Hemlock & Silver

by T. Kingfisher

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.

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.

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.

That’s humans for you, I suppose. In dreadful danger, with the weight of the world crushing us down, we’ll somehow still find ourselves thinking, I wonder if he likes me?

Poor dead queen. The first person in history to believe that her child was replaced by a doppelganger and actually be correct.

there were a lot of them. At least five, I think. Five isn’t a lot when it’s grains of rice, but a great deal when it’s bites of hemlock or forty-foot monsters.