up.

Two copper for egg, she said in sign, five for meat. Or equivalent.

Lessa pulled Middrenite coin from her belt, notably not the new ones printed with Arren’s face.

Two eggs, she signed, and Kissen remembered that Inara had learned her language from her mother, just as Kissen had learned it from Telle.

She gave one bright brass coin with a hole in it, which Kissen didn’t recognise, and the old woman plucked two eggs out of the steaming water and threw them.

Lessa caught both, passed Kissen one without comment, then stepped deeper into the rock cave.

‘What’s this for?’ said Kissen, as the other woman started peeling her egg.

‘Snack. Keep the shell.’

Kissen decided not to question this small kindness and followed Lessa deeper into the shadows.

Beneath the rock, the air grew hotter, sultry, and the cave beneath the overhang narrowed like a wedge.

Here, there were hints that a great shrine was near: some untouched silver cups filled with what smelled like rancid palm wine; metal hands on leather thongs hanging from spikes in the rock, some holding hammers, some pointing; an arrangement of piled stones around a pit where a ritual fire might have burned the flesh of animal sacrifices.

Then, on the ceiling, jagged script carved into the rock in a language Kissen was pretty sure wasn’t Irisian or Middric.

‘What does it say? ’ she asked Lessa, but the lady didn’t laugh or chide her, and instead read out loud:

‘ Bone of earth, blood of hand

Fire with blacken, quench in sand

Join with iron, grind with sea

’ware the god, and leave him be. ’

Kissen rolled her eyes. What theatrics.

‘So,’ she said drily, ‘the briddite rhyme.’

Yatho had taught it to her, for one of the ways the people had fought back in Blenraden was by the smiths teaching each other how to forge briddite weapons.

The rhyme held the skill within it: bridhid ore from old volcanic flows had to be mixed with iron and heated wildly hot with crumbled coal, called blacken, then cooled slowly, quenched in grey sand, and ground with seawater. It required the work of several hands.

Though the last line was the one Kissen usually preferred. In Middric it was ‘’ware the gods, and leave them be’.

‘Seems so,’ said Lessa, and headed deeper in. The cave was quickly becoming a crevasse.

Kissen tongued her gold tooth as she assessed the shadows ahead. ‘You’ve not been down here before?’

‘I’m not you. I don’t bother gods for entertainment.’

Kissen scowled. ‘It was always your plan to bring gods into the war,’ she said, ‘wasn’t it?’

‘This is a gods’ war,’ said Lessa. ‘It has always been my plan to win.’

‘Does that mean you’ll use Inara as well?’

Lessa stopped and glared back at her.

‘You said you wanted to win,’ said Kissen, cracking the egg with her thumb and peeling it one-handed. She was all for mother and daughter reconciling, but she had seen children used for less, and by people who were supposed to love them.

‘I will not put the fate of our land on the shoulders of a little girl,’ said Lessa coldly. ‘ My little girl, who has already seen too much, given too much. I would rather die.’

Kissen was surprised by her certainty, but warmed too. ‘It seems, Lady Craier,’ she said, ‘there are some things we can agree on.’

Lessa tutted. ‘Tarin did not ask such stupid questions,’ she muttered, then turned into the narrow passage to the smith god’s shrine.

Here, as the bright sunlight eked away, the air grew hotter still, thick with salt and steam.

Prongs of dribbling rock hung down from the ceiling, green and white and almost glowing in the darkness.

The way narrowed, and the shadows crept in around them.

Soon, scalding water ran past their feet, and they kept to the dry bank to its left, though sometimes they had to leap or climb around.

Twice, instead of shuffling around a thin edge, Kissen just stepped through on her prosthesis, mainly to annoy Lessa and prove that she could.

Eventually, the dark swallowed them whole. Then, Lessa began to drop the shell from her egg, piece by piece onto the floor. It formed a faint but clear line, reflecting the tiniest edge of light still threading in from behind them. A distinguishable trail.

Smart.

Lessa soon ran out, and Kissen took over. More than once, she felt the scrape of rock like a blade along her scalp, her shoulders, her fingers. A claw that scratched, a tooth that bit. And every time her flesh touched stone, it seemed to thrum , beating in a rhythm she half recognised.

Then, between one step and the next, the sea scents of salt and stone disappeared, replaced instead by hot metal and earth.

They had crossed a threshold, and now the beat was not only in the rock, it was in her ears, in her very bones.

The air reverberated with the sound of metal striking metal, over and over, hard and strong.

It reminded her of Yatho, a smith at work.

A god was near, already manifest. And they had crossed the border into his shrine.

Lessa continued, and heat washed over them, sizzling on their skin.

Kissen’s shirt dried on her back, stiffening with crystals as the path brightened again with an orange glow that made her burn scars prickle.

The stone teeth from ceiling and floor looked about to snap closed and swallow them whole.

They were beaded, too, with shining globules.

Ore, spat out from some furnace, glinting like jewels.

Kissen felt instinctively for her chest, where the vial of Aan’s water used to hang as a protection against burning.

Of course, nothing was there except the white mark of Osidisen’s fulfilled promise.

She had no defences. Her flesh felt delicate, her breaths too quick, burning with the memory of flame and terror, the screams of her loved ones, the last kiss of her father.

That was long ago. Flame was flame, and burning was its nature. It was in her nature to feel fear, and let it go.

They passed through the teeth into a cavern, and light drenched them.

Hot rock glowed a vivid, molten orange, brightening the cavern that opened around them.

Rivers of hot water flowed across the ground beneath a cloud of fog, circling a vat of stone and an anvil ten times the size of Telle’s largest.

Above it, stood a titan.

There was no other word for the being who was hammering at an ore-stone the size of Kissen’s torso. It looked as if he was holding a blasted piece of burned bone, but as he hammered it, sparks of impure metal flew out onto the anvil and into the vat of lava he used for a firing oven.

His back was half turned away from his shrine’s entrance, but Kissen could see the god had a human shape; that of a broad man with a tremendous belly and legs rippling with muscle. His hands, however, were made of blackened metal, glowing with heat, cracking red across the knuckles and fists.

This was the heat that steamed the seas. Molten stone from the depths of the earth, and a smith god at his forge.

Lessa went down onto her knees and put her hands forward, bowing low. Kissen stayed standing. She didn’t bow to gods unless she wanted something from them. All she wanted now was to get Inara’s mother out of this with all her limbs.