Hall of Smoke Read online

  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, d
arkening 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.