Page 165 of Flame and Sparrow

With the roar of Dravyn’s voice came a roar of intense, eye-waveringly bright power. Flames filled the hallway. They were everywhere, just as they’d been on the day we met. Still not burning me, somehow, even as they destroyed everything else—scorching walls, singeing rugs, melting paintings right in their frames.

When the fires finally dissipated, the Death Marr was gone.

His dead servant-beast remained, its body now charred, little more than a withered husk. The God of Fire stared at it for a moment longer before kneeling to pick up the knife beside it, taking care to avoid touching the blade, which still festered with black energy. His expression was unreadable as he turned to face me.

I wanted his fury.

I wanted his fires to come back, and I wanted them to burn me to ashes.

I wanted anything except for the quiet hurt and uncertainty in his voice as he said, “What is this? And why do you have it?”

I swallowed, trying to clear away the intense dryness in my throat. I knew what to say. I had decided I was going to tell him the truth. This was not how I’d planned to do it—but my decision remained unchanged. It was now or never.

“It’s…it’s what Zachar said it was,” I told him. “A weapon created by the ones I considered my allies. I think it’s how they killed his beast, as he said, and they wanted me to bring it here, to test it and see what else I might be able to learn. What other kinds of weapons we might create and I….I meant to tell you before, I just…” I trailed off, feeling like I was rambling, wishing he would say something, anything in response.

He was silent at first.

I stared at the scorched ground between us as I scrambled for something else to say, something that would make this look better than it did until, finally, he spoke.

“So I was wrong.”

I lifted my eyes to his still guarded, unreadable face.

“You’re exactly like your sister. I wasn’t giving you enough credit before, was I?” He took a step back from me, as though I was infected with some horrible disease he didn’t want to catch. “You’re no pawn—you knew exactly what you were doing.”

Months ago, being told I was like my sister would have been the greatest compliment I could have hoped for.

Now, it felt like he’d taken that knife in his hand and stabbed it directly into my heart.

“I’m not her. It isn’t like that.”

“This magic, this backwards, disgusting, corruptedpower…is this the same power that’s been threatening our borders?”

“I don’t know, I was never told, I just—”

“Do you realize what this sort of thing could do, not only to this realm, but to all the realms connected to it? Do you even care? Or are you just like the rest of your kind? Rebellious, selfish,fools.”

Your kind.

I’d been called by much worse slurs throughout my life, but to hear him say it, and with such disgust…it stung more painfully than any insult I could remember.

But I’d gotten my wish. Here it was—the anger. The hallway was filling with heat that was making it hard to breathe, and I wasn’t sure whether to sigh in relief or cower at the furious power building around him.

“If the one I serve discovers this treachery,” he snapped, “then you will be dead before you can take another breath.” His gaze flew to the window.

The Death Marr was long gone, not even a trace of his shadows lingering.

I think we both realized, at the same harrowing moment, where that god would likely go next—assuming he hadn’t been there already.

Did that cursed middle-god know of the divine water I’d hidden, too? Had he made the connection between the weapon I already had and the grander ones my kind wanted to build? The ones they had sent me to gather materials for?

The evidence against me was damning enough, and if his shadows had penetrated deeply enough to see more of what I knew, more of what I’d originally planned, and he told those things to the God of the Shade…

A muscle worked in Dravyn’s jaw. His eyes were dark and calculating, anguish occasionally flickering in place of his anger.

I knew what he was going to say next.

I desperately tried to think of something else I could say, something that could fix this, but nothing seemed like enough.

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