Derring-Do for Beginners (The Red Company, #1)
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He ran home lightly through the gathering dusk along the narrow game-trails. He was familiar with their twists and turns, the places where the herons waited, the places where the marsh foxes marked their territories, the places where he had to run silently as a shadow so as not to disturb the singing frogs. It had taken him years of concentrated practice before he could pass through the game-trails without disturbing the wild animals; now it was habit. Their deep silences did not mock him; their knowledge was unwritten, their thoughts unspoken, their ways economical, gracious, beautiful. In ...more
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When she stopped sneezing she decided this was the beginning of her new life, her new self, and the new and improved Jullanar was not timid or distracted or wet. She could not do much about her appearance—various acquaintances and sisters at Madame Clancette’s had, to their credit, tried—but if she could not be as popular as Lavinia, or as smart as Maudie, or as accomplished as Nell, or as pretty as Clara, well, at least—Jullanar had decided this at some point in the past day of endless geometric fields—at least she could be a woman of character. She put her book away in the pocket of her ...more
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Men always liked talking about themselves best, she had found, every time she’d been obliged to sit and talk with one of her sisters’ suitors. And they particularly liked it if they got to do so in front of the pretty girl they liked best.
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Much like her niece, Maude Thistlethwaite did not precisely dislike her surname, but did find it both inconvenient and irritating that almost everyone found it difficult to pronounce. Unlike her niece, Maude had found this to be the case even with ostensibly well-spoken gentlemen and women from her own part of the world. She had, therefore, made the determination that she did not wish to be tied to her name, and began plotting from a very early age indeed to leave it behind. Most of her class and generation would have chosen to do this by means of marriage, but Maude had never met any man she ...more
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“Serendipity is the quality of finding something you are not looking for, and the knack of realizing you have found it when you do.”
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They spent a few minutes discussing body parts, adjectives, and a few basic phrases—he demonstrated various verbs, making her laugh several times, but never in an unpleasant way. Then, as a reward, he took her through the whole fencing routine, one move at a time, getting her to mirror his actions and correcting her. The morning passed amazingly quickly, he thought, rowing her to the Amberwells so she could admire the white swans swimming there, and then all the way to the Goldtree and back to the North Bridge, where he left his boat so they could take the road back to the city. Really, he ...more
Sue
Thanks for the belly laugh Vicky
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It was very pleasing, he thought, to hear Alezian so happy, see him so fit as well as happily plump.
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Damian waited in agony for him to finish, to articulate that secret thing that Damian was missing that everybody else had, but he did not. Instead he heard their mother say, even more quietly, with resignation worse than any anger she’d ever shown him, “I know.”
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“Not everything is about money or power,” Damian went on, gripping the table with his hands in emphasis and, perhaps, Kasiar thought, while Alezian stared in astonishment and Damian looked fiercer and more defiant by the second, because he had never disagreed so openly with his twin before. “I know that too,” Alezian muttered truculently. “You do not live it,” Damian retorted. “You say: friends are good for what they can do for you, things are good for what money they can sell for, all is valued only for their usefulness. But that is not true. Some things are good to do just because they are ...more
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He felt a sudden stab of gratitude that he had met her, this young woman who was his opposite in almost every way but for the fact that she, too, was that little bit counter to everyone else. He had known her long enough now that he didn’t think that she was ever easily in the centre of things.