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‘Don’t do what you can’t undo, until you’ve considered what you can’t do once you’ve done it.’
Many’s the time since then that a smile, a compliment on how well my horse had been cared for, and a quick question put to a stable boy brought me information that all the coin in the kingdom couldn’t have bribed out of him.
“A message is not delivered until it is understood,”
It’s not the kind of work a man does that says he can be proud or not. It’s how he does it. Be proud of yourself.”
“Nothing is ever simple and good,” I said to myself. “There is always a bitter peel, a sour pip somewhere.”
‘The man who must brag for himself knows that no one else will.’
But we are two old men, who have grown old together. Sometimes that is a greater closeness. We have come through time to your day and age.
There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense. That was when Burrich came in. I was not asleep, but I did not stir. He was not fooled.
I pleaded, but he continued to walk. Not hurrying, not lagging, but simply trudging along the way a man does when he has measured the distance he must go and matched his strength to it.
Honor and courtesy and justice … they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them up like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.”
