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He was the son of traitors, born to a noble House whose name was now treason to speak, and he had refused to take any other.
“The Andelin for my duchy,” Remin said. The words came to him like prophecy. “The Brede for my own. And your daughter for my wife.”
Ophele’s veins might contain the divine blood of the Emperor, they were stained by her mother’s treason and irrevocably dirtied by her illegitimacy.
Ophele knew a truth that was treason to the rest of the Empire: his family had been innocent. They had been implicated in her mother’s treason, the Conspiracy that had shaken the Empire to its foundation and almost broke the Covenant of Stars.
Purpose was the gift of imperfection. The divine world was perfect, flawlessly ordered, but in a perfect world there was no purpose, no reason to learn, to work, to grow. There might be debts owed in an imperfect world, but they could be paid. An imperfect world was a work in progress. An imperfect world could be changed. She could change it, if she was brave.
He taught his pages that a sword was a responsibility, and if a man took up a weapon, he had an obligation to use it to defend those who could not defend themselves.
it was the nature of men to throw themselves at the world, each one spending their lives to move just a little further than the last. Not every man died a hero. Many men died to be planks in a bridge, or stones in a wall.
“If someone were to ask, who is it that cooks for the wife of Duke Remin of Andelin, hero of the Gresein, and pointed to a wisp like yourself, I’d be the laughingstock of the whole ruddy Empire! My cooking puts meat on bones! Meat! Soldiers march the length of the Empire and chew up armies by teatime because I feed them! I will not be defeated by a picky teenage girl!”
He loved her. He knew it. He knew it as surely as he knew his own name. It was like flying and it was like drowning, beautiful and dreadful, and somehow inescapably inevitable.
“Because I love you.” He said it straight out, with such sadness in his eyes that she felt tears burn in her own. “I love you, and I would rather…you lived. But I’m tired of waiting for the axe to fall. If this is another trick—”
