Page 128 of Flame and Sparrow

“The third garden I asked about…” I began, gently. “Who was that for?”

He was staring at one of the flower piles I’d created, his eyes glassed over in thought.

“Dravyn?”

“You wanted to know about my ascension. Why I did it, and what happened in the days following it. And the truth is not far from whatever terrible stories you’ve heard, I imagine. Because the truth…” He finally lifted his gaze and met mine. “Is that I became the God of Fire because I wanted to burn it all down. The ones who had sent those assassins after my family. Every person those killers loved, every home they had ever had—all of it.” His fists clenched and his eyes flashed briefly with their wild, fiery glow. “And so I did.”

I straightened and took an uncertain step back, bracing a hand against the crystal behind me.

Dravyn blinked once, twice, and the wild glow faded from his gaze. “The God of the Shade came to me after the funeral. He offered me the greatest power imaginable at my weakest point imaginable, and I…I did not hesitate to take it.”

“So the garden, those markers…”

“There are two-hundred and thirty-two graves marked by the glass in that garden,” he said, confirming my worst fear. “Those are the ones whose bodies were actually found—the ones who didn’t burn entirely to ash.”

His gaze still held mine. We couldn’t seem to look away from one another.

“Ederis,” he said. “That was the largest of the towns I destroyed beyond repair. The rumors said the assassins who targeted my family had hailed from there, so that was where I went first.”

After a brief struggle, I finally found my voice. “Ederis was once a…a…”

“A predominantly elvish town.”

I knew that town—it was often referred to in rallying speeches by my kind, held up as a prime example of why the gods were monsters. Speeches that never mentioned the poisonous blades or murders we committed beforehand, of course.

The sick feeling in my gut twisted tighter.

“Ederis was a rebellious stronghold prior to my ascension,” Dravyn continued. “My family was not the first to be targeted by the extremists from that area. The upper-gods wanted the place dealt with. They offered me a chance at immortality if I proved capable of using the Fire magic granted to me, destroying what they wanted me to, and then reining my new powers in when they called me to do so. These terms…it all seemed like a fair deal at the time.”

“Two-hundred and thirty-two,” I repeated faintly.

He was silent for a long time.

“How could you do something like that?” I was trying—and failing miserably—to comprehend all the messy layers of him.

“I don’t remember most of it. Not that it makes it any better, but I was not the god you see before you now when it happened. I was a…a monster. For that first year or so, I forgot I’d even been human.”

My knees felt weak. I wanted to sink into the ground and just keep going, to fall back into my own realm, away from all my confusing thoughts and feelings.

I stared at my hands, eyes tracing the faint flame mark on my wrist, as I asked, “Why are you telling me all of this?”

“After everything we’ve been through now, it only felt…fair.”

Fair.

Except the gods were not supposed to be fair, or truthful, or remorseful about…well,anything. They raged without cause or reason, and they certainly didn’t build memorials to the things they slaughtered.

A corner of Dravyn’s mouth rose, but his voice was entirely devoid of humor as he said, “Are you thinking of smitingmenow? If only you could?”

I slowly shook my head.

It wasn’t that simple, unfortunately.

“Nothing about you fits the mold I had in my mind,” I said after a long pause. “And I just…I struggle when I can’t map things out in a way that makes sense. When I can’t follow a clean line from one point to another.”

He considered this, then quietly said, “Fire rarely follows a clean line.”

Yet another reason why this was all wrong. Whywewere all wrong, and I should have stolen Farak, raced away from the murderous god before me, and dove into the nearest waterway to take me back to my own realm. I wasn’t sure where I would go at this point, but I needed to go somewhere other than here.

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