Page 12 of Flame and Sparrow

I hoisted myself onto the widest of them. Arms out at my sides, I tiptoed my way over to the small section with the most stable flooring, a section jutting out so far that I could no longer see the broken-down house around it—only the sky and the marigold fields dipping and rolling away from what had once been a mighty estate.

The world was waking up, filling with birdsong, and the hills below rippled like a lake of gold as the sun slipped through the rows of flowers.

No matter how many times I took in this view, it still sent a shiver down my spine.

The gods could never see the world the way I did.

I collapsed into a pile of pillows and blankets I’d stashed in this little hideaway of mine, taking the first deep breath I’d managed since leaving Cauldra.

Images of the burning temple appeared every time I closed my eyes. A taste of smoke and bitterness lingered on my lips. My stomach rolled in protest every time I tried to swallow these things down, but I didn’t regret what we’d done last night. We hadn’t started this war, after all. The gods and their human followers had.

And more proof of their savagery was all around me.

This mansion and all the land surrounding it had once belonged to Andrel’s great-grandparents; he’d moved here himself as a young child. The House of Moreth that he belonged to had once been among the most influential of the old elvish houses, and this mansion, a centerpiece in that old world, its great halls a place for politics and social gatherings alike.

Its importance had unfortunately made it a target, too.

It had endured countless smaller attacks over the years, but none so terrible as what happened onBlood Night—the night when humans, their population soaring and their courage bolstered by the middle-gods they had embraced, laid waste to several important elvish houses through swift, calculated attacks they claimed had been guided and blessed by the gods themselves.

On that awful night, the fields of gold below me had turned crimson. One wing of the mansion—the grandest, filled with priceless art and a library full of irreplaceable books and binders full of our history—had burned beyond repair. Andrel’s grandparents, his parents, several aunts and uncles...they all had perished in the battle, along with my own grandparents, who’d been visiting at the time.

When human soldiers raided the mansion during the aftermath, stealing whatever scraps of our culture remained, Andrel had hidden deep in the tunnels that crisscrossed underneath his home and the lands around it.

They’d assumed he was dead as well.

But he’d lived.

He’d stayed hidden for weeks—nearly starving to death in the process—eventually emerging to find himself alone among a bleak and broken landscape.

Rumors of hauntings started to surround the place, and Andrel had done whatever he could to encourage people to believe them. He learned to set traps and wield various weapons, defending what was left against the few people who braved the mansion’s supposed ghosts.

Cillian had joined him some fifteen odd years ago—himself a refugee of distant but similar battles—and between the two of them, they managed to preserve at least some of the mansion. Cillian was several years older and wiser, and he came with connections to other powerful elves. Through these things, he’d helped Andrel turn the crumbling manor into a central hub of elven society once more.

My father had answered the call for one of the meetings being held there—meetings that soon turned to strategic gatherings of rebels plotting the downfall of the new gods and their followers.

Eventually, he’d brought my sister and me along to one such gathering, and this was how I’d met Andrel and Cillian, the two I now considered my only true friends: As a child with the bloody history of war at my back, snapping at my heels, pushing me violently toward them. I’d been twelve years old.

There were some who saw our meeting as fate. Three of the most powerful elvish bloodlines—what was left of them—brought together in such a way, uniting in the ruins of a tragedy… We had encouraged the rumor enough that it had become something of a modern day prophecy. We were living legends to some, and I went along with it because our kind needed hope—I couldn’t deny that.

But it was difficult to see myself as much of a savior while sleeping amongst rats and rubble.

The sun was rising above the forest in the distance, the morning growing steadily warmer. I slipped off my sister’s coat, trying to slip free of my jumbled thoughts with the motion.

I lifted my gaze to the sky, watching it brightening, igniting with a fiery show of red and orange streaks. It brought to mind erupting mountains, molten rock—all of the stories I’d heard about the God of Fire and the chaos surrounding him—and I couldn’t keep my lips from curling in disgust even though I had no one but spiders to share the scowl with.

I heard someone else making their way up the stairs. A short time later, I glanced over my shoulder and saw Cillian carefully picking his way through the rafters, nodding in greeting as he reached me. He said nothing at first, his attention drawn, as mine had been, to the explosion of color above us.

Finally, he inhaled deeply and said, “Hopefully not an omen of a certain deity on his way to seek revenge, hm?”

“Let him show his ugly face here,” I muttered, forcing my gaze to what was left of the walls around us. The show of color persisted even here, sunlight breaking through the gaps in the old wood like waves of fire pushing through cracked earth.

I dug my fingers into the itchy, worn blanket I sat upon and said, “If he could be bothered to grace this realm with his presence, I have no shortage of things I would like to say to him.”

Cillian chuckled. “How I’d love to eavesdrop onthatconversation.” Despite the light tone of his voice, a shadow of uncertainty crossed his normally bright green eyes, dulling them. They brightened again so quickly I wondered if I’d imagined it.

I wanted to believe I’d imagined it.

But the gods were not the only things looming over us this morning; my own uncertainty was at least partly due to the humans who worshipped them, too.

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