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

by Daniel Abraham

cold rain tapped at the shutters like a hundred polite mice asking permission to enter.

“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.”

He thought of his own children: Eiah, Danat, and even long-dead Nayiit. 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.

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.