Page 217 of Flame and Sparrow

I couldn’t speak.

I couldn’t move.

I was vaguely aware of the rocks jabbing into my back. Of the sunlight glaring into my eyes. Of Andrel kneeling beside me.

“I’m so sorry…” he said, smoothing sweat-soaked hair away from my face, “…that you chose the wrong side.” He jerked the knife from my body, causing another white-hot flash of pain and a brief fountain of blood.

The sunlight above me seemed to dim.

I tried for a deep breath but ended up choking, coughing hard, the force of each exhale squeezing my blood out even faster.

My vision blacked out for a moment. When it returned, Andrel was still there, the knife twisting back and forth in his hands. “Your sister will be so disappointed when I tell her what’s become of you,” he said.

The meaning behind his words was lost somewhere beyond the agonizing pain and the disassociation I felt—like a cliff’s edge just beyond the reach of my outstretched hand. I tried to hook my claws into it, but in the end my fingertips couldn’t catch anything, and I fell once more into blackness.

When I managed to blink back into awareness one last time, he was gone.

I was alone, sprawled out, blood streaming over my chest.

My hand fumbled over my wound. I was feeling for the full extent of the damage, expecting my soft, foolish heart to be fully exposed and falling right out of my chest.

Instead, I found steel.

The metal flask containing the water of Melithra was still tucked into my coat’s inner pocket, just below the spot I’d been stabbed. I took it out with a shaking hand and unscrewed its lid. I had no sensation left in my fingers, but I felt the lid falling, heard it hit the ground,ting ting tingagainst the rocks as it bounced away.

As the sound of it faded, so did all others.

I could think of almost nothing beyond my pain, but the Tower Keeper’s words came back to me in a rush, somehow still perfectly clear in the silence.

Its waters have the power to completely transform you with merely a sip.

I gritted my teeth against the pain, the hopelessness. I hadalreadytransformed my heart and my mind, yet I had still met my end in a rush of blood and fury and vengeance, just as I’d always expected I would. Nothing had changed.

The sun seemed very far away.

I closed my eyes, letting it go—prepared to leteverythinggo.

But then I somehow found the strength to lift the water to my lips, and I drank.

Chapter58

The sunand its warmth left me completely, and the darkness that followed persisted for what felt like a lifetime.

I was certain I was dead. That my punishment for my mistakes, for all the destruction I’d caused, was an eternity of this void I’d landed in.

But then, little by little, I became aware of sounds—the trickle of water. The whisper of breaths. The flutter of wings.

Then came scents. Stone, and mud, and something bittersweet that I couldn’t place.

I felt my hand move. As before, it was reflexively searching, feeling for the gaping wound on my chest. I no longer felt blood—dried or otherwise—on my clothing or skin. But the evidence of Andrel’s knife stretched across my heart in the form of a large scar.

“Yes, it’s still there,” said a quiet but powerful male voice.

My fingers reached next for the burn scars on my face.

“So are they.”

I wasn’t certain I was dead any longer.

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