What Feasts at Night (Sworn Soldier, #2)

by T. Kingfisher

If this was a fairy tale, it was the kind where everyone gets eaten as a cautionary tale about straying into the woods, not the sentimental kind that ends with a wedding and the words, “And if they have not since died, they are living there still.”

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 world. You picture your own home being carted away, piece by piece, hopefully by loved ones and not by strangers.

Tomorrow, in my experience, is only worth worrying about when there’s something you can do about it.

Anyway, never argue with your laundress. She has subtle and terrible ways of taking her revenge.

Now, for the most part, I do not object to church. I think it’s fine for those who want it. God, in my experience, is more likely to be found in gutters and at the bottom of dirty trenches than in designated architecture, but possibly that’s just because that’s where Ha is needed. (Ha and Har are our particular Gallacian pronouns that are used only for God. When I found out that in English those are sounds associated with laughter, all I could think was, “Yeah, sounds about right.”)

The prayers of the dying on the mud of the battlefield and the pleas of the fearful hiding in cellars must surely ascend just as quickly as those uttered under the light of stained glass. More quickly, if there is justice in the universe.

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. The war’s still there. I don’t live in it anymore, but it’s right over there, just on the other side of … I don’t know.

I loathe people who assume that because they are an expert in one field, they are therefore infallible on a totally unrelated topic, merely because they gave it five minutes of thought.”