Page 86

NOT FOR THE FIRST TIME, KISSEN OPENED HER EYES, surprised to be alive.

Her heart was still beating as she stared at a gloaming sky. Empty of fire, lit by the sinking sun.

The gods of Middren had come, and they had torn Hseth apart.

Only one power Kissen knew could have summoned them.

‘Ina,’ she croaked.

She turned, dragging herself to her knees, her feet. The flood had diminished, the fires were all burned out. The surviving Middrenites were picking themselves up and groaning. The Talicians left on the field were dead or dying. The rest had fled.

‘Inara!’ Kissen yelled. ‘Skediceth!’

What had Inara done? What had she lost to save them?

Elogast was picking himself up, wounded and burned, but alive. Arren lay lifeless, his chest empty. Elo met eyes with Kissen, but Lessa was already up and running, trying to find a horse, trying to find her daughter.

‘Inara!’

They spread out over the battlefield, crying out her name, trying to find a lost little girl who had saved them all.

Kissen threw herself up the slopes, her legs trembling with pain, hauling herself to higher ground.

They couldn’t waste a moment. If Skedi was not flying to take them to her, then he must be afraid to leave her. The gods had disappeared back to where they had come from, exhausting whatever great strength had brought them all so far from their shrines.

Then a ribbon of water threaded itself up through Kissen’s feet, a trail up the green, the black and the mud. Shining through the bodies, slightly crisped with ice.

Aan. Aan, who still had Inara’s hair.

Kissen followed the ribbon, half sobbing, half panting through her blistered lips. ‘Inara …’ Even to her, her voice was weak. Ina wouldn’t hear her. She just had to find her. Up to the crest of the southern slope she dragged herself, up over the rocks and the bodies.

There. She saw a small form in green, curled in a ball.

‘Inara!’ Kissen limped towards her over the sodden ground. ‘Inara!’

She reached her. Where was Skediceth? Where had that bastard gone, leaving her all alone in danger?

Kissen pulled Inara upright, checking for wounds.

The child was shaking so badly that Kissen could barely keep a grip on her.

There was Osidisen’s dagger on the ground, but its gem was cracked, the blade gone dull.

‘Ina what happened? Are you hurt?’

Inara opened her eyes. They were red with crying, but there was no bleeding, no obvious wound.

‘Ina … Where’s Skedi?’

‘I loved him,’ she whispered, then a sob shook through her body. ‘He knew how much I loved him.’

Kissen began to understand. She gathered Inara to her, holding on to her as the child’s heart broke, her whole body shuddering with her loss, and Kissen found her own eyes filling with tears.

Skediceth, that little god, the liar, the rat, the pest.

Kissen buried her face in Inara’s hair as tears spilled over her eyes and down her face, her scars, her wounds.

For the first time in her life, the godkiller wept for the death of a god.