King of Thorns (Broken Empire, #2)

by Mark Lawrence

as crow flies and cripple crawls. ‘King Jorg’s castle lies a good ten miles yonder.’

I could see it in my mind’s eye. The handsome Prince with my dagger in his face, and

genealogy can work for me or I can cut down the family tree and make a battering ram.

The grey let out a long complacent fart, saving me from an answer. I always loved that horse.

Any place three nations touch will grow well given half a chance. Blood makes for rich soil.

Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.

She died in the winter of a lost year, the daughter of a wealthy man who would have given all his wealth, and more, to buy her into spring.

Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull. I would

Wounded is good. Sometimes wounded is better than dead. The wounded cause trouble. If you let them.

Brother Maical’s wisdom lies in knowing he is not clever and letting himself be led. The foolishness of mankind is that we do not do the same.

The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one … each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment.

didn’t like the sound of Moorish torturers. In fact it’s hard to put any word in front of ‘torturers’ that doesn’t sound unsettling.

my grandfather was not the locking-up sort. That meant he was either very keen on executions or that he ruled with a light touch.

But sometimes it’s easier to love someone who has flaws you can forgive in return for their forgiving yours.

In the red ruin of battle Brother Kent oft looks to have stepped from hell. Though in another life he would have tilled his fields and died abed, mourned by grandchildren, in combat Red Kent possesses a clarity that terrifies and lays waste. In all else he is a man confused by his own contradictions – a killer’s instincts married to a farmer’s soul. Not tall, not broad, but packed solid and quick, wide cheekbones, dark eyes flat with murder, bitten lips, scarred hands, thick-fingered, loyalty and the need to be loyal written through him.

Such a thorough description of a person

There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.