What Stalks the Deep (Sworn Soldier, #3)

by T. Kingfisher

while I think babies are fine in the abstract, my sister has a regrettable belief that if I just hold one long enough, I will come to enjoy it. I will not. I have proven this to my own satisfaction, but apparently not to hers,

One American can really fill a room. I assume it only takes a hundred or so to really fill a country.

It is a very small country made of very large mountains. We grow turnips and sheep, but our primary export is people who want to get the hell away from it.

The way he pronounced dark as dahhhk was so pure that I had an involuntary urge to snatch up the teapot and find a harbor to dump it in.

“That is horrifying and I want to go home,” I said, although I pronounced it, “Ah. I see.”

I have never thought of myself as claustrophobic. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe I just had never been required to test that.

I rubbed my temples and wondered if God still looked out for fools, and if so, whether I’d exceeded Har patience already.

She gazed past me with an air that reminded me of an elderly Gallacian woman I used to know who had twelve children and twenty-seven grandchildren, and thus no longer registered screaming, crying, wailing, gunshots, explosions, or the sounds of breaking crockery.

Probably there’s a culture where ask him a few questions isn’t a euphemism for beat him until answers fall out, but I’ve yet to encounter it.

That boredom and terror are bedfellows is of no surprise to any soldier.

which would have made me homesick if I had any desire to ever go home again.

I would prefer a rifle to a pistol and a ticket to another country to either.

I held up both hands and stepped between them, in the pose colloquially known as “the first one to get punched.”

“Do you remember what it was like, coming home after the war?” Denton asked unexpectedly. “Of course.” He took another sip from the flask. “Home is where you’re supposed to be safe. But if something like that could happen, then how could any of us be safe anywhere?”

Sometimes when people hurt for a long time, they start to think that hurting is part of who they are. And then anything that helps the hurt, even healing, feels like it’s trying to strip part of them away.”

“Rules of life,” Angus said. “Be true to your friends, don’t cheat at cards, don’t piss on the less fortunate, and don’t steal other people’s skeletons.”