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.”

Angus grunted. 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.

Not a week earlier, I had been leaning on the windowsill, the smell of fresh bread wafting up from the bakery below my apartment, listening to the sound of two coachmen fighting over a fare. They had called each other the most extraordinary names, but because they were screaming in French, it sounded like a declaration of love delivered in the heat of a grand passion. Truly, Paris was the city of my heart.

“Inflammation of the lungs,” she snapped, biting off each word as if it were a curse. “That’s all it was.” The door slammed in my face with a crack like a gunshot.

Angus had been with me since I was fourteen, with a shiny new set of pronouns and a rifle I had no idea how to fire.

Bors had a mind like a lava flow. It took a long time to get where it was going, but there was no stopping it. I quite liked him.

“The stream?” I blinked at her. “You don’t use the springhouse?” “I don’t care for it,” she snapped. “But it’s right by the back door—” “I said, I don’t care for it.” She picked up the buckets and stalked out of the kitchen.

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.

she is not living, then she must be dead. Those are widely considered to be worse, because you can block up the entrance that a live moroi enters through, but if she is a ghost, she comes by way of your dreams, and how can you block the entrance to a dream?”

That reminded me of something, but I couldn’t place it. I stared at the long, silky hairs,

“Like there’s … something heavy—” He sucked in a shallow, rattling breath. “—on my chest.”

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.

Hob did not appreciate being used to pull things. I explained to him that it was just a small rock and he explained to me that he was not a draft horse.