The Serpent and the Wolf (Dark Inheritance Trilogy, #1)

by Rebecca Robinson

To learn for learning’s sake was a privilege.

Was that what Vaasa had been doing? Hiding from her emotions and calling it survival?

“You can inherit someone’s eyes, or their hair or their nose, but you cannot inherit their faults. You learn them. Which means you can unlearn them, too.”

“You call it anger, you call it fear, but it is none of those things. What lies inside of you is pain. The kind that burns worlds to the ground.”

“Dismissing your emotions doesn’t make them disappear, it only gives them reason to rise later without your consent.”

“The choices of others are not a burden I carry any longer, and neither is their shame.”

Do you want to know the secret, Vaasalisa? Only ever depend upon yourself. The world does not treat kindness with a mirror; it treats kindness with a blade. But Vaasa had been treating herself with a blade for months, and no matter how hard she tried to cut out the parts of her that wanted and wished and hoped, those parts still lived. Perhaps she should fuel them instead of smothering them.

“You… you aren’t upset?” “I don’t begrudge the ways you chose to survive, no.” As she looked down at him, she wondered if anyone had ever been so profoundly compassionate. That was the crux of who he was, and why he was often unfamiliar to her.

She saw his hair turning gray and his beard threading with it, too. How time would wrinkle the skin of his hands. And how they would sit upon the veranda, and he’d place his forehead against hers, whispering of the life they had lived and how the world was not made of mountains and adventurous horizons, but of living room floors and the quiet flicker of candlelight.