Days of Blood & Starlight (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #2)

by Laini Taylor

“Good girl.”

fuck off

Subdued. What a gentle word for the slave-making and spirit-crushing that had brought the chimaera under the Empire’s fist.

was friendlier to her face than most. Which of course made her totally suspect.

It was such an incongruous sight, the predator cradling the prey, that Sveva could only blink and feel that she’d hit the stony bottom of her own shallow depths.

What ill luck, then, to live in the time of failed safety!

It was the worst kind of silence, but a good kind of closeness. These weren’t her folk, but… they were, and maybe that meant that anyone could be anyone’s, which was a sort of nice thing to think, with the world falling apart.

What can a soldier do when mercy is treason, and he is alone in it?

but in these days of blood, there was no luxury of choice. Death ruled them all.

“As long as you’re alive, there’s always a chance things will get better.” “Or worse,” said Liraz. “Yes,” he conceded. “Usually worse.”

Mercy breeds mercy as slaughter breeds slaughter. We can’t expect the world to be better than we make it.”

“Do you want to know how I really got it?” “No, thank you. I’m this close to believing my own version.”

kata

a system of individual training exercises for practitioners of karate and other martial arts.

scree.

Light coursed through Karou and darkness chased it—burning through her, chilling her, shimmer and shadow, ice and fire, blood and starlight, rushing, roaring, filling her. Shock and disbelief. And rancor. And rage.

Karou understood that what she was fighting was familiarity—familiarity of a magnitude that was a profound kind of recognition. This was Akiva, and the recognition had been there even when he was a stranger,

“I came to find the new resurrectionist. I didn’t know that it was… you.”

That would always be true; there would always be both kinds of soldiers. How was he to find the good, recruit them, trust them to secrecy while he went about the slow and scraping work of building a rebellion?

Her shame had kept her from trying. She saw that now; she’d believed she deserved their contempt.

Nothing made you feel so useless as another person’s grief.

That was a rare commodity, and Karou hadn’t brought it—he raised a glass to the five new revenants.

“Let’s hope so,” said Liraz, her voice sharp. “Because the alternative is that he suspects you.”

And what am I? She didn’t know. Stone? Steel? Black hands and muscles too tense for laughter?

scree

a mass of small loose stones that form or cover a slope on a mountain.

One world on its own is a strange enough seethe of coiling, unknowable veins of intention and chance, but two? Where two worlds mingle breath through rips in the sky, the strange becomes stranger, and many things may come to pass that few imaginations could encompass.