The Familiar

by Leigh Bardugo

When she’d left her parents’ home it had been with all the pomp of a wardrobe being moved to a different wall.

She hoped that Marius was right, that it wasn’t beauty life required, but will.

“I can’t remain as I am,” she managed. “My back is already twisting from the weight of water and washing and baskets full of apples. I’m growing old before I’ve had the chance to be young.”

men have a gift for finding new ways to make women suffer.

Had she thought fear made life interesting? Well, she hadn’t really known fear, had she? She had tasted spice and found it pleasing. Now she was chewing the pepper, seeds and all.

Wishes granted were rarely the gifts they seemed.

Language creates possibility. Sometimes by being used. Sometimes by being kept secret.

He had always feared death more than he resented this unrelenting life.

His injuries were painful, but pain held no real interest for him. He knew it would stop. He knew death wasn’t coming. Pain without fear was easy to bear.

These were the ways women entered the body, through the kitchen, through the nursery, their hands in your bed, your clothes, your hair. There was danger in such trust, and a wise man learned to respect the women who tended to his home and heirs.

“Is he cruel to you? Has he hurt you?” “He is a man and so the answer must be yes.”

“What does a beetle think of the boot that crushes it? It is a very excellent boot with a most impressive sole and made of the finest leather.”

“You are quite mad,” he said. “One has to get through the day somehow.”

“Do you? I know what it is to lower yourself, to keep your eyes downcast, to seek invisibility. It is a danger to become nothing. You hope no one will look, and so one day when you go to find yourself, only dust remains, ground down to nothing from sheer neglect.”

She had never known a minute or an hour when there wasn’t some task to be done.

“I was sick because this life has made me so. Because it drains me and bores me, but I still cling to it as a child to his mother’s hand. After all these years of sorrow, I want to live.”

the young and fortunate believe they will always be so.

How was she to sort love from desire? It was like planting sage beside foxglove, trying to separate the leaves when the plants were still new. Both were a kind of medicine if only you knew which was which.

The rat didn’t dream of the ocean, not if it wanted to survive the cat.

For all the miseries of this world, you don’t want to leave it.

But the grim truth was that love or the lack of it made no difference. A servant did the washing and stoked the fire and scrubbed the floors and carried the water up the stairs. What she felt when she was doing it mattered to no one.

No, she wasn’t going to lose her tongue or her life to fear today.

A life lived hungry could lead you to eat from anyone’s hand. She would have fed greedily and never recognized the taste of poison.

“People forget the work it takes to make wine. They drink it down and wonder why the cup is empty.”

There are different kinds of suffering, Valentina thought. The kind that takes you by surprise and the kind you live with so long, you stop noticing it.

He kisses her fingers, and combs her hair, and he treasures her, as only a man who has lost his luck and found it once more ever can.