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HSETH ROARED INTO BEING OVER HER FALLEN STATUES.

What is this? Her voice whipped across them, a burning behind the eyes. This offering?

Her voice was cracked. Metal veins dripped across her body from her chest, dull and grey. Briddite. Hseth twisted as if weighed down with it, but she was still mighty, the rest of her flesh burning ember armour.

And this was Hseth weakened? Hseth small? True, she was smaller than she had been in Blenraden, a tree rather than a behemoth. Her hair was wild and golden, the flames around her heart blood red.

Kissen prepared her lungs, took a deep breath. ‘Look what we have for you, god!’ she bellowed. Gannet and Erl stood by her side, elbows to her elbows. ‘Our king gives you all his offerings in return for leaving our land alone.’

All the veiga, she hoped, were controlling their colours as best they knew how.

They hid their lies with their will, sending instead their fears, their hopes, their fierceness towards the god as she contemplated the great pile of prayers they had presented on a raft.

It floated now on the water, which had deepened to a few feet, pooling at the valley’s base.

The god looked up towards where the king waited on his islet with his battalion behind him, golden and bright, his chest aflame. Fire dropped from her feet as she drifted closer, boiling the river where it touched.

‘These offerings are not pain.’ Hseth seemed almost curious, childlike, then her mind-speak cut through their heads. Not screams? Not death?

Kissen winced. The god’s voice seared like hot wires, cracking through her defences as easily as a hammer crushed glass.

Just a little closer, they needed her a little closer.

Hseth tipped her head. Her presence was heating the air to steaming, and Kissen’s lungs ached. ‘Do other gods get such quaint little things?’ Her smile was dangerous. Even not in its full force, her presence made Kissen feel like her flesh was peeling away from her bones.

‘They’re for you, Hseth,’ she said. ‘Take them.’ She gripped her throwing knives inside her cloak. ‘Middren wants you to give them safety.’

Hseth looked at her, and Kissen felt her heart twist in her chest, trying not to show it in her colours, in her face.

Would she know her as the girl whose family she burned?

Would she understand this was the woman who had killed her last incarnation?

But there was no recognition in those eyes. Hseth did not know who she was.

‘My priests are calling for me,’ she said, sparks drifting from her mouth as she floated above the water, looking to the white robes on the slopes. The slow flood was past Kissen’s thighs now. Enough. It had to be enough. ‘They tell me to be afraid.’

Kissen took a shaking, hot breath. She could feel the burn scars on her neck, chest, hands tighten. She had killed this god, and she had returned as something else. Something worse.

‘Were you born for fear, great fire god of the north?’ Kissen tried.

‘I was made … for others to fear.’ Hseth’s hair burst up in corkscrews of flame, tearing up like a beacon to the sky. ‘I was made to destroy. I was made in pain.’

The flame shuddered around her chest, licking around the briddite that cracked around her. For the first time, Kissen felt some pity for the god that had come to kill them.

‘I am pain,’ said the god. She bared her teeth: broken rocks, stones and metal.

Her skin ran from red to white, hotter. Hotter than a brand.

She came closer. ‘I need not your puny offerings. I need not your squalid gods and your weak little country.’ She reached forward, not for the offerings, but for Kissen, who held her nerve. ‘All I need is death.’

Well, it was worth a try, but she knew a god used to blood would desire nothing less. And she had come close enough.

‘Now!’ bellowed Kissen.

The veiga at the mechanism had been aiming while Hseth was distracted. Chains of briddite weighted with stones fired, wrapping around her. Perhaps it couldn’t hurt her, but if it was a part of her, then it could touch her. It could weigh her down.

The god stumbled, shrieking as her feet sank below the floodplain.

‘Go!’ Kissen cried.

The veiga on the wings began swinging their own chains over their heads, throwing them across the god, wrapping her chest, her arms, her neck, dragging her down, down towards the river.

‘W-wait!’ Hseth cried. ‘What are you doing?’ What are you doing? ‘Priests? Priests!’ Help me.

‘Fire!’ Kissen roared.

Middrenite crossbows now. The hard bolts with iron tips flew through the god’s flame as she tried to avoid them, but dragged behind them briddite chains that bit into Hseth’s flame flesh, and stuck there.

‘Pull her down!’

Because what could hurt her was water. Kissen and the other veiga took the ends of every chain they found and dragged the shrieking god down, down into the flood. Then they used the stakes they carried with them to pin the chains down beneath the water.

Hseth was dragged bodily into the current, deep enough to cover her as she shrieked, sliding over her flames and heat. Her inferno sputtered, diminishing. Faltering.

‘Run!’ Kissen cried. ‘Fucking run!’

She grabbed the staff at her feet and waded away, as fast as she could. The other veiga did the same, quick, quick, as she heard the Talicians begin to scream.

She looked back as she reached the bank.

In the water, she could see Hseth’s twisting, writhing flames as she struggled against her bonds.

It would have been enough to kill her in her previous life, though back then she would have been too smart to fall for a trap like this.

It had worked on the god of war only long enough to hold him in place for spears; but spears wouldn’t kill Hseth.

No, this was about faith.

The Talicians had seen their great god dragged under a lake of water, her fire winking out of existence. The fight they had been dragged into had been hard, confusing. Their numbers had counted for little.

They just needed a final stroke to shatter them into terror and send them fleeing.

Kissen looked up. She saw the Middrenite and Irisian cavalry and the standing army were scattered into small units, churning in desperate melees.

Exhausted, all but overrun. Elo’s horn was blowing for his reinforcements, the master blow.

No one had yet come.

Kissen’s heart dipped, then rose again, as there!

She saw them! Along the valley edge came a string of riders and foot soldiers in the colours of Middren’s Houses.

Indigo, blue, grey, green, and red, and Irisians charging in their lightweight armour.

There were supposed to be more, in Yether yellow, but there were only two: Captains Alianne and Faroch.

But it was enough. The Talician army saw them too.

It was the Restish who broke first. They had taken the heaviest losses, and their biggest advantage had disappeared into the waters, screaming and bound by briddite. They would not stay for another charge.

So the Restish fled, mud flying up from the hooves of their horses as they clambered for higher ground. Priests who had gathered at the lip of the valley were shrieking after them, but even as the veiga watched, some red cloaks began to run.

Panic spread. There. Kissen noticed Lessa making chase of the Talicians.

There. She saw Elo and his blue lion. Still alive, scrambling up under a press of bodies, still on his horse as he cut down the enemy’s main attack.

A cheer broke out from the Middrenites, the final battalions of the army that surrounded the golden king. Fire burst out bright and brilliant from his chest as their faith in him increased a thousandfold, making a beacon beneath the storm-lashed skies.

The heart of a god-king. Fireheart. Sunbringer. Faith triumphant.

And the Middrenites called him.

Sunbringer. Sunbringer.

Fireheart, firehearth.

Our flame, our home.

Kissen breathed out. They had done it. Broken the faith of thousands, harried the greater foe until they fled. Would it be enough? Would it kill Hseth, as Kissen had hoped? The water and the broken faith?

But the god did not diminish. Hseth felt the loss of their fairweather love. She felt the faiths turn towards Arren, ripped away from her. It hurt. It had to hurt.

And Hseth was unused to disappointment.

Her flames burned hotter beneath the water. Wilder. Angrier. The flame of a wrathful god.

It seemed she had remembered what fire could do.

‘Shit,’ Kissen hissed.

Flame burst out at the top of the slope, a flare, tall as a beacon.

The larger shrine from which her priests must have planned to summon her.

Hseth used her power to tear it into a flame that ripped all her priests away with it, their robes setting alight, their hair burning.

She was making her own sacrifice, consuming her faithful.

Because gods loved martyrs, and pain was an offering. Pain gave her power.

The water was boiling hotter now where Hseth had been bound. The hillock that had protected the king and his battalion, an island in the current, had now the potential to trap them.

Kissen could see the glow of the briddite chains as Hseth melted them. Her arm broke free, blazing like a brand into the air, and then the rest of her followed, surging up above the water in a cloud of steam and terror.

Kissen was already running, calling the others to follow her as the god returned in a body of flesh and licking flame, hot briddite dripping everywhere.

She flung her arms wide, and a spray of molten metal went flying towards the valley heights, striking enemies and allies and burning cloth to flesh, flesh to bone.

Kissen’s eyes were seared. She lost sight of Elo, of Lessa, could barely feel the ground beneath her. Hseth’s brightness was almost too much. Blindingly hot, white-hot flame.

But Hseth had no interest now in the little veiga who had attacked her, only in the king who stood before her, his fire mirroring hers.