The Price of Spring (Long Price Quartet, #4)

by Daniel Abraham

If it were within my power, I would begin again. I would begin as a boy again, and live my life a different way.

“We’re all born to die, Most High,” Idaan said, the title sounding like an endearment in her voice. “Every love ends in parting or death. Every nation ends and every empire. Every baby born was going to die, given enough time. If being fated for destruction were enough to take the joy out of things, we’d slaughter children fresh from the womb. But we don’t. We wrap them in warm cloth and we sing to them and feed them milk as if it might all go on forever.”

They had each of them been wagers he’d placed against a cruel world. A child comes into the world, and its father holds it close and thinks, If all goes as it should, I will die first. This one, I can love and never mourn for. That was all he wanted to leave for Danat and Eiah. The chance of knowing a love that they would never be called to bury. It was the world as it was intended to be.

“It’s easy to counsel forgiveness when you aren’t the one swallowing poison. It’s harder to forgive them for having won.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing we’ve done matters. Only what we do next.”

“The past doesn’t matter,” Eiah said. “A hundred years ago or last night, it’s all just as gone.

But don’t let tomorrow steal what’s good about tonight. The future takes care of its own.

“We say that the flowers return every spring,” Danat said, “but that is a lie. It is true that the world is renewed. It is also true that that renewal comes at a price, for even if the flower grows from an ancient vine, the flowers of spring are themselves new to the world, untried and untested. “The flower that wilted last year is gone. Petals once fallen are fallen forever. Flowers do not return in the spring, rather they are replaced. It is in this difference between returned and replaced that the price of renewal is paid. “And as it is for spring flowers, so it is for us.”