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I am not sure which I prefer: To be taken for something I am not, or to fail at being what I am.”
“In order to have a future worth fighting for, you must have a past worth remembering.”
Was that not how you loved someone? By hammering your body into whatever shape they liked best, and handing yourself to them like a hilt?
‘We all belong to someone,’ she said, gently. The whole of her world was a system of allegiances, long chains of bent knees and bowed necks that ran from sinner to pulpit, from peasant to throne. It disoriented her even to imagine herself outside of it; no link could be removed from the chain unbroken. ‘We all serve someone. We all command someone. But who…’ She caught his eyes with hers. ‘That choice, at least, is now ours.’
He said, a little desperately, ‘But what if we didn’t choose, not really? What if it was only—proximity?’ His mouth twisted around the word, as if it tasted bad. ‘What if it’s not real?’
I want to be sure you choose freely, that’s all. You deserve to be free.’ ‘Who is free, who loves another?’ the knight asked lightly,
I thought, despairingly, that love didn’t make cowards of us, after all; it made heroes, and heroes usually didn’t survive.
Who is free, who loves another?
Even if we get ten years, Owen, or twenty—” You choked, and when you spoke again it was less than a whisper. “It’s not freedom, if it can be taken away.”
There was no freedom in running, either, if you knew one day you would be caught.
even now, the habit of love still catches me sometimes, unawares.”
“Sorry, love.” He meant it, I thought. But he was a man who had ceded all his choices to someone else, who believed he had none left remaining to him. His motions were the motions of a wind-up doll: inevitable, preordained.
“Yes,” said the shadow. “I should have done it sooner, probably, but I loved him so. Another thing he taught me: There is nothing a person will not endure, for love.” A lesson she had passed down to her daughter. Who is free, who loves another?
