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Kindle Notes & Highlights
To my queer family. You are loved; they cannot take love from us.
We, who are kin to the dragons, surely know the names of our own grandmothers and of the lives they led. Listen now to this tale, written the way it was told to us by our foremothers, who in turn learned it from their own foremothers. Hear now the tale of Kunlin Yeva. Hear now the truth of the guildknight of Mithrandon.
“You’ve always said blood doesn’t matter.” “It doesn’t,” he says. “Until it does.”
He hops from topic to topic like a bird, bursting with curiosity. She has already decided that she likes Emory, who seems unbearably soft in this world of stone and hard angles.
Yeva feels—and knows—that this has something to do with what she said earlier, her insolence rippling outward invisibly, in ways she had not predicted. It is the first lesson she’s learned in Mithrandon, and in many ways it is the most important one.
“You have the strength of the earth in you,” she used to tell her daughters. “The rains can come and the ploughs can carve through you and still you will remain.”
Little by little, her mouth gets used to speaking her father’s language until it becomes second nature, until those syllables dominate even her thoughts and the language she spoke in her mother’s home fades and becomes brittle in her mind.
She looks no different from the other knights-to-be, except she is swifter and fiercer. She learns quicker and works harder.
Taken from the soil and cradle of her home and placed in this hard land, full of stone and bright metal, she has fashioned a womb for herself from which she can safely navigate her new world.
A hard-won belonging she is now expected to abandon for a strange land, under strange circumstances. To be alone and nobody again. And Emory can’t see how much his request is asking of her. He even thinks this will be better for her.
For a brief moment sadness envelops her like a flash of ice. But before Yeva can latch on to it, Lady Sookhee puts it aside and returns a small smile to her face. But this gesture of reticence only endears her to Yeva, who has spent a lifetime putting her own emotions into neat boxes where they won’t bother others.
She’s spent half her life cutting herself into pieces and burying the shards that others considered unsightly. She’s walked around as a hollow husk of herself. She’s tired of it.
“Prayers are for the living. Not the dead.
