Page 3

Kissen sighed, and pulled her belt down from its hook from the wall.

She had sourced a few throwing knives, one briddite, and a cutlass with a briddite edge.

Not enough of the ore in her opinion, but she had to make do.

Sakre was mostly still loyal to Arren, and most of their briddite stores had been melted down into useless talismans they wore to ward off bad gods and spirits.

‘I’ve never seen a god’s power like hers,’ she said at last. Of course, gods sometimes manifested at their shrines when they were called, but not always.

If they could summon Hseth at will, the god was either very na?ve, or very greedy.

Or both. ‘Her priests lead the country, command the army. They use fear and pain as weapons, so I don’t doubt that they can use the god too.

I saw the shrines they made; if they carry them with their armies, they could summon her anywhere. ’

‘Their foot soldiers must be exhausted,’ Elo murmured. ‘Talicia hasn’t run a ground war in nearly fifty years. Few of them will be trained, and you said half of them were farmhands, fisherfolk, younglings. Why would they put themselves through this?’

‘Fear and power make people do stupid things,’ said Kissen. ‘Mad things.’ She had told all she had seen in Talicia to Elo, Lessa and the king: the burning of children, of people, the zeal and the terror.

‘I don’t know how to stop this,’ she admitted. ‘Even if the Craiers get help from Irisia, even if you can hold them off in the north …’

‘I’ll think of something,’ said Elo.

Infuriating. He was infuriatingly calm.

A rattle of knocking at the door, and their brief peace was broken.

‘What?’ Kissen barked.

‘The tide is up,’ said a familiar voice. ‘And if we set sail, Elo might not wish to swim to shore.’

Kissen grabbed her staff, and slid open the door to see Inara standing in the warm, bright sunlight, with an intentionally innocent look.

Her cropped hair suited her well, springing up into a thicket of curls around her neck and ears.

Her thirteenth birthday had been and gone as the spring warmed, and she had also grown drastically in height in what felt like a bare few weeks since Kissen had first met her.

‘How did you know I was here?’ said Elo, grabbing the pottery bowls he had brought from the food vendor and sliding them back into his satchel, wiped clean with bread and ready to return in exchange for a copper.

‘You were seen sneaking aboard in the wee hours,’ said Inara. ‘Like a thief in the night.’

Elo sucked his teeth, yet when he stepped out into the brightness and noise of the ship’s deck, it was hard to imagine him thieving or haggling over petty coin.

His skin glowed as if he had been born of the sun, and in his fine garb he looked more like a lord than a working knight, or even the baker he had called himself when they first met.

Inara was also well pranked up. She had forgone the Craier green and instead wore a stiff ochre undershirt with brushed wool leggings, and a long red tunic over both, dotted at the shoulders with droplets of tumbled glass.

For a moment, in her rumpled shirt and patched trews, Kissen felt like a stranger.

She was a foreign orphan, a guttersnipe and a mercenary, she wasn’t meant to stand side by side with knights and nobles and kings.

Well, she had never been one to know her place.

‘I’ll bet the god ratted us out,’ said Kissen, looking up.

She was right, Skediceth, god of white lies, was perched on the highest of the three mainmasts that stabbed through Lessa Craier’s ship, his wings outstretched as he bathed in the sun and the sea air.

He had mostly recovered himself since the fights in Lesscia, but he had stayed smaller, quieter than she remembered.

He often kept to the high perch when he wasn’t on Inara’s shoulder, a silent sentinel against would-be assassins seeking vengeance against the Craiers on their ship, the Silverswift .

Kissen had to admit, it was a beauteous vessel; its raised foredeck had gilt banisters up to the top, carved in flowing, twisting designs.

This held Kissen’s cabin side by side with the one belonging to Lessa’s guard captain and fellow rebel, Tarin.

The aftcastle where Lessa and Inara would stay was at the other side of the well-polished main deck, now empty of barrels and livestock but busy with crew who were preparing the sails for release.

There, between the upright panelling and doors, three small shrines were studded into the wood. Before the God War, every Middrenite ship would have had such shrines, to gods who might protect them on the seas. Now, these altars seemed preserved from another age.

One was clearly for Yusef, the god of safe haven.

Inara’s father. The totem carved for him was a statue, broad-shouldered and bearded, draped in a string of red glass beads.

As with most of his shrines Kissen had seen before his death, he wore the travelling robes of the eastern tribes that had settled Restish centuries before, and a woven belt of what looked like sail rope.

The others weren’t so familiar: one held a spiked conch and a crown of gold-dipped cowries, the other a winged totem of a gull carved from pale, smooth stone. The latter was probably some wind god, and Kissen resisted the urge to spit in its offering cup. She was not fond of wind gods of late.

‘Everything’s stowed,’ said Inara, dragging her attention away. ‘Apart from Legs.’

Kissen glanced overboard to see her horse, merrily eating hay from a bag, his tail swishing away the flies that clustered about him, oblivious to the noise of the harbour.

He was still in the temporary stables beneath the pulleys they used to bring beasts aboard.

She had stopped them, not wanting him to spend the night aboard in the cramped dark beneath the deck.

Kissen sighed. This was going to hurt.

‘Elo, I have a gift for you,’ she said, using her staff to ease herself onto the gangplank before carefully moving sideways down it. Better to feel like a crab than to fall and break her neck.

‘What do you mean?’ said Elo, following her.

The main port of Sakre, north of the Silverswift, was teeming with folk – merchants, haulers, runners and crews – but the Craier ship had a privileged position in the nobles’ docks, separate and in a pool of quiet, save for the pining cries of gulls.

It was one of the few remaining hints, other than the stink of lye and blood in the Healers’ streets, that the city had hung in the balance between king and rebels.

That was until Lady Craier finally understood that destroying Arren meant splitting their country into factions that would fight each other instead of following her to war.

As Kissen reached the stones of the harbour, Legs nickered, coming forward to greet her. Kissen reached up a hand for his warm, strong nose and stroked the white streak that marked it. His arrow and thorn wounds had healed well but had left pale notches in his flanks.

‘Shall I call the captain to bring him aboard?’ Inara asked, her eyes also on his scars.

‘No,’ said Kissen. ‘He’s not coming.’

‘Not coming?’

Inara climbed the fence of his pen so she could stroke him too, but he stamped his feet and shifted his face towards Elo, ignoring the girl. Her lips tugged downwards, but she held in her disappointment as Elo patted Legs’s neck.

At last, he understood. ‘You can’t leave him,’ he said. ‘I went through great lengths to fetch him here for you.’

‘I know,’ said Kissen heavily. ‘But I told you before: I owe him better than a slow death in a cage.’

‘But he loves you,’ said Inara, and didn’t add even if he has not forgiven me for riding him into a riot. Kissen patted her arm in comfort.

‘Sometimes, you need to let love go,’ she said. ‘He’s a pathway horse, he knows this land. I can’t close him in a stinking hull for weeks with no light and air. It would break his heart.’

She couldn’t imagine Legs away from the green places, the trees and the mountains, the roads he had carried her through time and time again, the chestnut leaves and the bracken.

She had bought him, barely a year old, from a woman too liberal with a whip and too stingy with her grazing.

It had taken a long while for him to warm to her, but when he did, he became family.

Elo shook his head as Legs nuzzled his shoulder. ‘We both owe him better than a long road to war.’

‘Then don’t take him into battle. He’s loyal, steady on the way. And …’ She clicked her tongue as her own bloody horse pressed his nose into Elo’s hands. ‘Bastard seems to like you.’

‘You told me once to get the fuck away from him,’ said Elo, now scratching Legs’s white streak.

‘Well, if I can’t offer you my arms, baker-knight, at least I can offer my Legs.’ She winked at him, and Inara snorted. ‘There are packhorses in the army, he can be yours. A friend. One you can trust.’

Elo smiled so fully that his eyes crinkled, then turned and clasped her shoulders. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Say you’ll look after him,’ said Kissen, reaching to hold the back of his neck, somewhere between a warrior’s clasp and a lover’s embrace.

‘I promise.’

Legs huffed, annoyed at being left, then gently, carefully, came back to Inara and put his nose to her shoulder, sniffing at the jewels there. He didn’t move as she slowly raised a hand to his mane, and he let her hold him.

Kissen breathed out. She wished she could hold Elo together in her arms, hold the world together through her will alone. She was afraid that if she let him go he would disappear, run into war, die a hero, when she wanted him to live, wanted him to keep living.

‘I hope we meet again, baker,’ she said, instead of all that she felt. He knew. Of course he knew.

‘We will,’ said Inara, and she leaned over to put her arms around both of them. ‘We’re coming back with ships and weapons, from Irisia. Maybe their gods too.’

A flutter of wings, and as if summoned by the word ‘gods’, Skedi alighted on the fence beside Legs, the size of a small squirrel, his wings bright and dappled like an owl’s.

From his antlers dangled some odd objects: one of Inara’s mother-of-pearl buttons, a piece of curling hair, wrapped tight, and a green beaded bracelet from one of the archivists who had helped Inara and Telle make off with the contents of the cloche.

He also had a smudge on his brow which could have been dirt … or blood.

‘Humans do like touching each other, don’t they?’ he said, his whiskers twitching.

‘What do you want, godling?’ said Kissen, stepping back from the others as Skedi cocked his head. She approximated that to a smile.

‘Inara’s mother is coming,’ he said. He tightened the tuck of his wings and shifted his paws anxiously. ‘And so is the king.’