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“Things change so quickly,” she said, “and so completely.” “They don’t, m’lady,” Vincen said, taking her hand. He kissed the knuckle of her thumb. “Only the stories we tell about them do.”
And really, what else was there to do about it? If there was a magic for erasing the cruelties of the world, Geder had never found it.
He hadn’t made himself smile in weeks. Not since the day he’d ridden into Suddapal. There was no one in the world who could have coaxed him to feign happiness except Aster, and the pretense carried perhaps a thin version of the truth with it. His gaiety was a loose scab on a festered cut, but it was in place for now. And if he wasn’t whole, he was able to pretend he was. That had to be enough.
The joy in her performance only seemed artificial to him because he had seen her joy unfeigned.
Fallen, she been what each of these women needed.
Speculation is the art of thinking where no evidence is available.
It is for this reason that speculation is also the natural realm of tolerance, for judgment demands evidence, and it follows that the absence of evidence which forms the core of speculation requires the absence of judgment.
They might be wastes time and of effort
laughter bubbling out of with the words.
Komme,
Yardem grunted, his ears turning back they way they did when he was being polite.
and riding into toward the port,
Jorey Kalliem
It was lovely. That it could not last made it more so.
The profound moment appeared silently and with no fanfare. It cleared its throat, almost in apology, and between one breath and the next changed Cithrin forever. She didn’t catch her breath, didn’t shout. There was no feeling of exultation that demanded it. The sick chaos that she called her mind resolved like a choir lost in pandemonium suddenly finding a chord. Though she had not been asleep, she woke.
It was where, as a young man, Lord Ternigan and Lord Caot had
to fight against the Feldin Maas’s mercenary showfighters
The distance between herself and the soldiers was a social fiction, and like all social fictions terribly important.
She and Jorey pretended they were in two separate journeys that happened, as if by happy coincidence, to overlap for a time. And perhaps that was true. Perhaps that was the metaphor for being a mother to a son. It left her feeling soft and calm and only a little melancholy to think so.
“You’re getting damp.” “Not very much so,” she said. “And besides, my alternative is to huddle in a tent as if a little water would melt me. I’m too old for that kind of pretense.” “Not too old for the pretense of being old,” he said.
“It is rude, you know, to dissect a woman’s story of herself before lunch.”
Everything had a cost. Cithrin knew that the way she knew her own body. It was simply the way the world was built. Even an apple given freely had to be carried or eaten or thrown away at the risk of offending the giver. A word kindly given cost the time it took to respond and to think afterward whether it had been truly meant.
The king’s gaze flickered to from Cithrin to Kit and back to Cithrin.
It wasn’t that there was hope. It was better than hope. It was certainty.
“You cannot go,” she said. “And there is no one else that I trust.”
If wouldn’t have been enough to get her back anyway.
almost as it they were back
