Page 159 of Flame and Sparrow

If there was a coward between us, it was me, not him.

I kept my hand in his, determined not to let the coward inside of me win. Finally, I managed to speak again. “Can we go for a walk?”

He smiled as he rose to his feet—the roguish, almost playful smile that I so rarely got to see. “We can go anywhere you like.”

Not anywhere,I thought, holding in a sigh.Because the place I’d like to go doesn’t exist.

A place where the wars between our kind had never happened, where we were all equal, where both our siblings were still alive… It didn’t exist, but we walked hand-in-hand as if on our way to it just the same.

We strolled from the palace grounds and into the hills beyond. After climbing a particularly steep slope, we found ourselves facing an impressive view. The grass tickling my ankles was soft as velvet, the air teemed with magical energy, and the indigo sky seemed to stretch on for an eternity. I tilted my head back, frowning slightly, struck again by the difference between the skies of our respective worlds.

“What is it?”

“It’s still strange to not see stars when I look up.” I pulled my gaze back down to his. “I’m not complaining, of course. You gave me a kind of sun, after all—the forgelight is more than enough.”

He considered my words for a moment before slipping his hand from mine, a mischievous glint in his eyes. He stayed on the peak of the hill but put some space between us, summoning fire into his palms as he walked away.

As I watched, huddling against the cold, he started to hurl handfuls of flame into the sky.

The fireballs scattered as they flew upwards, breaking into droplets that moved more like liquid than fire until they were mere dots against the vast sky—about the size of distant stars—at which point they fixed in place. Over and over he did this, until there were more fiery stars hanging in the sky than I could count.

Then he lifted his hand, made a sweeping gesture, and all at once the points flared brighter, bursting into bright shades of orange and red and white.

They stayed in place and continued to sparkle even after he lowered his hand and turned his attention back to me.

“Not exactlystars,” he mused, strolling to my side. “But the best I could do on short notice.”

I stared up at them, spinning in a slow circle, mouth agape as I tried to take in all their beauty at once. “I’ll settle for them,” I said with a soft, mesmerized little laugh.

I continued to marvel at the scene above me for several minutes. When I finally lowered my gaze, Dravyn was watching me with the faintest hint of a smile on his lips.

“Are all the gods such show-offs?” I asked with a wry grin.

“Yes,” he said. “But I’m one of the worst.”

Another quiet laugh escaped me, turning breathy as he closed the remaining distance between us, wrapping me in a loose embrace and planting a kiss on my forehead. I tucked my head against his collarbone, he rested his chin against me, and we stood like that long enough to make me forget the rest of the world.

My heart thumped, fast but steady. My hands splayed against his hard chest, bracing for balance. I kept watching the stars. One occasionally fell from its fixed point, but even the fall seemed beautifully choreographed, sparks and smoke trailing in a vibrant, spiraling pattern as it plummeted to the ground.

And as I watched the streaks of falling firelight, suddenly there were no doubts left in my mind about what I was supposed to do.

Chapter43

I couldn’t becomewhat my sister had been.

I wouldn’t be the pawn my kind insisted on, the rebel they needed, the martyr they wanted.

Instead, I would take the knife hidden in my closet and bury it as deeply as I could into the earth. I would tell Dravyn everything, and I would stay here—this was the side I would choose, and that crack between my worlds could split as wide as it wanted to. I would leap to this divine side and, somehow, I would find a way to stay here.

With him.

I’d wanted to burn with him before. Now I realized I wanted to build with him, too. I wanted to melt the broken pieces of both our worlds and all our wars down and shape them into something new.

I leaned back so I could see his face, ready to declare all of these things in that very moment, but I stopped short as I noticed his quiet smile had given way to a much more serious expression.

“Is something wrong?”

“No.” He took a step back, hand falling over mine and grasping it tightly as he said, “But I think we should talk about what happened the other day.”

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