More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He was my batman in the war, and now served as a combination valet, groom, and voice of reason. I inherited him from my father, along with my chin, my hair color, and my cast-iron liver.
Fleshy stems, thin white threads growing through the staring eye of a hare …
(Technically, as a sworn soldier, the entire estate was left to me, as my father’d had no sons.
Narrator Is a she
He had kept bringing me tea while I was staring at the snow. Days’ and weeks’ worth of tea. The fighting had only lasted two weeks, and I spent nearly twice that staring at the snow, drinking tea.
??what does this mean?
“I’m not exactly a man,”
“As far as English propriety is concerned, a sworn soldier is not a respectable guardian of virtue.”
listening while something huge walked overhead.
“The Devil overlook you, sir,”
Look up meaning ???
I couldn’t explain what it had meant, when I sat there staring at the snow for a month straight with my mouth full of ashes and my head full of dead men, that the tea was always there and always hot.
This is what it means. codrin helped take care of easton when wounded at war
“Inflammation of the lungs,” she snapped, biting off each word as if it were a curse. “That’s all it was.”
Gotta be something more to how he died. why is everyone being so weird about his death?
a moroi.”
The mare, the hag, the old woman that lives behind the woodpile?”
She believed that girls should be educated the same as boys, which was extremely helpful to me in its way.
with a shiny new set of pronouns and a rifle I had no idea how to fire.
“You think people won’t take the job because they’re afraid of this moroi creature?” I asked.
“Hag that sits on your chest and steals your breath,”
At the Usher house, I’d seen things and hadn’t had the wit to fear them until much too late.
If you have ever dealt with the possessions of the dead, you probably know what I mean. You take things away and leave behind emptiness, and everything you remove—every sheet and pillowcase, every lost sock and old razor—erases a little bit of the dead person’s footprint in the
“Please, I beg of you. Do not tell me that there is fungus all around us. Do not remind me about spores in the water or myceli—myce—mushroom bits in the air. I cannot bear it. If you absolutely must tell me about an exciting mushroom, please start by telling me that it cannot possibly infect me or grow over me or poison me or … well, you know.”
Perhaps it was easier when you were a mycologist and saw the whole world in shades of fungi, and could easily differentiate between those that went into an omelet and those that consumed dead women’s brains.
They mostly don’t hand those out for being brave, just for being too foolish to run away.”
gouged the mushroom in its nasty pinkish cap. It immediately began to bleed.
“The common name is ‘bleeding bonnets
“They grow where the familiar sits.” Angus translated this for Miss Potter. “Like a witch’s familiar, he means.”
“It’s just a mushroom, Bors. We don’t need to go buying deceased cats.”
God, in my experience, is more likely to be found in gutters and at the bottom of dirty trenches than in designated architecture,
As difficult as it is to read Angus’s emotions, I am fairly certain that he lost the remainder of his heart to Miss Potter in that instant.
“A demon that comes in while you sleep and crouches atop your chest, stealing the breath from your lungs.”
Though the moroi, she is always female. She is often supposed to be like a werewolf, too, in that sometimes she is a living person who goes about at night.”
“Into a moth, if the stories are to be believed.”
(Not something I experience personally, you understand, but you don’t live among soldiers who
have their own slimy earthtongues popping up occasionally without getting a pretty good notion.)
Sometimes it is even said that the moroi is the ghost of an unbaptized child or one stillborn, still trying to draw its first breath.”
“Iron under your pillow wards off evil.”
I sometimes think the fundamental disconnect with civilians is that they think a war is an event, something neatly bounded on either end by dates. What anyone who’s lived through one can tell you is that it’s actually a place. You’re there and then you leave, but places don’t stop existing just because you aren’t looking at them.
It’s a place I go to, even if nobody else can see that I’ve gone.
can smell it and certainly hear it, even if I can’t always see it.
well-meaning people who try to comfort you by telling you that everything’s okay, you’re home now, and the war’s over, as
We all realized long ago that we’re
dual citizens now, that we come from two different places. Gallacia. And the war.
I followed the bar of light to the woman who sat on the side of my bed, watching me.
She seemed familiar too, didn’t she?
groped around until I found the handkerchief and, deeply annoyed with myself, shoved it back into the keyhole.
“World’s a big place. I figure some bits just get overlooked sometimes. Like God goes around sweeping things up but He misses a corner now and again.”
“It was the woman with the broken face.”
You put the running water between the moroi and her body.
Then her face tore apart.
The lower half of her face swayed back and forth, the curve of the
smile trembling like a leaf in an autumn wind.
