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

by Laini Taylor

Kaz made Zuzana wish that beauty were something that could be revoked for bad behavior.

“What is it about you?” she had asked him recently. “I almost never like people, even in tiny doses. But I never get tired of being with you.”

There is intimacy in pain. Anyone who has comforted a sufferer knows it—the helpless tenderness, the embrace and murmur and slow rocking together as two become one against the enemy, pain.

Older sisters could be tiresome when you just wanted to dither away a day, but they were a comfort when you found yourself fugitive in a strange forest, prey to sounds and shadows and in need of someone to tell you it would be all right.

” “I love you, crossbar,” whispered Karou, and petted it.

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.

“As long as you’re alive, there’s always a chance things will get better.”

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

Zuzana was calm, effortfully so.

The man had lifted Madrigal up, cloaked in her living shawl, and brought her back down again, and even a boy could see that there was magic between them, and more than magic.

I am a link in a chain, she thought. Their badge had it right—not in bondage but in strength. She strode between her brothers, three abreast down the center of the broad city boulevard. This is my chain.

You could look out the window today, see the sky raining fire, and say that it has all been for nothing, everything we’ve ever done, because now we’ve lost. But folk were born and lived and knew friendship and music in this city, ugly as it is, and all across this land that we fought for. Some grew old, and others were less lucky. Many bore children and raised them, and had the pleasure of making them, too, and we gave them that for as long we could. Who has ever done more, my friend?”

Her courage was a guise. She wondered if courage always was, or if there were those who truly felt no fear.

Do the thing. Kill the monster. Change the world.

“Daughter of my heart,” was the message Brimstone had sent just for Karou. She wanted to cry again right here in the court, thinking of it. “Twice-daughter, my joy. Your dream is my dream, and your name is true. You are all of our hope.”

Soul is what matters. Flesh is vessel.

Be your own place of safety,