Page 103 of Flame and Sparrow

I finally found the courage to open my eyes just in time to see the water rolling harmlessly away, as if something had grabbed a hold of the waves and peeled them back. It felt like someone lifting the lid of my coffin, barely saving me from being buried alive.

My hand groped over my bleeding side, feeling for the damage while I watched the sea continue to peel back, certain I was actually dead, certain I was imagining this.

I felt someone pick me up. I didn’t care who it was. I wouldn’t have cared if they decided to toss me into the sea, either.

“You certainly have everyone’s attention now, I think.”

Mairu’s voice.

Burn brightly, she’d told me. I suppose I had. But I didn’t feel either bright or burning in that particular moment—I felt dull and cold, like the last foolish flower of summer clinging to life before the winter snows inevitably buried it.

The Serpent Goddess carried me across a stretch of receded sea and damp sand, back toward the shore. She wasn’t looking ahead of us as we walked, but behind us, eyes narrowed as if she was giving the sea a stern reprimanding.

I concentrated—or tried to, at least—and I felt glimmers of her power floating around us. A hazy understanding dawned over me.

“You were controlling those waves a minute ago, weren’t you?” My words came out in a quiet, breathless rush.

She lifted her chin, unapologetic. “I saw you in danger of drowning, and I couldn’t let that happen. Not to you.” Her gaze shifted covertly down the shoreline, to where Dravyn stood in the middle of what looked to be an intense conversation with the God of the Ocean and several other Marr. “Or to him.”

We reached the shore. She laid me on the warm, dry sand, and I tried to lift my head and watch the conversation playing out between Dravyn and the other Marr.

“I don’t think he would have cared if I’d drowned. I think—” I choked on the words as I tried and failed to push myself upright. I stubbornly tried again, and succeeded this time, though the pain in my side made me so dizzy I nearly fainted. “I think…” I gasped “…that he’d be happy to have the ordeal over with, honestly.”

She placed a steadying hand on my arm. “He would be happy to have it over with,” she agreed. “But I don’t think you drowning is the ending he’s hoping for.”

Chapter29

My recoveryfrom the Ocean Marr’s trial was agonizingly slow.

There was no peppermint bath, no special salve that could immediately erase the pain or draw the weariness from my bones this time. No amount of rest, and no amount of food or drink I consumed, made my weakness go away, either. I was given all manner of these things, but they merely dulled my suffering. I’d tumbled over the edge of my body’s limits, landed hard and awkwardly at the bottom of the cliff, and the climb back up was proving steep and brutal.

Three days after the trial’s end, I was tossing and turning in the throes of a restless slumber when I caught the scent of cedar and smoke. I jolted awake, cursing at the pain that throbbed through my ribs as I did so.

Dravyn appeared in my doorway a few moments later. He looked wordlessly to Rieta, who had been keeping watch at my bedside. Her concerned gaze lingered on me for a moment before she bowed to the god she served and left.

Once we were alone, Dravyn hesitated, one hand in his pocket while he watched for something in the hallway, before he made his way into the room.

“I’m fine,” I told him before he could speak. “You can stop checking on me.”

“You still look horrible.”

“That’s rude,” I mumbled, sinking deeper into my pillow.

“I was thinking…” he continued, drifting closer, “…I have a favor I can call in from the God of Healing. And I believe it needs to be done. I’m tired of seeing you like this.”

I inwardly recoiled at the thought of him calling in any favors on my behalf. “I don’t need any more divine encounters, thank you. If you don’t want to see me like this, you could just leave.”

His jaw clenched at the suggestion, as though maybe hewantedto leave, but something unseen was holding him back.

I refused to ponder what that something might have been.

He stayed for the better part of the next hour, neither of us paying much attention to the other. I continued to doze in and out of awareness while he occupied himself with increasingly pointless tasks, clearly looking for any excuse to stay in the room.

He finally broke the silence as he picked up and studied the sword I’d earned from the Ocean Marr’s trial—which Kelas had begrudgingly collected and presented me with before we’d left the shoreline.

“They’ve subjected you to too much, too quickly,” Dravyn said. “Which shouldn’t have come as a surprise; the other courtswantyou to fail, and meto fail, by extension.”

“Why?”

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