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I … I don’t know. I could try, but … He shrank, he couldn’t help it. He could feel the ship’s shrine, but like a whisper of wind in the trees, impossible to grasp. He wasn’t tied enough to it. I’m scared. What if I die?

He would lose everything to a god’s mortality: lack of faith. All his slowly growing hopes, torn to nothing.

He looked around them, trying to think like Kissen.

They were underestimated, they had that on their side.

They did not know he was still there, and Imani was unarmed.

She must not have been expecting much of a fight with only two guards.

The archivists must have let her in: Cal and Solom would have served the tea they didn’t drink before they killed them.

‘She will be,’ said Imani, a tinge of regret in her voice.

‘Tomorrow they will take the tide beyond Irisian waters. We thought to use her, but it became clear she wouldn’t break faith with your king.

’ She smiled tightly, sadly, and her archers stepped closer.

‘I told you, young Craier, countries are not built on pity. You will be good for us, won’t you? ’

Good? If Skedi could, he would have laughed. Imani didn’t care about Middren, about Arren, about Hseth. She cared about maps traced in gold and gods, in a game of hidden pieces.

Fight with me, he heard Inara say.

You know I will, he told her.

But it was Telle who laughed. Skedi sat up. Had the archivist been reading Imani’s lips? Why was she drawing attention to herself? These people, who Inara never should have met, never have dragged into rebellion and danger.

She doesn’t know you at all, Telle signed to Inara, who could not help but smile. Who you are. What you’ve done.

‘What did she say?’ said Imani, narrowing her eyes at Telle.

‘She says,’ said Yatho, ‘get your ignorant arse the fuck out of our house. And take your muscle with you.’

The Mitha bristled. Yatho’s shades had turned bright and fierce as a new-set flame, orange and ready to roar. Telle’s, too, were firm and vivid green.

‘Now, Skedi!’ Inara cried.

Skedi leapt out of his shrine and dived towards the back of one of the guards.

He slammed into his head, and scratched at his neck with paws and teeth, growing heavy and hanging down as the guard screamed.

Unlike the king’s knights, these did not wield briddite and did not know gods to attack humans on a whim.

He reached around, trying to rip Skedi off, dropping his bow.

Telle ran for the other guard, her fists balled, her eyes furious, as Inara looked for something, anything, to use as a weapon.

The archivist released one hand, throwing a spray of seeds towards the guard, who flinched and misfired.

Telle raised a half a greenling she must have lifted from the table, grabbed the guard’s neck and slammed it into his eye, squeezing the fruit with enough acid to make him reel back, yelling.

Then, Telle turned towards the guard still struggling with Skedi, who had come around to his face now and was beating it with his wings. She grabbed the man by the hair and wrenched him down. Skedi tumbled off as she delivered a good strong knee to his nose.

Yatho, who had followed behind her, stood up from her chair, hammers in her hand, and drove one up into the chin of the first guard, who was still rubbing at his eye. Blood and teeth sprayed out and he fell back, unconscious.

‘Stop!’ cried Imani. ‘I command you to—’

Skedi fell to the side, exhausted . The guard grabbed Telle’s dress.

Though his neck was matted with blood, he used a heave of strength to throw her to the ground.

Telle crashed into one of the seats, but even as he threw her she dug her nails into his sword arm, leaving bloody trails in their wake.

He bellowed out a curse and drew his sword.

Yatho roared. ‘Get your fucking hands OFF MY WIFE!’ she roared, stepping towards him, her colours a trail of blazing glory so bright it seemed like the afterglow of lightning.

She swung with all the considerable force of her shoulder and upper body, crunching the head of the hammer into the side of the man’s face, then with her other shattering his knee with a sickening crunch.

Inara used the distraction. She ran to the sword he had dropped and grabbed it. It looked heavy, but she didn’t need to be good: she needed to be smart.

And the Mitha had no weapon.

Inara held her blade as Elo had shown her, one hand on the pommel, one on the hilt. She ran, blade pointed at the Mitha.

‘Mercy!’ she cried, backing away, her voice deepening with panic and confusion. ‘Please!’

Skedi leapt up. Inara could do it, he knew. Barely more than a child, but she could run her through, for threatening her, her mother, her country. It would take more strength than she had, she knew that, Elo had made her stab the body of a dead goat to be sure. But she had momentum.

Kissen doesn’t kill people, Skedi called to her.

Inara stopped, her captured blade just at the Mitha’s belly.

I am not Kissen.

She had fired an arrow from a distance and killed a person. She had reached a hand out to a god and wrestled with it in the hope it would kill the man who bore it, but she had never felt her blade pierce flesh, muscle, bone.

You get to choose who to be, Inara.

Inara’s blade was pressed against Imani’s belly, but she drove it no further. The first guard who had been struck with the greenling and the hammer had picked himself up, drawn his sword, spitting blood. The second was still groaning on the floor.

‘ Tell them to stop fighting ,’ Inara snarled in Irisian, ‘ and kneel.’

Imani clenched her jaw. ‘I am one of the Mithrik, girl,’ she snapped, though she was breathing fast and scared. ‘You won’t kill me.’

‘I am Lady Craier’s daughter,’ Inara growled, pressing harder with her sword, and the woman’s colour screeched black with her fear. ‘And I’m not strong, so it will be a slow death.’

The woman’s hands shook, and she spoke not in Middric, or Irisian, but Restish. ‘ Twfei .’ Kneel.

The standing guard looked towards her, then to Skedi. He paled, threw down his blade, then slowly dropped.

‘You too,’ said Inara to Imani.

The Mitha fixed her eyes on her, but slowly, carefully, went to her knees.

She had thought she was facing a quiet archivist, a wheelchair-using smith and a noble’s girl, but she was wrong; she had chosen to come for two brawling survivors from the Blenraden gutter, a god, and his powerful protector.