My father used to tell me that once begun, a battle was a living thing and no one could control it.
She waited. Sometimes silence kept people talking. Sometimes if they talked enough, they wouldn’t notice when you didn’t.
You cannot outrun fate.
Too often, people acted like her curves were some engraved invitation.
I want to scream at him! Do you know how hard it is to always keep your head down? To swallow insults and endure outright threats? And yet I have done so. I thought it proved my toughness. I thought if you saw I could take whatever came at me and still smile, you would see that I was worthy.
What I want is him back, him standing beside me, him laughing at all this. I would settle for even his worst self, his cruellest trickster self, if only he could be here.
The universe belongs to the curious.
He had begged for the heart of stone, but for the first time, he felt the weight of it in his chest.
Nothing he says is a lie, but all his words are riddles.
The ferns are silvery in the moonlight, the woods full of shifting shadows.
Madoc seemed like the sort to roast him over a fire, consume his flesh, and call it love. By then, I had become familiar with love of that kind.
I wanted to show you that you could trust me, that you didn’t need to give me orders for me to do things. I wanted to show you that I believed you’d thought it all through. But that’s no way to rule. And it’s not really even trust, when someone can order you to do it anyway.
How appropriate to have my tongue cut out, when silence has been my refuge and my cage.
It feels a bit like expecting a proposal of marriage, only to get offered the role of mistress.
Well, wife,′ he says to me, a chill in his voice. ‘It seems you have kept at least one secret from your dowry.
A king is not his throne nor his crown.
I don’t feel calm at all. I am a maelstrom of emotions. All I want to do is scream.
She’s going to want to wear your skull for a hat,′ Oak warns. There is an uncomfortable shifting among the ex-falcons. Perhaps they are recalling their own choice to denounce her, their own punishment. ‘And Cardan is going to laugh and laugh when she does.
I only know how to be cruel or to laugh when I am discomposed.
I feel the stitches holding me together as though I am a rag doll with stuffing trying to leak out.