Faithbreaker

Book 3: Fallen Gods

by Hannah Kaner

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Friendship; Sword & Sorcery

Synopsis

In the epic finale to the #1 internationally bestselling Fallen Gods trilogy that started with Godkiller, the fate of Middren hangs in the balance as mighty gods and mortal heroes clash in a final battle for supremacy.

War has come. The fire god Hseth is leading an unstoppable army south, consuming everything in her path. Middren's only hope of survival is to unify allies and old foes against a common enemy.

Elo navigates an uneasy alliance with Arren—his friend, his enemy, and his king. Now they each must decide how much they're willing to sacrifice to turn the tides of war.

Meanwhile, Inara joins her mother on their ship, the Silverswift, to seek aid. Still grappling with her powers, Inara must reconcile who she is and where she belongs, while Skediceth has to question if their bond will be enough to keep them safe.

Kissen has no allegiance to the old ways of Middren. But, as she tries to find her family, she is forced to question what, and whose, future she is fighting for.

In Faithbreaker, Hannah Kaner delivers a powerful conclusion to the Fallen Gods trilogy, masterfully weaving together love and sacrifice, loyalty and betrayal, and the true meaning of faith.

Release date: April 1, 2025

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 304

Sample

Prologue

HESTRA, GOD OF HEARTHS, FELT THE FLAME OF HSETH’S coming. A flesh beyond her flesh, a fire beyond her fire. Hseth was no longer a god of burning heather for the herds to graze, nor a god of furnace and forges. The fire god had been reborn for blood and brass and bone. For war.

And as the weeks passed, Hseth’s power grew, feeding from fury and fear as the Talicians came over mountains and waves to claim Middren for their own.

Hestra, with her dwindling power, could sense the hearths of Daesmouth crumbling and falling as its people tried to hold off the sea invasion. She could feel the stones that had once been carved with her ancient symbols in the north, which cracked and cooled as Middrenites fled down the Bennite Mountains ahead of the Talicians’ flaming raids. They left behind their homes, those few places that still held Hestra’s twig-and-moss figurines buried beneath the hearthstones in return for her blessing.

So few still remembered that the hearts of their houses held fire god shrines.

And that did not stop them burning.

From the shadows of fireplaces, Hestra saw clouds of smoke rising over burning groves of ripening fruit. She saw wells blacken with the blood of the people who had drunk from them. She saw the poor folk who were caught. Their livestock, their children, dragged to be sacrifices at the feet of a god who would not remember what love could feel like when freely given. Not taken with blade and flame.

And Hseth’s fire priests were happy to burn rich lands if it meant they could claim them more quickly and without a fight. They did not care that their own fighters were choking on their flames, their bellies empty and their clothes threadbare. They did not care that gods were not supposed to be used as weapons.

Hestra wondered if she should go to Hseth, speak from hearth to flame and remind the Talician god of the promises she had made. Remind her that she had been wise once, that she had known when to let flames burn, and when to let them die.

She did not. Hseth would not hear her; all she heard were the voices of her priests, and the screams of her victims.

There was only one person who wanted Hestra to speak, and she had no words for him.

‘Will you not talk to me, hearth god?’ Arren whispered in the rare moments he was alone, now he had negotiated himself free from confinement by the rebels and used his banner to summon armies to their defence. ‘Will you be silent till all of our people are ash and dust?’

Our people?

‘The Vittosk lands to the east are overrun, Hestra,’ Arren pressed, the use of her name like a tug on her heart. What she knew by sight he learned through letters, pleas for help, promises of soldiers, guards, supplies. She could feel his voice in her twigs, in her body. She could feel his fear as if it were her own. ‘They took Blenraden and hung its pilgrims and guards from the walls, like totems, flayed with fire.’

Hestra burrowed deeper into his heart, wishing his words could not find her. Burning faithful, delighting in pain; that was not what she wanted. Hestra wanted people to turn away from their bright cities and gods of fortune. She wanted them to leave their coin and silks and spices, and to come back to the hearth, come back to her. To seek out her warmth for fear of the dark.

‘She has forgotten you, my heart.’

Hestra knew. Of course she knew. All promises had been broken with Hseth’s death. Now, she was left to wonder if the other deity of fire had ever meant them at all.

Was it so wrong to help her? She just had to do one thing, rescue one little boy-king,

gasping away his life on a stone floor, and manipulate him into her power, connect him with Hseth and her conniving. They had hoped to take root in the space where Middren’s gods had been torn out.

It had been good, for a while. Hestra had gained life and strength, suffused with colour, in her binding to him. So many hopes, dreams, so many promises he gave to her.

All now on the brink of destruction.

Arren’s fortress had been shattered and invaded, his beloved had tried to run him through, and he and Hestra both had been choked almost to death by the demigod, the Craier girl. He was a king of little, now. Lost pride and a losing war.

He had no power to offer, and she had nothing to say to him. Gods could hold the silence of centuries, and only the first boon she had granted him, etched black in his flesh, kept them together.

The promise to keep him alive.

Could she leave? She had used almost all of her old power to take Arren’s double with his army to Lesscia, and then the rest bringing him back again to the fortress with his precious knight, the little god of white lies and the halfling girl who slipped with them to her hearth. Her prayers were so sparse now, so faint, her will so weak that if she left the king she was afraid she would lose her form, her shape, her very self. She would be nothing but nameless power, a malevolent spirit, a breath on the wind.

Perhaps she should do it. Disappear. What else was there? Staying in a land of the faithless, half-throned king, harassed by flames she could not command? Caught in the chest of a man who wanted all the love, the worship, everything for himself?

Our people.

‘Will you leave me here alone,’ said Arren, ‘like everyone else?’

He spoke as if to himself, staring out of his window into the starry sky above the city of Sakre. Was he truly speaking to her? Or was it Elogast in his mind? She kept her thoughts close, giving neither comfort nor pain. He wanted love, like her. And power. War had caught them both between two worlds: flame and a future, a king and chaos.

God and human.

 

Chapter OneKissen

KISSEN LAY IN THE PERFECT CROOK BETWEEN ELO’S SHOULDER and chest, sated and exhausted. The cabin she had been permitted was barely three strides across, and her small cot took up most of the room.

Still, she preferred it to a hammock in the belly of the ship, cheek to cheek with its crew that looked like they’d steal her teeth from her mouth and slit her throat with a smile. Despite Inara’s assurances, Kissen didn’t trust Lessa Craier, or her rebels. Her hand still ached from having to escape from the lady’s chains through a cellar of blackfire.

It was nice to have a locking door between her and them. And, well, some privacy went a long way.

‘How do you have so much energy?’ she groaned, sitting up and reaching over to splash herself with cold water from the washstand. Elo hoisted himself on his elbows and grinned across at her, looking annoyingly pleased with himself.

‘I didn’t hear you complaining,’ he said.

‘I didn’t say I was complaining.’ She leaned back against the other side of the cot and regarded her friend in the thin light of the porthole.

He had changed. He was harder, wilder than he was when she met him. The burn scar across his chest that he had received from Hseth had healed well into a mottled pink hand, bright against the dark brown skin of his broad chest. It added to the hatchwork of scars from battles old and new.

‘But,’ she added, ‘I know when I’m being used as a distraction.’

Elo tipped his head and smirked. He had a shadow of stubble, accentuating the sharp line of his jaw. ‘I promise you, Kissenna, you had my full attention,’ he said.

Bastard. No one used her full name. Not even Yatho and Telle.

He sat up straighter, his smile falling. ‘Of course I need a distraction,’ he said. ‘We’re on the losing side of war.’

It didn’t feel like war in Sakre. It had been weeks since Kissen had stopped Lessa Craier’s attempted coup, and the king was still lurking in the capital, gathering forces from local nobles, shoring up defences, supplies, weaponry. Most of this war was the tedium of waiting for it to happen.

But Kissen knew that the battle with Hseth wasn’t the only one on Elo’s mind. His own rebellion had failed, lost at the outset, and now he had been forced to unite again with the king he had tried to kill, who had tried to kill him.

‘You should come with us to Irisia,’ said Kissen, and he frowned. ‘Fuck the king. Fuck all of this. Join the Craier mission and speak for Middren there, in your mothers’ land.’ She nudged him with her foot. ‘Anyway, between Skedi, Inara, her mother and the gods, I don’t know where I stand.’ She lifted her shortened leg and wiggled it at him. ‘Or hop.’

Elo laughed, closing his eyes, and Kissen pulled her leg back, rubbing her thumb over the severed end of her knee. She was most comfortable naked, scarred in all her glory, and it was rare that she had the luxury of the privacy and warmth that a ship’s cabin afforded. After she had dragged herself through the rugged Talician highlands, she was going to make the most of it.

‘Or . . .’ she continued. ‘If you want me to stay, I could fight—’

He opened his eyes again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Last word I could find of your sisters was that they made it to Weild. If there’s any goodness in the world, they will have taken the first ship to Irisia.’

Kissen glanced out of the porthole towards the harbour wall, between the towers to the open sea, bright as glass and silver-tipped. It was a big world, and her sisters could be anywhere. ‘It’s a fool’s hope,’ she said.

‘But it’s hope. You’ve given more than enough for this country.’

‘And you haven’t?’

He rubbed his brow. The early summer sun beat at the sides of the cabin, and heat prickled on their skin despite the slight breeze slipping beneath

the door. The air was scented with the Irisian stew Elo had brought her in a thin pottery bowl from one of the harbourside stalls. His favourite. ‘I can’t leave,’ he said. ‘I won’t. My place is here. Only a coward abandons the mess they made.’

‘It’s not your mess,’ insisted Kissen. ‘It’s Arren’s, it’s the gods’, it’s Lessa Craier’s. You tried to put things right.’

‘And failed.’ Elo laughed hollowly. ‘Miserably. I almost broke our land on the brink of war. I almost lost Inara, got your family killed.’ He touched the top of his hair; it had grown out in tight coils, nearly long enough to braid. ‘I almost got you killed, Kissen.’

‘Well, I contributed some arrogance to that, didn’t I?’ she said.

He laughed again. At least she could make him laugh. His smile was warm, but brief, and he swung his muscled legs out over the side of the narrow bed. She liked that he was comfortable around her, in his own skin. Honest. They were honest with each other. This was no love story between them, no romance. It was trust, unfettered. Need, without possession. She had the sudden urge to kiss him again.

‘My time is marked by failure,’ he said. ‘I may as well accept it and fix my mistakes, or die trying.’

‘Or, you could leave behind this land that has done nothing but hurt you.’

He looked at her then, and by the crease near his lip, the tension in his jaw, she knew he would not. Could not. He had given too much to Middren, to Arren, to let it all go.

‘Do you think you’ll come back?’ he said instead of answering.

Kissen pushed her hair from her eyes and leaned back against the cabin wall. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, honestly. ‘There’s not much left for me here apart from you. And I might have your attention, baker-knight,’ she looked him up and down, ‘and the rest of you. But . . . I know your heart lies elsewhere.’

Elo winced. Then he stood and grabbed his shirt from the pile he had made of his clothes. The rotten man had folded them as they were undressing. ‘I’d better leave,’ he said, pulling it over his head and the scar on his chest. ‘Before the ship disembarks with me on it.’

Shit. Not her best choice of words. It was his heart, his life, that Hseth and the king had tried to take from him in exchange for power.

Arren. The core of Elo’s hurt and bad humour. His betrayer, and the centre of his soul.

‘He told you he loved you,’ pressed Kissen, ‘didn’t he?’

‘He was manipulating me,’ said Elo, bending over to grab his trousers and giving Kissen a quite tasty view. ‘While I tried to kill him.’

‘And he succeeds in it because . . .’ Because Elo’s life was intertwined with Arren’s, tangled, knotted, and painful. And ignoring that wasn’t making it go away.

‘We’ve never even kissed, Kissen.’

‘If love were only kisses everyone would be in less trouble.’

‘I hate him. Everything he has done. Everything he stands for.’

‘Love and pain are not so different,’ said Kissen. ‘Why else would gods want blood and death as sacrifice?’

Elo sighed, lacing up his trews. ‘He’s not a good man.’

‘No.’ Kissen grabbed her own rumpled shirt and pulled it on. These stolen moments could not last long, not when they both walked the fine line between arrest and usefulness in this city. But perhaps it would have lasted longer had she some better skill in holding her tongue. ‘But if you’re fighting in his army, you’re going to need to resolve your issues somehow.’

Her knight ignored her, sitting on the bed to pull his boots on.

‘You could fuck,’ she said brightly. ‘That worked for us.’

Despite himself, Elo snorted, one boot on, one off. Kissen gave him a grin and leaned over to pick up her new prosthesis from the floor. Elo had helped navigate Sakre and paid for a new one from the funds he had stored in one of the city temples that had been repurposed as banks.

‘Is it working all right for you?’ he asked, noticing her adjusting the straps to put it on. It was a fine enough piece, with red leather for the kneecap and a wooden leg, but it was nowhere near as effective as the one that Yatho had made. Its base was already chipped and battered from use, and it hadn’t been created for her, so she felt unsteady in it, as if her leg was a breath behind the rest of her. Still, it was an improvement on the twisted thing that her old one had become through all her trials.

‘It’s like losing a sword made for your hand, and being given a hammer to use instead,’ said Kissen. A hammer that bit the hand; the agonising squeezing of her right shin and calf were worse when her leg didn’t feel enough like her own body. ‘But it’s serviceable. The artificers have got better in the years since the God War, you should see the shit I wore as a kid.’

Elo put his warm hand on her shoulder, and she leaned into it for a second. Then he took a breath—

‘If you say you’re sorry again I’ll punch you in the mouth,’ she said, finishing her straps and shrugging him off. ‘I made my choice to fight the fire god. And beat her too. And I’d do it again.’

Elo nodded, passed her her trews, then picked up his own tabard. This was a bright padded blue, striped in curling waves of gold, and he fastened it with his belt and a new sword. He had lost his old one in Lesscia, and this new blade had a plain hilt, no longer a reminder of the lion’s head he had sacrificed.

‘Only . . .’ she pulled her trews over her prosthesis, the right leg adjusted and unlaced so it would slide on easily. ‘She has briddite in her heart. I don’t know if a veiga’s tricks will harm her this time.’

‘Do you think the reports are true?’ said Elo, kneeling down without being asked to help her tie up the laces. ‘That they can summon her to use as a weapon of war?’

Kissen sighed, and

pulled her belt down from its hook from the wall. She had sourced a few throwing knives, one briddite, and a cutlass with a briddite edge. Not enough of the ore in her opinion, but she had to make do. Sakre was mostly still loyal to Arren, and most of their briddite stores had been melted down into useless talismans they wore to ward off bad gods and spirits.

‘I’ve never seen a god’s power like hers,’ she said at last. Of course, gods sometimes manifested at their shrines when they were called, but not always. If they could summon Hseth at will, the god was either very naïve, or very greedy. Or both. ‘Her priests lead the country, command the army. They use fear and pain as weapons, so I don’t doubt that they can use the god too. I saw the shrines they made; if they carry them with their armies, they could summon her anywhere.’

‘Their foot soldiers must be exhausted,’ Elo murmured. ‘Talicia hasn’t run a ground war in nearly fifty years. Few of them will be trained, and you said half of them were farmhands, fisherfolk, younglings. Why would they put themselves through this?’

‘Fear and power make people do stupid things,’ said Kissen. ‘Mad things.’ She had told all she had seen in Talicia to Elo, Lessa and the king: the burning of children, of people, the zeal and the terror.

‘I don’t know how to stop this,’ she admitted. ‘Even if the Craiers get help from Irisia, even if you can hold them off in the north . . .’

‘I’ll think of something,’ said Elo.

Infuriating. He was infuriatingly calm.

A rattle of knocking at the door, and their brief peace was broken.

‘What?’ Kissen barked.

‘The tide is up,’ said a familiar voice. ‘And if we set sail, Elo might not wish to swim to shore.’

Kissen grabbed her staff, and slid open the door to see Inara standing in the warm, bright sunlight, with an intentionally innocent look. Her cropped hair suited her well, springing up into a thicket of curls around her neck and ears. Her thirteenth birthday had been and gone as the spring warmed, and she had also grown drastically in height in what felt like a bare few weeks since Kissen had first met her.

‘How did you know I was here?’ said Elo, grabbing the pottery bowls he had brought from the food vendor and sliding them back into his satchel, wiped clean with bread and ready to return in exchange for a copper.

‘You were seen sneaking aboard in the wee hours,’ said Inara. ‘Like a thief in the night.’

Elo sucked his teeth, yet when he stepped out into the brightness and noise of the ship’s deck, it was hard to imagine him thieving or haggling over petty coin. His skin glowed as if he had been born of the sun, and in his fine garb he looked more like a lord than a working knight, or even the baker he had called himself when they first met.

Inara was also well pranked up. She had forgone the Craier green and instead wore a stiff ochre undershirt with brushed wool leggings, and

a long red tunic over both, dotted at the shoulders with droplets of tumbled glass. For a moment, in her rumpled shirt and patched trews, Kissen felt like a stranger. She was a foreign orphan, a guttersnipe and a mercenary, she wasn’t meant to stand side by side with knights and nobles and kings.

Well, she had never been one to know her place.

‘I’ll bet the god ratted us out,’ said Kissen, looking up. She was right, Skediceth, god of white lies, was perched on the highest of the three mainmasts that stabbed through Lessa Craier’s ship, his wings outstretched as he bathed in the sun and the sea air. He had mostly recovered himself since the fights in Lesscia, but he had stayed smaller, quieter than she remembered. He often kept to the high perch when he wasn’t on Inara’s shoulder, a silent sentinel against would-be assassins seeking vengeance against the Craiers on their ship, the Silverswift.

Kissen had to admit, it was a beauteous vessel; its raised foredeck had gilt banisters up to the top, carved in flowing, twisting designs. This held Kissen’s cabin side by side with the one belonging to Lessa’s guard captain and fellow rebel, Tarin. The aftcastle where Lessa and Inara would stay was at the other side of the well-polished main deck, now empty of barrels and livestock but busy with crew who were preparing the sails for release.

There, between the upright panelling and doors, three small shrines were studded into the wood. Before the God War, every Middrenite ship would have had such shrines, to gods who might protect them on the seas. Now, these altars seemed preserved from another age.

One was clearly for Yusef, the god of safe haven. Inara’s father. The totem carved for him was a statue, broad-shouldered and bearded, draped in a string of red glass beads. As with most of his shrines Kissen had seen before his death, he wore the travelling robes of the eastern tribes that had settled Restish centuries before, and a woven belt of what looked like sail rope.

The others weren’t so familiar: one held a spiked conch and a crown of gold-dipped cowries, the other a winged totem of a gull carved from pale, smooth stone. The latter was probably some wind god, and Kissen resisted the urge to spit in its offering cup. She was not fond of wind gods of late.

‘Everything’s stowed,’ said Inara, dragging her attention away. ‘Apart from Legs.’

Kissen glanced overboard to see her horse, merrily eating hay from a bag, his tail swishing away the flies that clustered about him, oblivious to the noise of the harbour. He was still in the temporary stables beneath the pulleys they used to bring beasts aboard. She had stopped them, not wanting him to spend the night aboard in the cramped dark beneath the deck.

Kissen sighed. This was going to hurt.

‘Elo, I have a gift for you,’ she said, using her staff to ease herself onto the gangplank before carefully moving sideways down it. Better to feel like a crab than to fall and break her neck.

‘What do you mean?’ said Elo, following her. The main port of Sakre, north of the Silverswift, was teeming with folk – merchants, haulers, runners and crews – but the Craier ship had a privileged position in the nobles’ docks, separate and in a pool of quiet, save for the pining cries of gulls. It was one of the few remaining hints, other than the stink of lye and blood in the Healers’ streets, that the city had hung in the balance between king and rebels. That was until Lady Craier finally understood that destroying Arren meant splitting their country into factions that would fight each other instead of following her to war.

As Kissen reached the stones of the harbour, Legs nickered, coming forward to greet her. Kissen reached up a hand for his warm, strong nose and stroked the white streak that marked it. His arrow and thorn wounds had healed well but had left pale notches in his flanks.

‘Shall I call the captain to bring him aboard?’ Inara asked, her eyes also on his scars.

‘No,’ said Kissen. ‘He’s not coming.’

‘Not coming?’

Inara climbed the fence of his pen so she could stroke him too, but he stamped his feet and shifted his face towards Elo, ignoring the girl. Her lips tugged downwards, but she held in her disappointment as Elo patted Legs’s neck.

At last, he understood. ‘You can’t leave him,’ he said. ‘I went through great lengths to fetch him here for you.’

‘I know,’ said Kissen heavily. ‘But I told you before: I owe him better than a slow death in a cage.’

‘But he loves you,’ said Inara, and didn’t add even if he has not forgiven me for riding him into a riot. Kissen patted her arm in comfort.

‘Sometimes, you need to let love go,’ she said. ‘He’s a pathway horse, he knows this land. I can’t close him in a stinking hull for weeks with no light and air. It would break his heart.’

She couldn’t imagine Legs away from the green places, the trees and the mountains, the roads he had carried her through time and time again, the chestnut leaves and the bracken. She had bought him, barely a year old, from a woman too liberal with a whip and too stingy with her grazing. It had taken a long while for him to warm to her, but when he did, he became family.

Elo shook his head as Legs nuzzled his shoulder. ‘We both owe him better than a long road to war.’

‘Then don’t take him into battle. He’s loyal, steady on the way. And . . .’ She clicked her tongue as her own bloody horse pressed his nose into Elo’s hands. ‘Bastard seems to like you.’

‘You told me once to get the fuck away from him,’ said Elo, now scratching Legs’s white streak.

‘Well, if I can’t offer you my arms, baker-knight, at least I can offer my Legs.’ She winked at him, and Inara snorted. ‘There are packhorses in the army, he can be yours. A friend. One you can trust.’

Elo smiled so fully that his eyes crinkled, then turned and clasped her shoulders. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Say you’ll look after him,’ said Kissen, reaching to hold the back of his neck, somewhere between a warrior’s clasp and a lover’s embrace.

‘I promise.’

Legs huffed, annoyed at being left, then gently, carefully, came back to Inara and put his nose to her shoulder, sniffing at the jewels there. He didn’t move as she slowly raised a hand to his mane, and he let her hold him.

Kissen breathed out. She wished she could hold Elo together in her arms, hold the world together through her will alone. She was afraid that if she let him go he would disappear, run into war, die a hero, when she wanted him to live, wanted him to keep living.

‘I hope we meet again, baker,’ she said, instead of all that she felt. He knew. Of course he knew.

‘We will,’ said Inara, and she leaned over to put her arms around both of them. ‘We’re coming back with ships and weapons, from Irisia. Maybe their gods too.’

A flutter of wings, and as if summoned by the word ‘gods’, Skedi alighted on the fence beside Legs, the size of a small squirrel, his wings bright and dappled like an owl’s. From his antlers dangled some odd objects: one of Inara’s mother-of-pearl buttons, a piece of curling hair, wrapped tight, and a green beaded bracelet from one of the archivists who had helped Inara and Telle make off with the contents of the cloche. He also had a smudge on his brow which could have been dirt . . . or blood.

‘Humans do like touching each other, don’t they?’ he said, his whiskers twitching.

‘What do you want, godling?’ said Kissen, stepping back from the others as Skedi cocked his head. She approximated that to a smile.

‘Inara’s mother is coming,’ he said. He tightened the tuck of his wings and shifted his paws anxiously. ‘And so is the king.’ ...