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Robert had dealt with fire-breathers before—some of the common house-dragons could give you a painful singe when cornered, along with a mildly venomous nip. But diving for cover as a white-hot flame sizzled between his hair and his hat… this was terror, this was bowel and bladder and legs all turning to water together, this was abandoning all concern for any other person in the world. This was the moment when Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax, eighteen years old, realized that he really was going to die.
my mother—she always tells me that the goddess Vardis put the soul of a hero into me at my birth. But she doesn’t know very much about heroes, and maybe Vardis doesn’t either.”
“My mother, sometimes she says that everybody in the world is a donkey with the heart of a lion. Everybody. Only most people don’t ever discover it—they don’t have to, they get along all right just being donkeys. But it’s there, always, if you really need it. If you really want to find it. If you look for it.
She had never in her life understood the word heartbreak, for all that she had used it as freely as anyone; now she learned that it was not in truth a cracking, but a rending, and not as neat as a simple, tidy split, but a mess of bloody ribbons. She felt it go in her breast, and wept with the pain.
