Long Live Evil (Time of Iron #1)

by Sarah Rees Brennan

She wasn’t beautiful. She looked like an angry walnut.

Everyone agreed it wasn’t about the romance, but discussed the love triangle incessantly.

Being nice was nice. Being nasty got shit done.

The Emperor loved like an apocalypse. In real life, people let you go. That was why people longed for the love from stories, love that felt more real than real love.

and cheekbones so angled they were almost hexagons.

Apparently ladies also let their minds break spectacularly under strain, leading them to give melodramatic speeches and offer to perform forbidden rituals.

Men didn’t enjoy being insulted. Emer knew this, as she insulted them often.

Rahela dropped a kiss on the viper’s head. “I’m calling you Victoria Broccoli.” Seemingly Emer’s lady had confused a viper with a lapdog.

Emer’s lady smiled. “Sorry, I’m top-heavy as a double scoop ice-cream cone over here. Where was I?”

“Don’t call us minions.” Key made a dissenting sound. It appeared he wished to be an evil minion.

An anti-hero was just a villain with good PR.

The Cobra said everybody had their own creative process. His was writing frantically, chasing art down rather than creating it.

Art is the first and last word. Art is the final consolation.”

Villains were never morning people. They had to stay sharp for midnight plotting.

Now Rae made the toast her bitch. As she munched, she schemed.

“I was electrified to hear Key say that when distressed, you call on the names of your lovers,” drawled the Cobra. “Jesus and Batman?” Holy sacrilegious misunderstanding.

The Cobra lounged so hard he was almost horizontal.

“I won’t hear Marius slandered! He’s my little cupcake who never does anything wrong.” “Well, your little cupcake kills you,” Rae snapped. “So there.”

The Cobra was a fanatic like Alice, who wouldn’t hear a word against their definitely-not-problematic fave.

Given her current chest situation, any expansion was alarming. Rae worried she might give herself an unplanned piercing.

“Cease saying ‘my lady’ in tones of dark sarcasm.” “These are the only tones I’ve got.

“How many knives do you have on your person?” “I can’t do complicated mathematics and kill ghouls at the same time.”

She fixed an expression of extreme interest on her face, as if at a party with a college guy telling her about film studies.

There was a silence. “You’re… climbing into a tomb?” “Have some sense, there are no ladies’ changing rooms! Hold my cloak.”

Ambition is wicked, and I want so much. If I want to live that makes me a monster, if I want a man that makes me the harlot of the tower, if I want a throne that makes me an evil queen. Fine. I’ll be a wonderful monster. I trust my own wickedness. I will never believe in someone else again.”

“My lady,” implored Emer. “Be calm. Put down the serpent.” Rae laid Victoria Broccoli tenderly down in a jewellery box.

“I mostly use my fan to cover the evil twins.” She made a gesture bosomward. “I call them Cruella and Maleficent.”

Rae mimed puking. The Cobra hit her with her own fan. “Et tu, bestie,” Rae grumbled. “Brutal.”

So she was still into Octavian. Guys with great bone structure could get away with anything.

The Beauty performed such an elaborate undulation that she would have overbalanced, if her bodyguard hadn’t neatly stepped in to bear her weight

“Is my mother right?” Rahela murmured. “Are men useless? They don’t take out the trash, they don’t rescue the damsels. The only thing a villainess should do at a party is make catty remarks and spill red wine on the heroine’s dress! I never get a moment’s peace to make catty remarks.”

Rae snapped her fingers. “It’s the prime minister. Older politician, unmarried and mean, with vaguely sinister facial hair!” A classic secondary villain. “My lady, facial hair is not a motive.

Key clearly needed more practise assisting his lady: he heaved her up with the courteous tenderness of a man handling a sack of potatoes.

Instead he was doing the majestic equivalent of turning up late to the meeting with Starbucks.

“Make better laws or make criminals,” the Cobra snapped back. “The crimes will continue until the justice system improves.”

King Octavian didn’t sleep in the main palace surrounded by staff as his parents had. He occupied a separate bachelor’s quarters, where he could have his fun undisturbed.

ugh hes awful

Rae adopted her prophecy intonation, which sounded like a phone sex operator with a nasty cold.

Why must he concentrate on these irrelevant details when Rae was trying to progress the plot?

Once again, book characters achieved spectacular muscle tone while too busy with corporate takeovers or magic destinies to have time for the gym. Fictional men had abs for pages.

She dragged her mind from the brink of panic into the realm of getting shit done,

Once upon a time she’d selected the Emperor as her favourite character, but she’d never imagined being one of the many people he discarded on his way to the top.

Beneath her hand she felt the rhythmic thunder of his heart. As though he were a real living person. As though she held the drums of war in the hollow of her hand.

“If it has two heads instead of a tail,” the Cobra murmured, “how does it go to the unisnake bathroom?” Rae was happy to enlighten him. “It excretes through its pores, like sweat.” The Cobra gave her an unimpressed look. “This you remember?”

Octavian was meant to forge the sword in the dawn, not sleep late and hastily forge the sword during the Queen’s Trials,

“The evil twins cause wicked back pain. Nobody thinks of this when they write about the villainess’s luxuriant curves!”

It must be the prime minister and his facial hair of evil.

Mouth opening and closing, his gaze travelled the court, in search of help or possibly sex ed.

A second hot bath might be overkill, but Rae had a lot of party eyeliner to remove and she schemed better in her hot tub. She was starting to think of it as her plot tub.

Now Emer heard only the sound of Rahela singing in the bathtub to her snake.

They were halfway through the tale of Lord Ross and beauteous Lady Rachel,

I CRY