Running Close to the Wind

by Alexandra Rowland

lots of people told me it was surprisingly sexy! Well, technically they said ‘unexpectedly sexual,’

Some may ask if it is better to be loved or feared, and I say: Neither. It is better to be pitied. Then people don’t expect anything of you.”

Julian did not give him any incredulous looks, just smiled at Avra with a laugh twinkling in his eyes, which was all that Avra was ever looking for in response to his outrageous remarks. So many people did not understand this about him.

Avra himself felt that while all of sex was very nice to have, his personal strengths were solidly within the first and fifth acts—that is, the flirtation and foreplay, and then the afterglow.

What does it mean that he is doing this, and why is he making it your problem? Speaking as one man to another: Ugh. Men.”

I deal with dicks all day, and then on my days off, I often want to put my feet up and not deal with any more dicks, even if they’re attached to people I love. Which is a shame, because those are the dicks I like best.” “Ah,” said Avra sagely, handing the remarkably small salami to Cat. “The dangers of making one’s hobby into a career.”

Teveri’s very smart and—and good at personal boundaries. Maybe too good at personal boundaries. Maybe sometimes a little unhealthily fixated on their personal boundaries to the point that their boundaries and their guard kind of become the same thing,

seagulls, being creatures of pure evil and insatiable, ravening greed, had learned that cakes were for eating.

Julian had somehow gotten into a particularly impassioned thread of his argument, concerning organized religion (especially state-sanctioned religion) being not an entity of holiness at all but merely a facade of playacting covering up purely imperialist motives—“We tithe to our church, because the church tells us that we must, but rather than using that money to build schools and libraries in the backcountry, or to otherwise fund learning for the masses, the great majority of it is used for the monks’ own benefit!

Abbot Symon used to say, ‘Alas, I have much yet to learn—and hurrah, I have much yet to learn! The Emperor of Heaven is generous!’

Nobody is sane. Nobody has ever been sane. Sane is fake. Sane is…” He waved to his own face. “One of those things you wear to a masked ball.”

“The king had mistreated his concubines terribly and kept them locked up, so Qarat’ash preached against segregating society by sex, because they thought that would stop what’d happened to them from happening to anyone else. They said that if we are all one under the stars, it is immoral to differentiate ourselves based on our physical forms, and that everyone should simply be a person, and thus everyone would be liberated equally. Which sounds nice enough at first, but you see how that can very quickly go to shit in the hands of the wrong people.”

“Having no money brings a whole host of problems,” Julian said. Avra could just see that he was stroking Teveri’s knuckles with his thumbs as he squeezed their hands. “But having too much money does too. It sucks your soul dry, eventually. Even a sweet-natured and well-intentioned person starts making decisions based on protecting the money rather than helping other people.