All This Twisted Glory (This Woven Kingdom, #3)

by Tahereh Mafi

“Are you implying that I’m vain?” “I’m not implying it, Kamran. I’m delivering the statement to you directly.”

Omid and Miss Huda promptly dissolved into gales of laughter, delighted to have nearly killed themselves with stupidity.

He knew now that she was so far above him he wasn’t even worthy of standing in her shadow.

God, he’d wanted her. He’d wanted her with an all-consuming thirst, with the desperation of a man waiting to die.

It was the kind of contradiction she often felt repeated in herself: that she was both useless and powerful; unimportant and essential.

Fate, he thought bitterly, was only romantic when one was destined to be the hero.

“They should learn to hold their tongues,” Kamran snapped. “They talk too much. All of them.” Hazan, too reasonable to deny a proven fact, only sighed in response.

Kamran almost choked. As if Alizeh’s otherworldly beauty could ever be threatened by Huda, who continued to resemble an egg swaddled in the implausible scramble of its own yolk.

He feared that if he allowed himself the indulgence of rolling his eyes at Huda, his eyes would eventually roll out of his head from overuse.

“I refer to your unmitigated arrogance! You expect to be king of the largest empire on earth, responsible for the countless needs and protections of innumerable citizens, and yet over and over you exercise that imperious, self-satisfied speck of a brain only in the service of yourself, putting the lives of your dependents—innocents—at risk, in order to slake the thirst of your revenge, meanwhile you needed only to ask if I would face you in a duel, for I would have readily accepted—”

Ate him up

“You do not require forgiveness. You require perspective.”

“You must not resist life when it becomes inconvenient to live. You cannot outrun fear. You should not ignore pain. You will not outlive death.”

We must allow for reflection even when we suffer. We must reach for compassion even when we triumph. If you spend your days waiting for your sorrows to end so that you might finally live”—he shook his head—“you will die an impatient man.”

“Master yourself so that you will never be mastered. Know yourself so that you might live with conviction. Live with conviction so that your steps never falter.” He paused. “The mastery of self means never fearing the consequences of doing what is right.”

“Anyway, every time something terrible happened, I’d lock myself in my room and then lock myself in my closet and then lock myself in my head, where the stupidest of all my dreams lived, and I’d imagine that one day I’d meet the dashing prince and he’d be everything good and glorious and”—she hesitated, looking suddenly haunted—“well, I suppose I thought he’d be different. Kinder than everyone else.”

Kamran turned to face her, scathing as he said, “Was my question funny to you?” She shook her head in an exaggerated motion, eyes widening in fake innocence. “Not at all, Your Highness. Nothing about you is funny. You’re a very serious prince. Everything you say is of the utmost seriousness.”

For all the frost in her veins, she’d never known this kind of fever, never felt such desperation. And he’d never even kissed her.

“You can’t lie to me forever, Cyrus. I’m going to find out the truth about you, and when I do, I promise you this: I’ll ruin him. I’ll make the devil regret the day he was born.”