Page 35 of Flame and Sparrow

Gasps and whispers broke out all around me.

Cillian looked as if he might be sick.

I couldn’t say I didn’t deserve the skeptical and sickened, disapproving looks shot my way—particularly after the risks they’d all gone to in order to save me. It was the most basic of survival rules among our kind, whether we counted ourselves among the rebels or not:Don’t trust the gods or any of their monsters.

Thedon’t make deals with thempart was, of course, implied.

The only person notlooking at me like I was a fool—or some sort of delinquent child—was Andrel. He remained quiet, still staring at the sky with a thoughtful frown on his face.

“What kind of deal did you make?” Saphiel asked.

I made my voice hard and unflinching despite the doubts trying to gnaw their way into my mind. “The kind that will get me close enough to the gods to destroy them from the inside out,” I said.

Another round of gasps and whispers. Skeptical, amused, afraid—the tones I caught ran the gamut of emotions; it was hard to pick out a specific one from the flurry of noise.

I continued to recount the deal and all the plans I had made in that desperate moment.

Each word fell like a hammer stroke upon my old life, pounding away until it was entirely shattered. Nothing could truly go back to the way it had been before this moment. Even if I put the pieces back, the cracks between them would still be visible, diffusing a different sort of light over everything I’d known.

As my explanations trailed off, the whispers returned, louder and more urgent than before.

“Are you crazy?” Cillian asked, tilting toward me, his voice low and just between us. “I can’t let you do this.”

Guilt and fear coated my throat, too thick to swallow, but I somehow pushed a response out. “It’s done, Cillian. I have to see it through; the mark isn’t going to just go away.”

“And apparently it knows when you start talking shit about the gods,” Saphiel mused, poking at the mark in question, which still shimmered a bit around the edges. “It seemed to react whenever you raised your voice against them.”

I shivered at the thought of the brutish Fire God listening in on this conversation. “Just a coincidence, I hope.”

“Terribly unsettling, otherwise,” said Saphiel—a vast understatement.

I wondered again at what I’d truly gotten myself into, but I refused to dwell on it. Not here. Not now. The crowd around me would not see my doubts if I could help it. My sister wouldn’t have shown any doubt; she would have been rallying them to the point of wanting to join her on a march to the divine realms or wherever else. Her shadow stretched longest in moments like this, making me more determined than ever to carry her weight without collapsing.

“Whatever becomes of the mark and the bargain, we’ll see it through, as she said.” Andrel’s sudden voice was quiet yet commanding in the whisper-filled grove.

He was no longer looking at the grey sky; he was back to studying me, a strange emotion I couldn’t name shining in his eyes. “I believe we should go to Hael, as Saphiel suggested, and plot our next moves from there. We need to get away from this city and its lingering unrest above everything else.”

I nodded, grateful for the way his voice had pulled stares away from me.

Feeling a touch lighter, I breathed in deep and let my gaze wander back in the direction of Cauldra. The city was located in a valley along the Laton River; we were high above it now, and though trees blocked much of my view, I could still make out a few smog-veiled buildings.

I’d escaped.

Logically, I knew this.

But the heat on my skin and the smoke in my hair still made me feel as if I was burning, and I was beginning to wonder if the feeling would ever go away.

* * *

We traveled to Hael,as planned, and I spent the next several days preparing for…well, I didn’t exactly know what.

How did one ready themselves to face the gods?

I’ll send for you, he’d said.

Then what?

I needed a plan beyond whatever he had in mind as part of my indoctrination as his potential servant, and I hated—absolutelyloathed—that I couldn’t map things out with any sort of certainty.

---