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Is it any wonder, then, that I became what I did? Delaunay maintains that it was ever my destiny, and perhaps he is right, but this I know is true: When Love cast me out, it was Cruelty who took pity upon me.
Blessed Elua loved me nonetheless for it. After all, what was he if not a whore’s unwanted get?
the keeping of secrets from adults is oft the only power a child may hope to possess.
“All knowledge is worth having.” I knew it by rote; if Delaunay had a motto, that was surely it.
“This I will tell you, Star of the Evening,” he said in a cold voice, bowing formally to her, the distant tone of the dromonde in his telling. “That which yields, is not always weak. Choose your victories wisely.”
Surely if we knew what bitterness fate held in store, we would shrink back in fear and let the cup of life pass us by untasted.
You’re not like the others, who are trained to it from birth, like hounds cringing under the whip for a kind touch from their master’s hand. No, you embrace the lash, but even so, there is aught in you that rebels at it. Let others plumb the depths of the former;’tis the latter that interests me.” At that, I did shudder.
The Night Court taught me to serve, and Delaunay taught me to think; but from Melisande Shahrizai, I learned how to hate.
I had thought myself Kushiel’s victim, marked out for the awful divinity of his love. It was something else, to think of myself as his weapon.
I have known the depths to which mortals are capable of descending, and I have seen the heights. I have seen how kindness and compassion may grow in the unlikeliest of places,
It is a human failing, to attribute the best of motives to those we know the least, and the worst to those we love best;
It is a strange thing, how pride may run the strongest among a people despised, as the Tsingani had been in so many lands.
