The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin #5)

by Daniel Abraham

The war gold was a bit longer than it was wide, embossed by a press that existed only in the bank, signed by Komme Medean and King Tracian’s master of coin. A few carefully worded lines promised that king and crown would honor the transferred debt, and a line of cipher made it possible to check the note against forgeries.

Cithrin invents cash

“When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog. If the question’s how much do we have to punish the other side before we can stomach peace, my experience is you can do the enemy a damned lot of hurt before it starts feeling like justice enough. Most times it comes down to how many of them you can kill before you get tired and bored. And whether you can break them so they don’t take their turn after. Looking for everyone to feel happy is waiting for yesterday.”

Etiquette was such a beautiful system of lies. It allowed everyone to pretend when the truth was too ugly to bear. That they all shared in the lie made it at least something that they shared.

“It seems to me that the source of war isn’t the dragons or magic or the spiders in the blood. I hear the histories and learn the songs, and I feel that humanity is the beginning of it all. Pain and lust and vengeance and oppression. But I also see that we are capable of tremendous compassion and hope. I think of all the cities that war has razed, and still, we’ve built more than we’ve torn down. I think of all the things of beauty that found their end in violence, but there keep being more beautiful things.”

Soldiers of the glorious empire or monsters of violence and suffering. So much depended on the story one told about them.

It’s a little gathering of friends and family that needs arranging. Only it’s going to decide the fate of the world, so we’d like to get it right.”

Everyone loves peace when they’re losing the battle.”

To do what they did, they had to feel deeply and authentically and without reserve, just the way that doing what he did—overseeing the death of men both under his command and on the enemy line—meant falling back into step with Yardem despite months or years apart as if they’d only walked into adjacent rooms for a moment.

Thoughtfulness and kindness and love, I contend, are so much the way we expect the world to be that they become invisible as air. We only see war and violence and hatred as something happening, I suggest, because they stand out as aberrations. In my experience, even in the midst of war, many lives are untouched by battle. And even in a life of conflict, violence is outweighed by its absence.”

“We’ll put it on his tombstone,” Marcus said. “‘Here lies a vicious, petty tyrant who damn near broke the world. He did one brave thing at the end.’”