PrologueFifteen Years Ago
HER FATHER FELL IN LOVE WITH A GOD OF THE SEA.
The god’s name was Osidisen, and her parents named Kissen and her brothers in honour of his attention: Tidean, “on the tide”; Lunsen, “moon on water”; Mellsenro, “the rolling rocks.” And, finally, Kissenna, “born on the love of the sea.” Osidisen filled their nets with fish, taught them when to ride a storm and when to hide, and brought them safe home with their catch each day. Kissen and her family grew up in the sea’s favour.
But the sea god didn’t bring fortune to the lands of Talicia. Eventually, the villages on the hills were enticed by a god of fire, Hseth, and her promises of riches.
Everyone wanted the wealth of the fire lovers. In Hseth’s name the Talicians burned their boats and felled their forests to forge weapons, heat brass, and make great bells which rang from sea cliff to mountain border. Osidisen’s waters emptied, and smoke rose over the land. Soon other, darker stories of violence spread from town to village: sacrifices, hunts, and purges in the fire god’s name, enemies and old families burned for the fire god’s pleasure.
One night, the night after Mellsenro’s twelfth birthday, when his fingers were inked with his name, eleven-year-old Kissen woke to smoke, strangely thick and sweet smelling. It scratched at her throat.
She came to, and realised she was being carried by men with cloths tied over their mouths, their faces daubed with coal dust, and bells shining in their hair like little lamps. Kissen’s limbs wouldn’t move, and her chest was heavy as if dreams still lay on it. The sweet smoke, she recognised it: a sleeping drug made by burning sless seeds, along with other scents she didn’t know. Below her house, the sea was lashing at the cliffs. Osidisen was angry.
She tried to speak, but her mouth wouldn’t work, her tongue sticking against her cheek. Her head flopped to one side, and she saw Mell too, his fresh-inked hand dragging along the floor.
“Mmmelll,” Kissen tried again, but her brother didn’t stir. The drug smoke was seeping through the shutters, through the walls. It hung in the air.
“Quiet,” said one of the men holding her, giving her a shake. She knew that voice, those smudge-green eyes.
“N-Naro?” Kissenna asked, her voice a little stronger now. The waves crashed outside, and the smoke stirred as some sea wind forced its way through the cracks in the wattled walls. She felt a fresh bite of salt air across her face, on her lips. Her head cleared a little. Naro glanced at her, panic in his eyes.
“They said they wouldn’t wake yet,” he said through his mask.
“Hurry.” The other voice she recognised too. Mit, Naro’s brother-in-law. The masks were protecting them from the drug. “Hurry!”
They were carrying her deeper into the house, to the hearth at its centre. “What are you doing?” Kissen asked, her voice thick but clear. Her body still wouldn’t move.
They reached the hearth, a round stone beneath the thatch roof which opened to the sky so smoke could escape. Around the embers of their evening’s fire, a tangled cage had been set, in the shape of a bell, forged out of driftwood and metal. Her parents were already bound to its outer edges. Her brothers were being tied: ankle, ankle, arms, neck. Offerings. Kissen was the last.
Naro and Mit flung her against the bars next to her father. The sea wind tore through the smoke hole in the roof, ripping around the beams. The shutters rattled and the house shook with the sounds of angry water.
“Naro, stop,” said Kissen, stronger now; the sless smoke was almost gone from the air, though it bound her limbs still. “Why are you doing this?”
Naro was twisting her legs to tie them to the foot of the cage while Mit strapped her hands to the bars. Lunsen was crying, hiccupping with fear. She had lost sight of Mell. Kissen found the strength to struggle as they bound her against the metal, but they were bigger and stronger than she was. Outside, bells were ringing, their sound broken and battered by the rising wind. The sound could have been from thousands, though the village was barely a hundred souls. All of their neighbours must be out there. They had planned this together, to catch the sea god’s favoured family. Kissen could smell hot pitch close at hand. Terror clawed down her throat.
“We’re not sorry, liln,” said Mit. How dare he call her “little one?” That was what uncles did, friends. He was not a friend. He was a traitor. “It is what must be.”
Kissen drew up her strength and snapped at his hand with her sharp teeth. He leapt away, clutching his thumb pad where she had caught it.
“Leave her,” he snapped. “It’s time. They won’t wait for us.”
They ran. Kissen was shaking. She spat out Mit’s blood and tried to breathe, turning against the ropes to find the closest family. “Papa.” He was not far from her. “Papa!”
Bern, her father, was breathing badly. His mouth was torn and bloody, his face bruised. They must have beaten him in his drugged sleep. That ruined mouth had kissed the god of the sea, but now coal daubed his forehead in the bell-shaped symbol of Hseth.
The air thickened with smoke again, not sweet this time but bitter and sticky, hot and black, rising up through the floor. Their village had lit the pitch beneath their stilt foundations.
Kissen yanked at her wrists, her legs. “Papa!” she cried. They had left her neck unbound when she had tried to bite. She writhed, tugging her arm into strange contortions, the bones popping as she craned her neck towards her closer hand. There. She could reach. She set her teeth to the rope, gnawing and tugging at the knot. It was sea-rope, not meant for fraying, but she didn’t want to die.
Tidean was awake too. “You filthy castoffs,” he was shouting, struggling against his bindings, choking as they tightened on his throat. He coughed on the smoke. “You saltless traitors!” His voice was raw.
The heat was rising. Kissen could feel it on the soles of her feet. “Be calm,” their mother said, her voice drug-thick. “Be calm, my loves. Osidisen will save us. I promise.”
They couldn’t see the flames yet, but the air swam. Osidisen’s sea wind was still forcing its way inside, and the smoke and air were dancing together like oil and water. Kissen’s mouth, her eyes, her nose dried out. She set her teeth to the rope with renewed force.
“I’ll make you all pay for this!” Tidean yelled his promise over his mother’s, but he was bound too tight, tighter than Kissenna. His wild thrashing did no good. The floor cracked in places. Bright light peeked through from the foundations. The walls blackened. Then, an ember, a spark, a lick of flame, and the wooden doorway caught alight, sending sparks into Tidean’s eyes. He screamed, and thrashed.
“Breathe deep, my son,” said his mother. “It’s all right, Osidisen will come.” She was lying, lying to ease their deaths, lying to herself. Osidisen was a water god; he would not come far past the shoreline, not even for them, just as no fire god would dare swim in the sea. Gods couldn’t save them now.
The rope sliced the delicate flesh between Kissen’s teeth, and blood poured thick and hot across her tongue. She growled and bit down hard, wrenching at her restraint. A shot of pain, a grinding in her gums, then a snap. The rope! The rope was loose, her canine still buried in it, ripped clean from her mouth.
Kissen snatched her wrist free and went to work on the other, letting her salt blood drip down her chin onto the stone below, where it hissed and steamed.
Second hand, free! Her feet. She bloodied her nails on the ropes, snarling with desperation. She would save them. She had to. Her breath was hot, her eyes stinging, but she would not stop. Her mother was coughing now.
“Breathe deep, my children,” she said. Kissen could hear the tears in her voice. Lunsen was whimpering now; Tidean’s struggles were less and less intense. Mell had not even stirred. “Let the smoke take you to sleep, and Osidisen will come for you.”
Kissen’s ropes came away, and her feet were loose. The floor was now on fire, and the sea wind was doing nothing but thinning the smoke, losing them the chance their mother wished for: a painless death.
“Papa.” They had tied her pa hard to the metal, which was getting hotter. Kissen climbed anyway, her hands burning.
“Kissenna,” Papa mumbled through his swollen lips. His eyes were open. They shone with dazed relief. “My girl, run.”
“I’m going to save you,” she growled between coughs. “I’ll save you all.”
Kissen pressed her fingers into the hard sailor’s knots; they were tight, but she could work them, releasing her papa a piece at a time. Her eyes were stinging. Mell woke at last and yelled as the flames reached the edges of the hearth, nipping at his heels. Good, all awake. If they were awake, they could run. She freed her father’s left hand and moved to his foot while he unbound his right. They were losing time. The sound of the bells outside was rising, sonorous, merging into a single note, louder than the fire.
The flames changed. They twisted together, spinning up the walls, then plunging to the floor in a pillar of fire, sparks spinning out like snow. Laughter crackled in the smoke, harsh and delighted.
The fire span and blossomed into skirts of light and embers. Within them, a woman twirled, her arms wide. Hseth, the fire god. Her hair sparked with yellows and poisoned red, and heat rose from her, cracking and splitting the wood and beams.
“Sea god!” she cried, then she called him by his name. “Osidisen! Look how they turned from you and gave your loves to me. You cannot touch me, you gutted old water goat! This land is mine!”
Hseth did not look at Kissen or her family. She did not flinch at their screams. She burst through the ceiling in a scourge of flame and the roof came crashing down.
Kissen blinked. Black heat. Then light. Then pain. The cage was shattered under the heavy beams. Mell had stopped screaming. She blinked again. Her father was there, free from his ropes. Her head hurt. Her mouth was full of ash.
“Pa . . .” she choked out. He was wrenching the rubble from her, but he could not lift the warped metal that had buried itself into her right leg, shattering it below the knee. By flesh and bone she was trapped. She was going to die; she could see it in her father’s eyes.
“It will be all right, Kissenna,” he said, lying like her mother had, in the soft voice Osidisen admired. He stroked her hair as if putting her to sleep. “Be brave, my love, my daughter.”
“Run away, Papa,” she said, stifling a sob of fear. “Please.”
“Don’t cry, Kissenna,” he said. “It is better this way.”
Pain. Blinding, atrocious pain. It drove into Kissen’s leg. She screamed, but the smoke stuffed the noise back into her throat. Her papa had orange-hot metal sizzling in his hands, fresh and hissing with both of their blood. He heaved it up high.
“Her leg for her safety, Osidisen!” he cried. “I beg you, save her from this place in return for this, her flesh, blood and bone, my own making.”
He brought the metal down another time and turned.
Kissenna screamed again, the pain devouring her faster than the fire. But her father was not done. Her vision went black, white. When she came to, her papa was dragging her out of the wreckage, leaving the bottom of her leg behind. Charcoal ran down his face, cut through with tears, streaming into his beard.
Then she saw the seas below their shattered walls. Raging, impotent, beating at the base of the cliff. The salt air rose. It had stung Kissen awake for a moment. The waves were catching each piece of wood as it fell from the house and tearing it apart.
“My life, Osidisen!” her father cried. “My life for hers, the last thing I will ever ask.”
“No!” Kissen croaked, barely conscious.
“This you owe to me! My lover, my friend. You owe it to her now. My life for Kissenna’s!”
The sea rose, tearing up the cliff as if to reach him. Osidisen’s face rose from the waves, his eyes as dark as the depths. For a moment, Kissen hoped he would deny it, save her father instead.
But gods love martyrs.
He nodded.
Kissenna tried to struggle. She did not want a god’s promise; she wanted her father, her mother, Tidean, Lunsen, and Mell. She wanted her family. Her papa clutched her a last time to his chest and scratched her face with his beard as he kissed her.
“I love you,” he said, and threw her to the sea.
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