Page 7 of Flame and Sparrow

I nodded, my gaze lingering over the unconscious men for a minute longer before searching for something else to focus on. “You missed two others, by the way,” I said, nodding toward the temple.

“Did I?” He smiled without taking his eyes off his nails.

Understanding shivered through me. “You used a different poison on them?” My voice cracked a bit, my throat suddenly dry. “Wolfweed?”

He yawned. “I imagine it’s started to work by this point.”

Five deaths.

Wolfweed worked differently compared to the kastor-blossom’s poison…more slowly. And though it fully paralyzed limbs, it usually left the brain alone. The two humans I’d heard inside the temple wouldn’t be rendered unconscious the way the three guards under the arch had been. They would be awake to see their deaths falling toward them, but unable to do anything about it…except scream, perhaps.

I shook the image from my thoughts and kept moving, pacing the grounds and resisting the urge to pick at the burn scars on my face.

It seemed barbaric, but the gods we were dealing with were capable of far more brutality than anything we could dream up.

Eventually, the humans would thank us for these kinds of barbaricbut necessary demonstrations, for our role in driving the gods away. This realm would be much better off if the once-powerful elven houses ruled it once more—a point our ancestors had tried to make diplomatically, only to be ignored.

My pacing came to a stop at one of the centerpieces of the immaculate grounds: a towering marble statue of a beautiful male deity. Slender hounds with fire-wrapped bodies curled around his feet. A symbol was etched into the pedestal beneath him, one shaped like a twisted burst of flame.

So this was him—the middle-god of Fire and Forging. The one this new temple was meant to be dedicated to during the upcoming Feast of the Shade celebration.Dra’ Zerachiel, my kind called him. The humans called himDravyn.

What a shame his temple would be in ruins by the time he arrived.

Maybe he would be so offended by this that he wouldn’t even bother to come.

One could hope.

“Ugly brute, isn’t he?” Andrel said, casting an indifferent glance toward the statue before turning his attention back to his nails.

I nodded, even though I didn’t agree. In truth, it took me a long moment to stop circling the god and pry my eyes away from him. The sculptor had clearly been in love with her subject matter; it showed in the powerful lines of his muscles, in the elegant posture of his body, in the lifelike rendering of his arrogant smile.

But there was a very good chance this statue looked nothing like the actual God of Fire—and we wouldn’t know, even if it did.

He was one of the Marr—the middle-gods who directly served the world’s three upper-gods, the Creators—but he was still relatively young, and not one of the original deities who’d held that position. He had ascended to divine status only a short time ago, and I wasn’t aware of any clear, credible sightings of him in this realm.

But like all of the Marr, he’d been mortal once.

This was partly how the upper-gods tricked humans into such blind devotion: by making them believe they were more connected to the divine than they actually were. They used the Marr as their servants in this realm to try and bridge the space between them and mortals. Those Marr even blessed some humans with trace amounts of magic, further quieting any skeptics that might arise—an act that simultaneously filled this realm with more divine magic, giving them a current of energy to feed off of, thus continuing their cycle of power and dominance.

The truth was that whatever humanity the middle-gods possessed was stripped from them the moment they ascended; there was evidence of this everywhere, if one only bothered to look.

The chaos accompanying the Fire God’s very ascension was well-documented, even—mountains roaring to life and spewing molten rock, wildfires raging across the lands, clouds of smoke blotting out the sun for weeks. Plenty of fragile humans had perished during the turmoil, and speculation about how powerful this new middle-god must have been to create such carnage still made for conversation fodder to this very day.

But they spoke of the carnage in awed tones rather than fearful ones, so eager to see themselves in the divine that they willingly overlooked the beastly parts.

Hence the statue before me being shaped as a mortal—albeit one whose beauty was arguably inhuman.

“I wonder how long it will be before that ugly face makes an appearance in this realm?” I don’t know why I voiced the thought aloud. Or why I was once again staring at the stone likeness of the god, or why my mind seemed determined to try and imagine a living, breathing, more colorful version of him.

Andrel sauntered closer, sparing another glance at the massive statue before shrugging. “At the rate these temples are being built, it’s only a matter of time.”

This fire god was so new to the role that he didn’t have divine servants chosen yet—which was, of course, a major reason behind the construction of temples like the one before us: The people of Cauldra wanted to draw him into their city in hopes that he’d choose one of them.

It was the last rung on the divine hierarchy ladder, and they hoped to climb it. The Marr served the Moraki, but the Marr had direct servants as well—the Miratar, or the lesser-spirits, as they were usually called. But they were still divine, despite beinglesser, still powerful and able to walk in the immortal realms alongside the gods.

And so many humans believed they were just one prayer, one ritual, one temple dedication away from the honor. So many willing slaves, so eager to sell their souls and safety for a chance to more completely bind themselves to the divine…

The thought made me sick.

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