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‘ HSETH, HSETH, HSETH. ’

The name was bitter in her mouth. The statues had taken out great sweeps of the Middrenite army, including one of their trebuchets and several veiga, and there might yet be more of them. Kissen could still smell hot death on the wind.

Taking the lower ground felt less wise than it had originally seemed, but Lessa launched a counter attack, taking her foot soldiers up the edge of the valley bowl to enact a pincer movement with Elo’s knights.

The rain was playing in their favour, turning their ground muddy, sliding and uncertain.

The allied invaders fell and tumbled down the slopes, some falling into their traps, others crashing into the scorched furrows left by their burning shrines.

She wondered how long it would take them to realise the next stage of their plan.

The veiga kept their chanting.

‘Hseth. Hseth. Hseth.’

The Talicians used Hseth to overwhelm their enemy, but what if the Middrenites summoned her first?

The ground beneath Kissen’s feet was flooding. She and her veiga stood spread across the raised knolls of grass that made islets in the water, but there was little they could do to predict how a river would move when its dam spilled over.

They couldn’t blow it up: that would have decimated their own force, and it appeared that Arren had finally understood that winning a war didn’t need to be achieved by destroying the very ground they fought on.

Instead, they had blocked in the overflow days before, and redirected the canals to fill the lake’s basin so it would quickly fill to the top, and spill over.

Kissen kept up the chant. Hseth. Hseth. Hseth.

She could see no Talician priests, no shrines. If they were calling to the god themselves, sacrificing to her, it must be further back from the top of the valley. That would benefit them the most, having her fall on them from above. A weapon with a mind of her own.

The veiga called her name, and they made offerings. Not offerings of blood and bone, not flesh and blood; but prayers. Ones she was not usually offered.

Kissen had sourced quite a few in Wsirin. It hadn’t taken more than two conversations with Skedi at her side to find a veiga’s street in the market behind closed and shuttered doors.

And the god of white lies had helped her find the best prayers.

Wishes to other fire gods for warmth against a coming winter, to healing gods for sickness and fever to be burned away.

To gods of war, begging for an end to skirmishes in Usic with woven beads of perfect glass, bargaining for their family’s safety with offerings of children’s bracelets, little shoes.

It broke Kissen’s heart to buy them, but she did.

And then she had the veiga and the clerics go through the Middrenite camp, finding every offering they could, both legal and illegal.

Prayers, so many of them. Prayers to Arren, prayers for rain, prayers for home.

Prayers of mourning, prayers of love, of sex, of wine and freedom from ill. Hopes by the thousand.

Would their prayer-offerings outweigh the sacrifices, the burning, the pain? No. But it didn’t need to. All they needed was temptation, something special, something new, votives stolen from other gods.

Exactly the kind that Hseth liked.

Hseth, Hseth, Hseth.

Their offering, too, held out the sweet temptation of Arren’s fighters turning towards her, loving her, desiring her. A god of all things.

The water was spilling around them faster now, rising up their ankles. The Talicians had committed over half their force to the fighting on the slopes. Kissen couldn’t see Lessa any more, or Elo. She knew the king was behind them, standing between the waters, as bait.

The rain intensified once more, hammering down on the field. Thunder boomed across them, lightning crackling down and silhouetting the fighters on the slopes, shining metal and red cloth, blood and helmets, hands and bodies, torn and bloody.

Hseth, Hseth, Hseth.

Then, she smelled it. The scent of childhood terrors. Flame, blood and coal, oil and sweat. The machinery of war.

The fire god came in a flash of lightning, a glimmer in the air, a twist of fire, vivid with light.

Not for her people, not for her priests.

For herself, she manifested above the fallen statues at the valley’s base, still whole enough to be a shrine, her war skirts flaring out around her like a bell.

And the Sunbringer’s heart flared brightly in response.