Faithbreaker, p.1
Faithbreaker, page 1
part #3 of Fallen Gods Series
Copyright
HarperVoyager
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HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2025
Copyright © Hannah Kaner 2025
Cover design by Sean Garrehy/HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Cover, map and interior illustrations © Tom Roberts 2025
Hannah Kaner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008521561
eBook Edition © March 2025 ISBN: 9780008521585
Version: 2025-03-05
Praise for The Fallen Gods Trilogy
‘An explosive debut that will leave you reeling’
Saara El-Arifi, #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of The Faebound Trilogy
‘Violent, bawdy, beautifully imagined, and intensely felt, Godkiller is a bone-rattling fantasy thriller that flies by in a breathtaking rush’
Joe Hill, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman
‘A fresh and confident debut, Godkiller will have you in its grasp from the first pages. Led by a cast of spirited characters, it leaps and bounds to the beat of its own golden heart, building to an epic clash of wills. Hannah Kaner has taken her first great strides in what is sure to be an extraordinary journey’
Samantha Shannon, #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of The Priory of the Orange Tree
‘Epic and intimate, tender and sharp, Godkiller is a triumph of storytelling and the beginning of a story that I can’t wait to follow’
Hannah Whitten, New York Times bestselling author of For the Wolf
‘Holy heck, this book is so good. A disabled bisexual mercenary heroine who murders gods, a former soldier turned baker with a troubled past, a noble child linked to the god of white lies … You need this story in your life!’
Katee Robert, New York Times bestselling author of the Dark Olympus series
‘Devastating and triumphant, Godkiller will eviscerate you’
Tasha Suri, award-winning author of The Jasmine Throne
‘I absolutely adored Godkiller. This novel has everything – adventure, wonderful characters, tenderness, humour, passion. I was gripped by both the story and world building … it is truly spellbinding’
Elodie Harper, internationally bestselling author of The Wolf Den Trilogy
‘Character-driven fantasy with a fresh approach to magic and gods? Sign me up! Godkiller is a delicious, heartfelt adventure with a cast of complicated characters you’ll fall in love with’
Jen Williams, award-winning author of The Winnowing Flame Trilogy
‘In this debut trilogy launch, already a bestseller in the UK, Kaner provides a satisfying payoff, along with twists setting up a sequel with much higher stakes’
Library Journal
‘This debut, a cross between The Witcher and Samantha Shannon’s The Roots of Chaos series, will attract many speculative readers, especially those compelled by folklore and found family … The setting of Godkiller feels epic and lived in, suggesting much more story to be revealed in future installments of the planned trilogy’
Booklist
‘A wonderful, gritty, explosively violent, and beautifully realized debut built around a mismatched trio’s classic quest’
Daily Mail
‘Kaner’s debut offers all the bloodshed, demons and magic a fantasy fan could want, while championing contemporary values such as inclusivity’
Financial Times
‘Dark, gritty and highly immersive’
The Fantasy Hive
‘A bold series continuation from a fantasy author to watch’
Kirkus Reviews, starred review
‘Readers who were hooked by the first book will be satisfied by the action sequences and antics of the wily, unpredictable gods whose mere whims alter the course of the characters’ destinies. This sets things up nicely for the grand finale’
Publishers Weekly
‘An epic fantasy odyssey’
Entertainment Weekly
Dedication
For my brothers and sister.
My fiercest defenders, and my oldest friends.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise for The Fallen Gods Trilogy
Dedication
Map
Prologue
Chapter One: Kissen
Chapter Two: Inara
Chapter Three: Elogast
Chapter Four: Skediceth
Chapter Five: Hestra
Chapter Six: Arren
Chapter Seven: Kissen
Chapter Eight: Elogast
Chapter Nine: Inara
Chapter Ten: Elogast
Chapter Eleven: Kissen
Chapter Twelve: Hestra
Chapter Thirteen: Elogast
Chapter Fourteen: Skediceth
Chapter Fifteen: Inara
Chapter Sixteen: Elogast
Chapter Seventeen: Arren
Chapter Eighteen: Elogast
Chapter Nineteen: Kissen
Chapter Twenty: Arren
Chapter Twenty-One: Inara
Chapter Twenty-Two: Kissen
Chapter Twenty-Three: Elogast
Chapter Twenty-Four: Skediceth
Chapter Twenty-Five: Inara
Chapter Twenty-Six: Kissen
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Skediceth
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Kissen
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Inara
Chapter Thirty: Kissen
Chapter Thirty-One: Inara
Chapter Thirty-Two: Kissen
Chapter Thirty-Three: Arren
Chapter Thirty-Four: Elogast
Chapter Thirty-Five: Skediceth
Chapter Thirty-Six: Inara
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Elogast
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Kissen
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Elogast
Chapter Forty: Kissen
Chapter Forty-One: Elogast
Chapter Forty-Two: Arren
Chapter Forty-Three: Inara
Chapter Forty-Four: Kissen
Chapter Forty-Five: Elogast
Chapter Forty-Six: Kissen
Chapter Forty-Seven: Arren
Chapter Forty-Eight: Elogast
Chapter Forty-Nine: Skediceth
Chapter Fifty: Kissen
Chapter Fifty-One: Elogast
Chapter Fifty-Two: Inara
Chapter Fifty-Three: Skediceth
Chapter Fifty-Four: Inara
Chapter Fifty-Five: Kissen
Epilogue: Inara
Acknowledgements
Also by Hannah Kaner
About the Publisher
Map
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.
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.
