Hemlock & Silver

by T. Kingfisher

Kings had people to run errands for them. It was one of the few reasons I could imagine wanting to be king.

honestly lol

At thirty-five, I was more than old enough to know that evil could present a fair face, but I had never heard that it got tired. Quite the opposite, really. Evil is relentlessly energetic.

Anthony laughed at me, chopped the root off with his knife, wiped off the worst of the dirt, and popped it into his mouth. Two hours later he was dead.

lmfao why did i laugh so hard at this

I was a child with a child’s attention span. Many adults think this is no more than a butterfly’s, flittering from thought to thought, but they have forgotten how, in some children, it is as sharp and pointed as a stiletto. Mine was focused now.

There is a crazy-wild delight that comes over you when you discover something new, something extraordinary. If you try to share that and people look at you blankly, it’s crushing. But if there’s someone else there to say really?! and take fire with enthusiasm alongside you—well, that will keep you going for a long time.

Monarchy, as the ancient philosopher Margay the Younger wrote, is a terrible form of government, but at least there’s always someone around to blame.)

Still, what else could I do? I had to try. Sometimes you get a miracle. Mostly you don’t, but you still have to make space for the miracle to happen, just in case.

“Fear is like a balloon,” he said, “and it blows up bigger and bigger. When it finally pops, relief comes rushing in to fill the space. The larger the fear, the larger the relief afterward. Then they have to find a way to let off that relief, and one of those ways is by dumping it all over the healer.”

The human body is a strange combination of incredibly fragile and unspeakably tough.

Maybe the point of gods and saints is that they can make the monstrous choices that people can’t.

Then I slept badly—I always do, the night before I know I have to be somewhere early—and

omg same

People make pilgrimages to the big Toad shrine to the west of Four Saints mostly to ask for wealth, which is also His domain, but more than a few go to ask for regularity. (I am not here to judge. In the course of testing things on myself, I’ve had more than one occasion to beg for Saint Toad’s intervention.)

omg lol

Noblemen notice beauty mostly by its lack. Women know that they are only as powerful as their face, and so they will slather poisons into every wrinkle, merely to keep what little power they have.

No sense asking why he was like this. He was a cat. If cats were helpful, they’d be dogs.

the world had a bad habit of not taking my likes and dislikes into account.

tell me about it

If you discovered a poison that could kill hundreds of people all at once, something you could put in a well or a waterway, say, would it be better to tell everyone so that people could try to find

a cure, or to tell no one so that evil people couldn’t use it, but risk someone else discovering it later?”

I looked back at the mirror, but the reflection was gone. And I was lying on the ground, on a sheet, extremely rumpled, partly underneath my equally rumpled bodyguard. The maid’s eyes traveled over the two of us. “Hullo, Javier,” she said. “Miss.” There is a level of blush beyond which human capillaries simply won’t hold any more blood. I lay under my bodyguard and wished for a vasoconstrictor. Javier closed his eyes. “Hello, Eloise.”

lmaooo i was waiting for a scene like this

“This is like one of those horrible philosophy questions. Do you sacrifice one person to potentially

save thousands?” I huffed a laugh. “I always thought that was such an easy question, too. Obviously you sacrificed the one person. It turns out it’s a lot harder when you’re going to watch the person die.”

If you were a poetic soul, maybe you’d say she looked like a princess in an enchanted slumber. To me, she mostly just looked dead.

i see what you did there