Flame and Sparrow by S.M. Gaither

Author:S.M. Gaither [Gaither, S.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

Another two days passed. I kept waiting for the God of Fire to lose his patience and call me back. For his fiery eagle form to swoop down from the clouds, snatch me up in his talons and carry me off. To steal me away, as all of my kind believed he’d done last time.

He never came.

I had mixed feelings about this. It would have been easier if he’d behaved as expected—a monster doing monstrous things, leaving me with no choice but to keep making plans to slay him.

Instead, I was allowed to linger in the mortal realm, to finish healing. To plot my next steps.

Each day, Andrel and Cillian came up with new theories and shared more thoughts about what those next steps should be. More experimental weapons appeared in our home. And as afternoon on the second day eased toward evening, visitors began to arrive—some I recognized, many I didn’t.

They were all coming to see me.

To speak with their living martyr, as Cillian had called me. Because word was spreading faster than ever; I was the warrior who had walked among our greatest enemies, survived them, tricked them into letting me come back.

Now they all wanted to know what I would do next.

I had a chance to rally and lift up my kind like never before. To give them hope. Encourage them to rise. To finish what my sister had started, which was the greatest vengeance possible for her death. It might not have been unfolding as I’d envisioned, but it was unfolding. Rapidly.

As the last rays of sunlight disappeared below the horizon, I was sitting in a patch of grass in the center of the eastern courtyard, studying the knife Cillian had given me and trying to prepare myself for the meeting with all our visitors.

My ears twitched at the sound of a familiar gait approaching—Andrel. He greeted me with a smile, his gaze snagging on the blade I held.

Cillian had looked at it as though it was food to fill his starving stomach. Andrel regarded it with a different kind of hunger, I thought; like a king looked at a territory he intended to conquer.

“Cillian’s filled you in on all of the ones who will be here tonight, I assume?” he asked. “All the questions and topics to be discussed?”

I nodded. There had been comprehensive notes, arranged in the way he knew I would prefer. He’d spared no details. I had all the facts. I could recite them, study them to my heart’s content…all the things I always did. All the things that usually made me feel calm and in control.

They weren’t helping me today.

I felt like my world was spinning, even as I put the knife aside and dug my claws into the soft earth.

“He’s been so excited about all these experiments and breakthroughs that he’s barely slept over the past weeks,” Andrel commented, sitting down.

“Sounds like typical Cillian to me.”

He gave me a crooked grin before tucking his arms behind his head and laying back on the grass.

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