Hall of Smoke E-Book

H.M. Long

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 674

Beschreibung

Epic fantasy featuring warrior priestesses and fickle gods at war, for readers of Brian Staveley's Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne. Hessa is an Eangi: a warrior priestess of the Goddess of War, with the power to turn an enemy's bones to dust with a scream. Banished for disobeying her goddess's command to murder a traveller, she prays for forgiveness alone on a mountainside. While she is gone, raiders raze her village and obliterate the Eangi priesthood. Grieving and alone, Hessa – the last Eangi – must find the traveller and atone for her weakness and secure her place with her loved ones in the High Halls. As clans from the north and legionaries from the south tear through her homeland, slaughtering everyone in their path Hessa strives to win back her goddess' favour. Beset by zealot soldiers, deceitful gods, and newly-awakened demons at every turn, Hessa burns her path towards redemption and revenge. But her journey reveals a harrowing truth: the gods are dying and the High Halls of the afterlife are fading. Soon Hessa's trust in her goddess weakens with every unheeded prayer. Thrust into a battle between the gods of the Old World and the New, Hessa realizes there is far more on the line than securing a life beyond her own death. Bigger, older powers slumber beneath the surface of her world. And they're about to wake up.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Twenty-five

Twenty-six

Twenty-seven

Twenty-eight

Twenty-nine

Thirty

Thirty-one

Thirty-two

Thirty-three

Thirty-four

Thirty-five

Thirty-six

Thirty-seven

Thirty-eight

Thirty-nine

Forty

Forty-one

Forty-two

Forty-three

Forty-four

Forty-five

Epilogue

Glossary of Names

Acknowledgements

About the Author

“Hall of Smoke is the kind of fantasy I love, filled with both high stakes and tender, nuanced human emotion. Add to that lyrical writing and intriguing world building, and you have a truly special debut. Not to be missed.”

Jessica Cluess, author of the Kingdom on Fire series and House of Dragons

“Long’s writing is elegantly understated, filling out Hessa’s complex world without ever stranding us – we are with her through every stumble and triumph. Hall of Smoke is ultimately a book about what it means to have your deepest illusions shattered and still scrape together the courage to begin again. A vivid and compelling debut.”

Lucy Holland, author of Sistersong

“Hall of Smoke is a breath of fresh air. The world is unique, the fights are top-notch, and the cast is unforgettable. A dazzling, fast-paced story with clashing civilizations, squabbling gods, and an indomitable heroine caught in the center of it all, Hessa’s is a tale that will grab you from the very first line and won’t let you go. I can’t wait to see what Long comes up with next.”

Genevieve Cornichec, author of The Witch’s Heart

“Hessa is a brilliantly written heroine, and I could easily have spent another 400 pages with her. The book’s world-building is intricate and refreshingly original, and it all ramps up to a finale that is the dictionary definition of epic.”

Allison Epstein, author of A Tip for the Hangman

“I have rarely read a fantasy novel that transported me like Hall of Smoke did. If you are a fan of myths and legends where gods and goddesses roam the earth and meddle with the poor mortals that serve them, you are in for an absolute treat with this book.”

M. J. Kuhn, author of Among Thieves

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Hall of Smoke

Print edition ISBN: 9781789094985

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094992

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: January 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© H. M. Long 2021. All Rights Reserved.

H. M. Long asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Grandpa Ian, with love

ALGATT, EANGEN, AND THE NORTHERN TERRITORIES OF THE ARPA EMPIRE

ONE

The shrine in the meadow before me was little more than a weathered collection of beams and tiles and stark angles. Poppies were scattered around it, fluttering under the gathering skies, and wood was stacked beside the low stone altar. But there were no ashes in the offering bowl, no scuffs on the earthen floor – only a handful of dangling bones, grey feathers and carved owls.

I was the first to offend the goddess this season.

I pulled warm air into my lungs and sagged against a nearby tree. Higher up the mountain, unyielding evergreens dominated, but here the forest was more varied. I stood under fresh summer leaves and filtered sunlight, each lending me a sense of protection as I willed my legs to stop shaking and eyed the shrine of Eang, Goddess of War. My goddess.

The wind gusted, sending the poppies reeling and pushing me towards the waiting shrine.

I forced myself to move, leaving the shelter of the tree and stepping out into the meadow. The mountaintop came into view on my left, bracketed by looming rainclouds, while forested foothills, streams and small lakes spread in every other direction. A town – a ring wall containing mossy thatch roofs and trails of smoke – lay down there. My family, my people, lay down there. And, if the goddess heard me, I would return to them by nightfall.

I pried my eyes from home, stifled the fear in my chest, and focused on the shrine. Before I passed into its shadow, I eased my worn legs into a kneel.

“Eang, Eang.” I whispered the name of my goddess and pressed my palms into the earth. The beaded leather tying my braid fell beside them with a soft thump. “The Brave, the Vengeful, the Swift and the Watchful. I’ve come to pledge atonement. I…”

My confession stuck on my tongue. The breeze increased and the patter of my heart turned into a torrent. I cracked open my eyes and saw the poppies, blood-red and black-eyed, arching in the corner of my vision.

“Eang, please don’t kill me,” I whispered. “I didn’t know it was him.”

My lungs didn’t seize. No beast leapt from the forest to justly devour me. The breeze merely departed, and the trills of songbirds took its place.

I crawled into the cool of the shrine and pulled my tinderbox from the pouch at my waist. I didn’t stand again until I had lit a fire in the offering bowl, and even then, I kept my head bowed.

Back on my feet, I opened the fine scars on the ends of my fingers and let droplets of blood fall, one by one, into the flames.

The rain began as I stepped outside to finish my prayers. I supposed I deserved that, but I still gritted my teeth as I took up position, straight-backed, head bowed, palms open beside my hips and facing forward. My left hand, the one I had cut, stung fiercely. I deserved that, too.

Inside the shrine, fire danced for the goddess, but I was forbidden from sheltering beneath its roof. So, I stood under the open sky while the rain ran through my hair and soaked my tunic, darkening its pale green into a deeper, clinging shade.

“Eang,” I began again. “In your name I sheltered a traveler in the Hall…”

The rain continued, steady and mild. I brushed the back of a salty hand across my mouth and adjusted my stance, the memory of an unassuming smile on a bearded face playing through my mind.

“I didn’t know he was an Algatt, Goddess. I didn’t realize he was the one until it was too late and then… I was weak. I didn’t heed the vision. Please, hear me.”

Blood and rain ran down my splayed fingers, converging at the tips in a steady pink drip.

“Let me go. Let me find him.” Something blasphemous and bitter coiled inside me in resistance, but I kept speaking. “I’ll finish the task you gave me.”

The rain increased. I let my hands relax and stared at the fire. It burned brightly against the damp and gloom, but nothing unnatural happened. The High Priestess had assured me that there would be a sign if the goddess accepted my pledge. I had seen those signs before – one didn’t grow up in the Hall of Smoke, the seat of Eang’s priesthood, without witnessing them.

But nothing happened now. The fire didn’t whisper. No owl called from the pines. The smoke didn’t twist into a recognizable shape.

I turned full circle, scanning the tree line. Poppies sagged under the rain and thrumming on the roof of the shrine filled my ears.

A minute passed. Then ten. Twenty.

I wrapped my arms across my chest. I couldn’t go down the mountain without a reply – I was an exile, and not just from my home, my hearth and my family. There was no salvation for a disgraced priestess of the Goddess of War. No place in the High Halls. If Eang did not speak, my soul would remain in the earth where my forsaken body would eventually fall, exiled and imprisoned until the Unmaking of the World.

The thought made me pale. I shivered and clutched at my arms more tightly, searching the trees again. I couldn’t wait here forever, could I? I had no more food. No blanket. No dry clothes. A Climb of Atonement was not intended to be a comfortable experience, even without rainstorms.

I tightened my resolve, ignoring the fear that turned my stomach. Eang was simply making me wait. She would reply. She would accept my pledge. She had to.

Because, if she did not, I could never go home.

* * *

I made myself a second, more modest fire under the shadow of a bent pine on the north edge of the meadow, just enough to lend a little light and protection from the gathering night. Beyond the dripping boughs, the meadow’s poppies closed their petals and the half-light of the storm relented to true dark. Eventually, the fire I’d lit in the shrine was all I could see. Then it retreated too, turning into a low, flickering belly of coals.

I closed my eyes. I should have gone back out into the rain, rekindled my offering fire, reopened the painful scabs on the ends of my fingers and prayed again. But my tunic was still wet and the meadow so open, so empty.

I ground my teeth. I was no High Priestess, but I was still a vassal of the Goddess of War, with the scars under my sodden tunic to prove it. One night on a mountain alone should not have made me feel so vulnerable.

But this was more than one night in the rain. This darkness felt like a warning, a glimpse of what the rest of my days – my eternity – would be if the goddess would not hear me.

A stick cracked.

I shot to my feet, smacking my head on a branch and sending a shower of cold rain and pine needles down my scalp and back. Even as I cursed and tried to shake needles from my hair, my hand fell to my belt. No sword. No axe. Just my small ritual knife, barely longer than my thumb, its simple wooden hilt darkened with age.

Another crack.

My heart, already battering against my ribcage, threatened to rupture. My knife was likely useless against whatever was out there – whatever beast Eang was sending to tear me to pieces – but the goddess had given me other methods of defense.

My heel slipped back and I dropped low as a familiar, unnatural fire welled up in the back of my throat. I watched the darkness, steadying myself and letting the heat grow.

The rain pattered and wind rustled the treetops, far above my damp hair. Whatever was in the forest drew closer, edging around trunks and boughs and boulders.

My fingers twitched and power seeped onto my tongue.

“Hessa?”

I wilted, half in shock, half in relief. The heat extinguished as a shadow separated from the darkness and stepped into the firelight, pushing back the hood of his cloak. Dark red hair, damp with rain at the brow. Brown eyes, creased with worry that contrasted the soft, unhappy smile tucked into his beard.

A woman came behind him, her lithe form ducking around boughs with all the height and grace that the gods had neglected to give me. Seeing the look on my face, she rounded the fire without a word and embraced me.

In her arms, the cold of the night and the well of anxiety in my stomach lessened. But I didn’t have time for consolation.

Before she could speak, I cleared my throat and peeled away. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Neither should you. You should have returned before dusk,” my cousin Yske retorted, resting one hand on my bare neck before she released me. Her eyes lingered on my throat. “They cut off your collar?”

Compulsively, my own gaze dropped. A bronze ring, little wider than the tip of my smallest finger, rested against the tawny skin at the base of her throat. Firelight caught the ring’s fine runes, twined into endless patterns. Brave, vengeful, swift, watchful. They were the qualities of our goddess, the first words of our prayers, and the heart of our identity as warrior-priests – as Eangi.

“Why didn’t you come home?” My husband took my cousin’s place in front of me. I sidestepped, but the movement was half-hearted and when he pulled me into his chest, I didn’t resist. The scent of him – smoke, leather and sweat – disarmed me, thick with memories of a shared childhood, urgent kisses and bloody battlefields. The scent of my husband.

I felt the shape of his own Eangi collar against my temple and pulled back.

“Eidr, stop.” The words came too fast. I narrowed my stinging eyes and pointed down the mountain. “This is sacred. You can’t be here.”

Eidr grabbed the back of my head and kissed my forehead, gently but firmly. “I pledged myself to you,” my husband reminded me, holding my face close. “Yske is your blood. You may have been cast out of the Hall of Smoke, but you cannot be cast out from us.”

I couldn’t hold his gaze, so I looked down at his chest and brushed at the embroidered collar of his tunic. As kind as the words were, they were just that – kind. If Eang refused to shrive me, neither he nor Yske would be able to remain at my side. I wouldn’t let them.

“You’ll not suffer for my sins, either of you.” I separated myself from him again and dragged damp hair from my face. “You need to leave.”

“Hasn’t she spoken yet?” Yske interjected.

Eidr would not back away, so I did. I put the fire between us and raised my chin, hoping that neither of them could see how badly I wanted them to stay. What if the goddess never spoke and this was the last time I saw them?

Yske spun the clasp of her cloak and pulled it free, revealing a tunic of mild blue, undyed leggings and the knife at her belt. “You’re shaking. Wear this, Hessa, please.”

“No,” I said, proud of the fact that my voice didn’t waver. “I ignored a vision from Eang. I broke a vow. I deserve this.”

Yske and Eidr exchanged a glance, then Eidr’s hand slipped beneath his own cloak. When he withdrew it, he held a hatchet.

“You can’t give me that,” I snapped.

Eidr gave me a weary look that failed to conceal his concern. “I won’t. But Yske and I just climbed a mountain in the rain and I’m cold. If you want to go sit out there and be wet, do it, but I’m going to find some dry wood – somewhere – and build up the fire.”

My throat closed. Eidr shouldered off into the night and left me alone with my cousin.

Yske swung her cloak back around her shoulders. “The fire in the shrine is almost out.”

I gazed back across the dark meadow. Sure enough, the warm glow of my offering fire was nearly extinguished.

I looked back at her, coaxing my expression into impassivity. “I have to go tend it. By the time I come back, you need to be gone. Both of you.”

Yske shrugged and, setting my shoulders, I slipped back out into the rain.

But by the time I had finished rekindling the goddess’s fire, watched my blood bubble in the flames and offered my prayers, Yske and Eidr had not left – not that I’d truly expected, or wanted them to. Instead, they had set up a makeshift camp, using Yske’s cloak as a shelter, and as I returned Eidr settled himself on a somewhat dry log beneath it. Lifting one side of his own cloak, he nodded to the open space.

“Sit, wife.”

I smiled. It was a compulsive, sudden thing that hurt more than my bloody fingers. The title was still novel, only a winter old.

Still, I reasserted, “You shouldn’t have come.”

His expression hardened, light from the fire he’d built up turning his face into a mixture of warm ridges and familiar hollows. “I’ll say it one more time. The High Priestess might have cast you out, but we will not abandon you.”

Yet, I added in the quiet of my mind. But it wasn’t a matter of abandonment, however he chose to cast it for himself. I was the one at fault, and I was the one that would have to leave forever.

My breath grew shallow at the thought and my resolve, already fragile, weakened. Eidr and Yske were Eangi too, I reminded myself, and unsullied ones. They belonged at this shrine as much, if not more, than I did. Who was I to make them leave?

Yske lifted the other side of Eidr’s cloak and wedged herself in without invitation. Resting the back of her head against the man’s shoulder, she eyed me. “Who’s to say the goddess didn’t send us to make sure you don’t die of stupidity?”

I raised my brows. “Then she’d hardly send you,” I retorted, though the humor felt stale.

All the same, Yske grinned a nose-wrinkling grin and kicked her heels out towards the fire.

“Sit,” Eidr broke in. “You made your climb; you made your sacrifice – twice – and there’s nothing that forbids you from sheltering at someone else’s fire.”

I looked back at the shrine. It was well-lit now, my offering set to burn into the morning hours. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps I could sit for an hour at my husband’s and cousin’s sides, just until my shivering stopped and my clothing began to dry.

“You need to be back before anyone realizes you’ve left,” I said. Then, more soberly, I repeated, “I’ll not have you suffer for my sins. Please.”

“Fine,” Eidr agreed. “Now sit, my arm hurts.” I rounded the fire and sat down.

* * *

In the half-light of dawn, Eidr’s warm chest left my back and Yske’s soft breath, inches from my forehead, moved away. I couldn’t bear to say goodbye, so I pretended to sleep on, holding still as Eidr wrapped his cloak around my solitary form and kissed my temple.

I sat up only once their footsteps had been replaced by the trills and lilts of birdsong. The rain had stopped, leaving the world dripping, scented with green and earth and damp. Our campfire had died off, but the one in the shrine burned more brightly than ever. Yske or Eidr must have stoked it.

That gesture alone was enough to make my eyes prickle. Why was I doing this? If Eang hadn’t responded by now, did she intend to at all? Yes, the goddess was not everywhere, but she would have heard my prayers. This was her shrine, a place where something of her essence always remained – a place where the fabric between the human, Waking World and the divine High Halls was torn.

Eang knew I was here; there had to be another explanation for her silence. Maybe, I thought, I should go back to town and consult the High Priestess. The idea was a tantalizing one, undergirded with the promise of seeing Eidr and Yske again. Maybe I could still catch up to them.

No. I reined that thought in. The sun was breaking through the canopy, the poppies were unfurling, and my blood was required in the offering bowl.

I crossed to the shrine in the cool of the dawn, pulling my ritual knife and flexing the wounded fingers of my left hand. But as I passed into the shadow of the structure and prepared to slit my thumb for the third time, the sight of dangling feathers and carved owls distracted me. My apprehension turned outward. Upward.

Eang was wildly powerful, ancient and undying, but she was not immortal. Almost no god was – at least, not naturally. What if Eang ignored me because she was in battle? What if she didn’t respond because she couldn’t? It had happened before.

That thought gave me all the determination I needed. Banished or not, I was an Eangi priestess, and I owed it to my deity to be patient.

I reopened the cuts on my left hand and let the blood drip. I prayed. Then I sat down in the meadow and sunlight, dangled my stinging fingers over my knees, and began my vigil once more.

The morning passed. The sun roosted high above the peak of the mountain, my frizzing black hair burned with heat, and I left my post to drink from a stream. The cool water took the edge off my thirst and the aching hunger in my belly, but only just.

When the rain started again, it was almost a relief. I let Eidr’s cloak stay in the shelter of the pine tree while I lay among the poppies and closed my eyes, relishing the droplets of cool water on my face and scalp. Above me, the blue summer sky reverted to the same muted grey as the evening before.

Eidr and Yske would have returned home hours ago. They and the rest of our order would be watching the mountain, waiting for me to join them.

“Eang, Eang,” I murmured, willing my words to be heard across distance, time and the division between worlds. “The Brave, the Vengeful, the Swift and the Watchful…”

The rain pattered down on my cheeks, my lips.

“Eang, please.”

War horns blasted up the mountainside.

TWO

Branches. Rain. Mud. Rock. There was no time for aching muscles or precarious footing; instinct propelled me down the same path that had brought me up the mountain the day before – the same path Eidr and Yske had taken back to town that morning.

The horns came again, long, drawn-out wails that ended in two high blasts. Eangen horns. Another bay followed them, this one lower and culminating in a twisting, deep crack. Algatt raiders.

There were raiders at the foot of the mountain, raiders in my home while I spent hours stumbling down a mountainside. Hours during which my people fought and died.

Eidr. Yske. I let out a frustrated, gasping choke and plunged through the forest.

Raids were relatively common. In the south, along the border with the Arpa Empire, farmers battled unsanctioned taxation from rogue legionaries. In the north, the mountains unleashed Algatt raiders once, sometimes twice yearly, initiating weeks of skulking and skirmishing. My own mother, far away in the village of my birth, had been killed in one such raid five years ago – the kind of loss everyone in my world shared.

Scars from fighting off raiders this spring were still fresh and pink under my clothes. But by now, the Algatt should have retreated to their northern mountains until harvest. That was their way. That was how it always was.

Was this my response from Eang? Was this my punishment for disobedience? The thought crept into the back of my mind, but it was too horrific to hold onto.

Could this raid be my fault?

By the time I sighted the town of Albor, the Eangen horns had long since stopped. I skidded to a halt on an open bluff, staring down into the valley through misty rain and billows of smoke.

My heart dropped. The great timbered Hall smoldered in the center of the town and the circular embankment around the settlement, with its wooden walls and crude towers, was a wreath of flames. The bulk of the fifty homes were still intact, but outlying farmhouses were already ash.

Nothing moved in the town or fields. The only signs of life were riders rounding up flocks on the eastern horizon, sending ewes and husky lambs skittering after the low, spreading bulk of their horde.

My knees threatened to buckle. I was too late. Eidr, Yske, nearly everyone I loved – they were down in that smoking ruin or carried off over the horizon.

I clutched at a sapling and felt myself crumpling towards hysteria. I had been frightened last night at the shrine, but this – this was a feeling I hadn’t had in years: the inexorable slide of fear building into a rampant charge. If I let it go, it would tear through my mind like a winter wolf.

But there would be survivors. I blinked, focused on the swaying sapling beneath my hand and the wind on my face. Algatt raiders never killed – or took – everyone.

I dropped off the bluff and landed hard on the forest floor. As I ran, I saw the Hall of Smoke in my mind’s eye, whole and vaulted and filled with warmth. Eidr and Yske were there with a hundred other familiar faces, moving around the central hearth, carrying and weaving and sharpening and singing. They wrapped themselves in furs in the winter; in the summer, they returned from the river at dusk, wet-haired and laughing.

The Hall belonged to the Goddess of War and her chosen warrior-priests, but it was also the heart of our town. The heart of the borderlands. The heart of my people.

Just inside the edge of the forest, the rhythm of hooves shattered my reverie. I ducked into the bushes as three riders barreled up the rise a dozen paces away, following a woodsmen’s track. Another came after them more slowly, off the trail on my other side, and then a fifth.

I dropped into a deeper crouch, disjointed prayers clattering through my head. They were Algatt. There was no mistaking them, not with their weathered, pale skin, the cut of their tunics – tapered to a point, just above the knee – fitted trousers, and the blue and yellow paints smudged into their angular fringes.

But why were the Algatt still here? Why would they risk leaving a handful of riders behind? Surely not to hunt down stray villagers. There was no point in that.

The rush of blood in my ears became a thundering river. Even as instinct urged me to run to the village and Eidr, I put out a hand to ground myself. My fingers sank into moss, soft and lush and cool with rain. The feeling steadied me in the midst of my disassembling world.

I waited in the moss, in the shelter of an arch of ferns, until the Algatt moved on.

My muscles complained as I eased out of my crouch, but I kept low, following game trails that I had run for the majority of my life, until the narrow earthen path ended in fields.

There were no fences here, no walls or rises to hide behind, but the wafts of smoke were dense and low. I darted across the open ground and stepped through a smoldering break in the ring wall.

Smoke curled past me. I wanted to call out, but the presence of Algatt in the forest demanded caution. I followed the wall around half of the settlement, gaze flickering between singed wooden walls, grass-covered roofs and small plots of vegetables and herbs, protected by wicker fences. There were no bickering children. No goats stood on their hind legs, trying to crop grass from the eaves. No women knelt at millstones, no men manipulated wood into a new cradle, a new stool. There were only creeping swaths of fire, smoke and an eerie hush.

I stared at fabric fluttering in a window, bold Eangen colors of blue and green and soft greys intertwined in endless patterns. Looking at it, I could almost believe nothing was wrong, that the air did not reek of seared meat. But when I peeked inside the window, the house was overturned and empty, and there was a smear of blood across the floor.

I reached the center of the village and halted, unable to move any further. The Hall rose above me in a lattice of stark, charred beams. My entire body rebelled against looking at it, but the corpses on the ground were worse. The old and the weak lay in piles, as if the Algatt had herded them in front of my home’s great, gaping doors to slaughter them in the sight of their goddess.

Then there were the Eangi priests. My people. My family. Some had managed to drag on their armor before the attack, but the rest were in daily working garb. However much warning the watchmen had given them, it had not been enough.

Only the Eangi’s narrow collars of bronze declared their status as Eang’s warrior-priests – the same collar that Eidr and Yske wore, and that the High Priestess had cut from my throat before I made my climb.

My vision glazed over corpses, shattered doors and churned, bloody mud. I had witnessed slaughter before; there was no one in my world who hadn’t, child or adult, priest or farmer. But this was like nothing I had ever seen. This was no raid. This was a massacre.

And in a settlement of this size, I knew everyone. The face of each corpse was familiar to me. I knew their stories, their habits and the obscure ties in our bloodlines.

But Eidr was not there; nor was Yske. Of course they weren’t, I told myself. They had escaped. They must have escaped.

Mechanically, trembling, I passed through the sea of bodies, fingering my ritual knife as I went. Every face I saw, every wound, reinforced my growing suspicion that this was more than a raid – an Algatt army had swept through my home, one that even the infamous Eangi of the Hall of Smoke could not stop.

Numbed by this realization, I entered the Hall of Smoke itself. Shafts of light poured through great scorched sections of roof and walls. The flames had died down, but the heat was still close and the air heavy with smoke. I pulled the edge of my tunic over my face and forced my feet forward.

Some detached, emotionless part of me began to give orders. Search the bodies. Find my husband and cousin. Find more weapons than this pitiful knife. Get to East Meade, to the rest of my family.

Give the dead their final rites.

I blinked, wrestling my mind away from flight, and tried to focus on that final task. Exiled or not, if I was the last Eangi standing in Albor, it was my duty to write the runes in the ash and release the spirits of the dead. Only then could they leave the blood-soaked earth and pass on into the High Halls of the Gods.

The High Halls where I could not follow.

Eidr. Yske. Where were they?

My world buckled, cracked and narrowed. Eidr’s and my bunk, one of the dozens of Eangi beds clinging to the walls of the hall behind shredded curtains, was a nest of embers. The bearskin that I kept rolled at the back was shriveled and reeked of burned hair. Our dangling bags of belongings were destroyed, childhood talismans spilled into the cinders.

The only salvageable thing was a bone and silver hairpin that Eidr had given to me, carved with birds and the runes for belonging, protection, and eternal promise. I let the collar of my tunic slip from my mouth and, clearing my throat, took up the hairpin. Desperate for some feeling of normality, I tucked its three prongs into my hair and blinked back across the Hall.

My eyes glassed over the bodies again. Somehow, before my gaze found her, I knew Yske was there; a flash of open, staring eyes, all too like a butchered doe. Near her, a flash of red hair. A limp, masculine hand. Eidr.

I did not move. Did not breathe. This was a vision – yes, that must be it. I was lying in a meadow of poppies and this was a vision from Eang, a warning, a…

The hoot of an owl broke into my shock. I thought I saw a grey bird up among the rafters, its feathers sleek and its eyes great, honeyed wells, but as I searched my gaze snagged on the Algatt silhouetted in the doorway.

We stared at one another. I saw a bloodied warrior in mail and decorative leather, eyes rimmed in black and skin streaked with blue and yellow paint. Little older than Eidr, his cheeks were still flushed under blond-lashed eyes and his sun-darkened forearms were laced with scarification – ritual and otherwise.

He, in turn, must have seen a bedraggled young woman in tunic and loose trousers, holding a knife as if it were an empty bucket.

“Come, I won’t hurt you,” he said. His voice was warm and only mildly accented. “Or you may run. You might even get away.”

I blinked sweat and smoke from my eyes. Run? He didn’t know I was an Eangi – not in this state, not without my collar. He thought I was just a girl. The offer was a fair gesture on his part, perhaps some acknowledgement that what his people had done here was far beyond heinous, far beyond honorable. Maybe I could even get away, like he’d said.

But the sound of his voice ignited something else in my gut. It was hot. Alive. And it grew.

I made myself look at the bodies strewn across the floor. I named them one by one, forcing the memories into my reluctant, grief-stricken mind to feed the heat – my deadly Eangi Fire.

Yske. There she was, cast over a fallen beam. We had been sent to the Hall together as children, holding hands on the cart for the entire journey. We’d become women together, bled and grown. Trained together. Fought together.

Eidr. His red hair a mass of fraying braids and blood. I’d been twelve when I kissed him and suggested we marry. He’d laughed at me then. But last autumn he had not, and the High Priestess joined our hands at the head of this very Hall.

“I pledged myself to you,” my husband’s words from the night before echoed through the disjointed hum of my mind. “Yske is your blood. You may have been cast out of the Hall of Smoke, but you cannot be cast out from us.”

My eyes flicked away. I saw Sixnit, one of my dearest friends, near the central hearth. Sweet and full-breasted, she’d come to the Hall two years ago when she married an Eangi priest. Now her husband lay dead in the hearth itself, and she curled around the silent form of their infant son.

Their son. My dazed eyes fixed on him. The baby was tiny, mere days old – I’d attended his birth, the day before my banishment. Now, the baby’s hand twitched on his mother’s chest – a chest that, as I watched, rose and fell. She was alive. They were both alive.

The heat finally filled my mouth and burst out in a hiss. The ritual cuts on my fingertips healed, my exhaustion fled, and my mind cleared, clean and sharp as a winter wind.

My fingers slipped into position on the hilt of the knife.

The Algatt barely registered my movement in time. My knife embedded in his forearm, an inch from his face. He turned his cry of pain into an enraged bellow that shook me to the bones. In an instant, his sword was in hand and he charged.

I broke into a forward crouch and screamed. It was low, the undulating, unearthly sound every Eangi was taught. When we lined for battle, when we prepared to leave the forest on a fog-choked morning, we each had our notes. They would clash and blend and rise, sending goosebumps up our own arms, let alone our enemies’.

My cry was alone, but it only made me more furious. I plunged forward, stooping to rip a broken spear from a corpse as I passed.

He never saw the blow. I ducked his sword and drove the spear through his padded tunic, into his gut, with the force only an Eangi could muster. Then I dropped, hauling the shaft down like a lever and opening his intestines with a squelching, sickening crack.

Relief trickled through my fevered thoughts as he toppled. I wiped tears from my eyes with the back of one hand and looked at Sixnit and her barely breathing child, but I didn’t try to rouse them yet.

“Eangi?” the Algatt choked from the ember-strewn floor.

I took up his sword and squatted just outside his reach, ignoring the growing stink of his open belly. With every breath I pushed out of my nose, I gathered my grief in tighter and forced my careening heart to steady. I could not look at Eidr.

“Your collar?” He blinked languidly.

“Cut off.” I rested the point of his sword in the ash, keeping my eyes fixed on him. “Did the traveler bring you here? Omaskat?”

He stared at me, clutching his welling insides. “Omaskat?”

I rocked my weight into my toes. “The traveler, with the eyes – one gold, one blue. He was here a week ago.”

The Algatt said something, but his voice was too low. I leant forward. “Did he bring you here?”

He gave no answer.

I felt a tear bead on my upper lip and swiped it away. “Why are you here so late in the season?”

Even on the edge of death, his fear of the Eangi – and the goddess we called on – was enough to make him speak. “Arpa.” His words ended in an agonized croak. “Legionaries. In our mountains. They drove us out… We took the rivers south. Nowhere… nowhere else to go.”

Arpa legionaries. Savage, unyielding soldiers of that great empire to the south, on whose rim the Eangen carved out an existence.

“Why would Arpa be so far north?” I slapped his cheek, but he was too far gone. His eyes rolled back and his legs bucked.

Still not looking at Eidr or Yske, I retrieved my knife from the raider’s arm and slit his throat in one grim movement. Then I moved to Sixnit’s side.

“Six,” my voice softened, cajoling and tense with hope. “Six, wake up, please.”

She didn’t stir, though her chest continued to rise and fall. I couldn’t carry her, so I numbly began to disentangle the infant from her arms, trying not to think past that simple step. The child’s stillness terrified me more than a thousand Algatt and I checked three times to make sure he was, truly, alive. But breath passed between his tiny parted lips, and his heart fluttered beneath my palm.

Steeling myself, I held him close and began to search the room for something, anything that might help me rouse or carry Sixnit.

But my thoughts refused to stay on task. As soon as the Algatt died, I was left alone again – alone with the corpses of my husband, my people, Sixnit’s helplessness and that looming, crippling grief. My eyes darted, faster now, and my breath shallowed. I saw Yske’s own, lifeless eyes. The blood in Eidr’s hair.

Eidr’s hair. Eidr, unmoving, unbreathing. Gone.

My chest threatened to cave in and black sparked across my vision. At the same time, feebleness, a side effect of using Eangi Fire, swept over my limbs. Only a wheezing gasp from the baby in my arms kept me from crumpling. I pushed the knuckle of a trembling hand against one eye and locked my knees. Focus. Just a moment longer.

If the Arpa had gone into the mountains, driving the Algatt into the Eangen lowlands… I had to get us to East Meade, the village of my birth. They had to be warned. I could leave Sixnit and the baby with my sisters—

Warm, slick steel met my throat. “On your knees.”

I froze, every muscle still and my breath lodged in my throat. Calculating, hoping, my eyes flew from the infant in my arms to the charred doors of the Hall of Smoke. There, misty daylight fell uninterrupted across the bodies of my people, but the way was clear. I could run with the baby. But not with Sixnit.

More silhouettes appeared in the doorway. More raiders, stalking and spreading out, muttering and eyeing me.

The child let out another fragile, crackling breath. My eyes fell from him to Six, still motionless at my feet, and what little hope I had died. I would risk my own life in a last, desperate play for freedom. But I could not risk theirs.

My throat swelled against the blade as I said, “We surrender.”

THREE

Years earlier, under a starry autumn sky, Svala the High Priestess moved through the camp towards me. In the firelight, surrounded by revelers, she might have been our warrior-goddess herself, robed in violence and armored with divine purpose.

There was blood in her crown of braids, spattered where black hair met tawny skin, and a slim ring of bronze glistened above her bloodied tunic. Its runes had worn smooth long ago, but I knew they were clear on my own, only a year old. The Brave. The Vengeful. The Watchful. The Swift. All that Eang was, and all that we must endeavor to be.

Yske and I sat against a boulder on the edge of the celebration, between our comrades and their fires, and the quiet of a far northern night. The trees were sparse here, gnarled and windblown. The expanse of open rock was still warm from the sun and pocketed with shivering clusters of seeding flowers and moss, while above the sky arched toward the distant, shadowed hulk of the Algatt’s high mountains.

This was Orthskar, in northern Eangen, where we’d spent the last three weeks hunting down a group of Algatt raiders. Raiders that, today, we’d finally routed and driven back into the mountains under the leadership of the woman who beckoned me now.

“Hessa,” the High Priestess held out her hand. “Come with me.”

Yske looked up, a cup of honey wine halfway to her lips. When we were children, I might have seen a flash of jealousy in her eyes at the High Priestess coming for me instead of her, but there was none of that now. We were old enough to know that the interest of our leaders was not always a good thing.

I nodded obediently, though the day’s battle had left me sore and exhausted. I eased myself onto my feet and slipped my plain, unadorned axe through its leather loop at my belt.

The High Priestess headed off into the darkness. I, it seemed, was expected to follow.

Yske grabbed my hand. She and I still shared our fathers’ curling dark hair, dense brush of freckles and brown eyes. But by now our progression into womanhood had begun to accent our differences; where Yske had her mother’s lithe form, every muscle calculated, every curve measured, I had my mother’s compact power.

“What does she want?” Yske asked, low enough to nearly be drowned by a thunder of drums. We both flinched as the warriors of the camp roared with approval and someone began a familiar song in a deep, rolling voice. “What did you do wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I hissed back.

“Hessa,” Svala called.

Yske’s hand dropped away. We exchanged one last uncertain glance, then I hastened off into the night.

The songs of the warriors followed us as we left the camp behind. They told the history of the gods, taught to us by Eang herself, of how the Gods of the Old World – their names lost over the millennia – had woven themselves from the darkness of the heavens, borne children, and created mankind from the dirt and divine birth-blood. Eang had been among their offspring, and the Gods of the Old World had quickly learned to fear their most violent daughter.

Svala and I walked until the older woman halted under the shadow of a tree. The firelight could not reach us here, but the stars gave enough illumination for me to make out the planes and shadows of her face – and the runes carved into every inch of the leafless, barren tree at her back.

Svala followed my gaze. “It’s a binding tree, Hessa. Have you seen one before?”

Distantly, I heard Yske’s voice join the chorus in the camp, vibrant and sweet.

“No…” Cautiously, I circled the tree, squinting at runes for protection and suppression, warning and foreboding. My nerves, already worn, began to fray, but I resisted the urge to draw back. Svala was watching me, and she would not overlook any weakness. “What is bound inside this?”

“What? Or who? It matters little.” The High Priestess nodded back towards the camp. Our comrades’ song continued to wash out towards us, now recounting how Eang had gathered her cousins and siblings, the so-called Gods of the New World, to overthrow the Gods of the Old. “Eang’s power will keep them asleep until the Unmaking of the World, along with the Gods of the Old World and a hundred other enemies besides. But the tree is not why I brought you out here.”

I retraced my steps, settling before her at a respectful distance – and letting her remain between me and the hushed, rune-laden tree.

“You killed today.”

Tears surged into my eyes, ready and eager. Horrified, I blinked hard and kept my back straight, but I had no doubt Svala saw how the act had shaken me.

She offered me no comfort. Instead she scrutinized me, crowned by the binding tree’s stark, wind-blown branches. “I had a vision of you, in the eyes of a dying man. It is not uncommon… Today was your first raid as full Eangi. Your first kill, since you came to us. So Eang showed me your future – a vision from Fate herself.”

I remained quiet, squinting away my tears. Fate was the most mysterious of divine beings, elevated and withdrawn from Eang and the New Gods, or any other assembly of gods for that matter. She had no physical form, but there were corners of the High Halls, the high priesthood said, where one could hear the clack of her loom on a starry night, as she wove the destinies of us all.

That Fate had showed Eang a vision of me was both awe-inspiring and troubling.

“I saw a man,” Svala said.

“A man?” I could not help myself. I was fifteen and, despite living in close quarters with men of all ages, her words made my cheeks flush. My eyes darted away from her and the lording tree to the chanting masses back in the camp, a hundred warriors releasing weeks of tension. Leather. Muscle. Nerves and grief, clawing for release. Eidr was there, somewhere, singing and laughing.

I shuffled on my feet. “Was he mine? The man in the vision?”

“I don’t know.” If she saw my embarrassment, she didn’t comment. I sometimes wondered if Svala had ever passed through those painful, formative years, or if she had spawned in all her mature, feminine glory. “But he stood with you in the Hall of Smoke, with a hound at his heel and a golden eye.”

A few tears escaped my blockade and trickled onto my upper lip. I licked them away. “What does it mean?”

“I’m not sure. But you were a little older, perhaps by three or four years.” Svala looked at me askance and, back in the camp, the song entered a resounding, final verse. I thought I saw a rare smile in the corner of the priestess’s mouth, but before I could be sure, it vanished into a frown. “When that day comes, you must kill him.”

FOUR

I turned away from the baby in my arms and muffled a cough in my shoulder. The Algatt guard who paced around the huddle of prisoners shot me a glare and shifted his grip on his axe.

My captors had brought Sixnit, the baby and I to the horde just after dusk, thrusting me down in the middle of twenty other Eangen. Most of the captives were young women like me, though there were a handful of boys, a smattering of older women and two men. I was the only Eangi.

My body had given into cold and fatigue, the result of Eangi Fire and a night in the rain, but it helped excuse the steady trickle of tears from my eyes. It was a pitiful shield, but it was something; a lesser suffering to focus on while a chasm of loss festered beneath my skin.

Sixnit and her son were the only things that kept that chasm from swallowing me. Sixnit had regained consciousness on the road but had yet to speak, lying with her head in my lap and slipping in and out of consciousness. The infant had recovered, though his breath was still so thin that my heart wrenched every time he inhaled. I wished he would cry, because at least then I could hear the life in him. For all that he moved now, he might have been carved of pale, clammy stone.

I had to save them. They were my one victory, my one purpose in all of this. When I looked at them, I no longer saw Eidr’s bloodied, limp hand or Yske’s soulless eyes. I saw only a friend and a child who deserved a chance at life. I saw someone I could save.

I gathered moisture from the dewy grass and stroked it across the baby’s lips. He began a frail, wheezing lament.

“Let me feed him.”

Sixnit slowly sat up, her flat cheeks pale over narrow chin and cracked lips. My heart twisted at the sight of her, but I managed a smile and passed her her son.

The Algatt guard glanced over, but he did not stop her as she unlaced the front of her shift, took the baby in her arms and offered him a breast. He did not latch on, fumbling and flailing feebly, but her skin and the scent of milk soon soothed him.

“Thank you.” Sixnit’s voice was soft, toneless in a way that told me she was as raw and shocked as I was. She looked at the guards askance, but her eyes did not focus until her son began to feed. Then something of herself seemed to return; she turned her vacant gaze down and stroked his fine black hair.

I thought that she would say more, would at least ask about her husband, but she didn’t. She knew his fate, and she knew the reality of our situation as well as anyone else in the tent.

I looked down at my knees. “What did you call him? I… I wasn’t there for the naming.”

“There wasn’t one.” In response to my quizzical look, she clarified, “We were waiting for you to come back.”

Neither Eidr nor Yske had mentioned that, likely to spare me the burden. I opened my mouth to say something in return, but my words paled. I’d been at the child’s birth, so it was appropriate that I would be there at his dedication, but not necessary – especially considering the reason for my absence. It was a gesture of kindness and friendship that, in the end, had excluded the baby’s own father from the ceremony.

“Quiet,” one of the guards finally commanded, her hard-lined face framed by smears of blue paint – nearly black in the distant firelight – and the axe and short spear she wore across her back.

We lapsed into silence. The other captives glanced at us curiously, but no one else dared to speak. Finally, when the guards had changed and night closed in, an older man broke the stillness. He was Erd, Albor’s chief blacksmith and one of my father’s distant cousins, though little family resemblance or intimacy remained between us. His muscular arms were bound behind his back – the Algatt had only bound those they perceived as a threat – and the lines on his face permanently entrenched with grey.

“When they realize what you are, they’ll kill you, Eangi.”

The mention of my title made my skin crawl. My gaze flicked to the guards.

When I didn’t say anything, Erd rubbed his bearded chin against one shoulder. “I saw you head up the mountain.”

I weighed his words, trying to uncover what he wasn’t saying. He didn’t know my crime, no one but Sixnit did, but he was the one who cut my collar off. That meant he’d seen just how furious Svala had been with me.

Sixnit watched me quietly.

“I made the climb,” I affirmed.

“Why?” the man asked.

I hesitated. If any of the villagers found out that I had been banished for letting an Algatt traveler into the Hall of Smoke, a week before they razed the village, I was as good as dead.

Guilt welled up in my throat. I had offered Omaskat hospitality on sacred ground and blatantly ignored a charge from Eang to kill him. No wonder the goddess had let the town fall.

Gods below. Was all this really my fault?

“It’s an Eangi matter. Svala had a vision,” I evaded, battling to keep my voice even and that chasm of grief from devouring me. “An owl called me up the mountain.”

All Eangen were familiar with Eang’s owl messengers. They were not truly owls, at least not according to legend; they were constructs of feathers and divine magic, infused with the final breaths of one of Eang’s sisters, who had been executed for a grave betrayal.

“But you gave the dead their rites?” One of the other young women asked, her voice hoarse from crying. “When you came back?”

The guilt plunged back into my stomach, making me want to retch. “No.”

My people stared at me, anguish and horror written across their faces. Even Sixnit, already pallid, lost a little more of her color.

“There was no time,” I said, desperate to explain my failure to myself and to them. In truth, there was no excuse. I should have begun the rites as soon as I stepped into the village. I had been too focused on Eidr and Sixnit and the baby and escape, and now the souls of our loved ones were bound to the earth until I or an Eangi from another village could release them.

Release them to a High Hall where I could not follow, not until Eang forgave me. But what hope did I have for that, now?

“Eang spared her,” Sixnit asserted. “That’s why she was up the mountain.”

“The Algatt spared her and us, and only for slavery,” an older woman, Ama, scoffed. She, like Erd, was another of my distant relations. “Saw that babe in your arms, I say, and think you’ve got more in you, both of you. You’ll be whelping Algatt come mid-winter.”

I ground my teeth to stifle a stab of fear. The rest of the younger women looked equally perturbed, though we were aware of our destiny. We had been raised in its shadow as, year after year, women and girls vanished into the Algatt mountains. Most of them were never found.

“Eang spared her,” Sixnit reasserted, her voice growing tight.

“If Eang wanted to spare someone, it would not have been Hessa,” Ama snapped. “She would have given us Svala or Ardam. But Ardam is dead in the Hall, and Svala’s likely just as dead in the woods.”

“The woods?” I repeated numbly. Why would the High Priestess of the Eangi be in the woods? Had she been who the riders were searching for, outside the burning town?

“Yes, last anyone saw her, that’s where she was. Praying and unarmed.” Ama’s eyes bored into me for another hateful moment. Then her attention snagged on a miserable little boy, who had begun to cry quietly in a corner of the tent. “So, with Hessa we will die. Don’t cry, child. Bravery, now.”

The possibility of Svala’s escape, and the terrifying hope that came with it, died in the pain of Ama’s insult. It burned, yet Sixnit’s defense of me burned still deeper. Yes, Eang had spared me – but only for punishment.

* * *

That night the rain resumed. The Algatt put us in a tent but permitted no fire and did not lower the flaps, leaving us exposed to the splatter of rain and the watchful eye of the guards. We were given food – rations of bread and hard cheeses, stolen from our own village. The older women organized and distributed it, feeding our bound companions by hand.

Outside the wall of heavy skins, fires flickered. Some of the Algatt sang, recalling the history of their alpine god Gadr, the battles of past years and anticipation of their future rest under Gadr’s Great Mountain in the High Halls. Some of their tales blended with ours; stories of how Gadr had been born of the Gods of the Old World and how he, together with Eang and a dozen others, had slain their forebears and claimed the High Halls for the Gods of the New World.

But that was where the similarities ended. Where Eangen songs went on to tell of how Eang came to rule over those Gods of the New World, the Algatt’s songs spoke of how Gadr had justly rebelled and come to dominate the mountains of the north. Unable to slay Eang, he set his worshipers, the Algatt, to raid and harry the Eangen until the end of days.

The words made my Fire burn, low and sickening, in my gut. It did not help that the Algatt loved to add slow wails and high yips to their songs – better for echoing down mountain ravines, Yske had once said. The sound was beautiful and eerie. It made my skin crawl.

Later, in the cold of the night, Sixnit shifted closer to my side. She and I huddled together, lending warmth and comfort to one another and the sleeping child.

“We need to dedicate him,” I murmured to my friend, eyeing the guards to make sure they didn’t overhear. “In case… in case they separate us. I can’t give the dead their rites now, but I can do this. Do you have a name?”

Sixnit shifted again, not quite looking at me. “But the High Priestess should do the dedication.”

My throat tightened. She was right. The High Priestess – or an elder priest, in remote villages – led all rituals, including the dedication of babies. I wasn’t one of them. I was just another Eangi, one of dozens. I was a servant, and an errant one at that.

But I’d seen dedications a hundred times. And this matter, like releasing the souls of the dead, was too important. Even exiled, I belonged to Eang and was bound to fulfill her will.