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“Lady Rapa and Lady Kana, p-pr-protect me!” muttered Rin with his eyes squeezed tightly shut. “If I survive this, I promise to listen to my mother and never skip school again, and I’ll obey the ancient sages and stay away from honey-tongued friends who lead me astray. . . .”
All sources of loyalty, of local attachment, were replaced with allegiance to the emperor. In place of the parallel chains of devotion forged by nobles, the emperor had put in a pyramid of petty bureaucrats—commoners who could barely write any logograms beyond those in their own names and who had to spell everything out in zyndari letters. Instead of ruling with the best, the emperor had chosen to elevate the craven, greedy, foolish, and low. In this new world, the old orderly way of life was lost. No one knew his place. Commoners were living in castles while nobles huddled in drafty huts.
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“Young man,” she mumbled after the retreating figure of Kuni Garu, “you may act lazy and foolish, but I have seen your heart. A bright and tenacious flower will not bloom in obscurity.”
“Good matches are not the stuff of stories and songs,” he said. “For every pain we endure together, there will be a joy twice as great. They will still sing of us in a thousand years.”
Your eyes are like empty wells. Your drool like an inchworm. I want you to have a wife. How about this matchmaker? She’s good at poking!
Sir, a reformed man is worth ten men virtuous from birth, for he understands temptation and will strive the harder to not stray.”
“There is often no line between perfection and evil.”
It was glorious to fight against men, but even more glorious to bend heaven, tame the sea, and reshape the earth.
Scholars protested and wrote tracts denouncing him as a tyrant. But they were only scholars, with no strength to lift swords. He had two hundred of them buried alive and cut off the writing hands of a thousand more. The protests and tracts stopped.
“Come, come”—they gestured to the other men back at the inn—“even sad men, even men who are about to lose their ears and eyes, have to eat, and eat well!” The men nodded. This was true wisdom. As corvée laborers, life was simply one whipping after another, and you could only be scared for so long before you decided that filling your belly was more important than anything else.
“Emperor, king, general, duke,” he whispered to himself. “These are just labels. Climb up the family tree of any of them high enough and you’ll find a commoner who dared to take a chance.”
If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.” To his satisfaction but not surprise, everyone volunteered to stay with him. The best followers are those who think it was their own idea to follow you.
What is fate but coincidences in retrospect?
“When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon.”
“It’s always scary to do the interesting thing,” said Jia. “Ask your heart if it’s also the right thing.”
They ignored all forms of discipline and the chain of command. Even uniforms were optional. Every rebel soldier dressed however he wished, and if a soldier really wanted a sign to prove his revolutionary zeal, he could tie a red bandanna around his head with the twin-raven insignia of Cocru. Everyone marched as fast or slow as he liked.
Even a king cannot tell a diamond apart from a white topaz without a hard enough surface to test them against,”
Many things in this world become real when enough people believe them to be real.
It’s easy for men to be friends as close as brothers when they’re poor and struggling, but much harder when things are going well. Friends are never as close as blood.
Marana continued to sip his tea, keeping his face impassive. Motivating a man was about finding the right tender spots to push until he couldn’t wait to do what you wanted, just like defeating a tax dodger involved finding the one thing he cared about and squeezing it until he opened his purse and willingly, tearfully, offered up everything he owed.
So much received wisdom was not wisdom at all, just like so much of what men imagined as signs from the gods were only wishes in their heads.
“Sometimes parents just want their children to be safe and ordinary.”
“Being compassionate to one’s enemies means being cruel to one’s own soldiers.”
Tonight, she would be a symbol, and she understood that whatever else symbols did, they did not sigh and complain about their fate.
“Must a beautiful woman always be a seducer, a harlot, a mere bauble put on display as a distraction? Is that the only path open to me?” “Those are the labels men have put on women,”
Princess Kikomi stared at Marana. She had no words for how she felt about this man. Hate seemed inadequate.
Words always seemed so much more convincing when backed by swords.
I thought you weren’t going to take sides. Who said anything about taking sides? I’m here to have fun. You consider it fun to divide brother from brother? The mortals are always dividing uncle from nephew, husband from wife. I’m doing no more than adding a bit more randomness to their lives.
A seducer is one who wins through deception rather than force, a harlot is one who wields sex like a sorcerer wields a staff, and “a mere bauble” may yet decide to put herself on display to guide the hearts and minds of thousands into an unstoppable force.
“I’ve often thought the pleasure that parents take in their children is like the pleasure a man gets from releasing a wild bird. I would venture to guess that Lady Garu had plenty of joy, though she had seen but a little of how high you would fly.”
“If the freedom and way of life that you so treasure are worthy of your love, then you will win the hearts of your young far more easily than the visitors of Dara can. But the young must be allowed to make their own choices, to live their own lives as grand experiments. They must choose to become you. That is the only hope for Tan Adü.”
“Politics is the highest of the arts,
Old friends are like old clothes: they fit the best.”
“The common people are like unruly children. If you give them candy always, they will think they should be given even more. But if you slap them hard and then hand them candy, they will come crawling to you and lick your hand.”
There was a tendency by some to romanticize love, to make a fetish out of it. The poets made love seem like a bar of iron coming out of the furnace at the blacksmith’s, red hot and staying so forever. Soto did not think much of such notions. A man fell in love with a woman, married her, and the passion would cool. He would then go into the world, see other women, fall in love again, marry them, and feel the new passion cool in turn. After all, in all the Tiro states, a man was allowed to have multiple wives, if he could persuade all the wives to agree.
“Actions may be interpreted multiple ways, and it is how they’re seen that matters, not what was intended.”
Both focused on the children, anchors for two kites that rode different winds.
“A marriage is a carriage with two sets of reins, and you must not let him do all the driving.
“Safety is an illusion, as is faith without temptation. We’re imperfect, unlike the gods, but in that imperfection we may yet make them jealous.”
“There’s never going to be an end to suffering if ‘he deserves it’ is all the justification people need for inflicting pain.”
Kuni was the sort of man, Risana realized, who, rather than deceive himself, was so full of self-doubt that he could no longer see himself.
“I suppose some men think of women like clothes,” I said, dabbing at my eyes. “Newer is better.”
Now that I have seen the larger world, I wish to change it, as does Mata. But while he wishes to restore the world to a state that never was, I wish to bring it to a state that has not yet been seen.
A man who steals is a man who has lost all hope, and you’re too young to have no hope.”
If you insist on fighting every fight that comes your way, you’re simply letting them push you around in a different way.
When Haan falls, the people suffer. When Haan rises, the people suffer. When Haan is poor, the people are poor. When Haan is rich, the people are poor. When Haan is strong, the people die. When Haan is weak, the people die.”
“I cannot say that I’m a good man, only that I’m a man who tried to do good. I like to believe that the people will remember me fondly, but I also know that the legacies of men cannot be foreseen during their lifetimes. I do not know if I’m the man who will complete the task you dream of, for that is a question that must be asked of our descendants in a thousand years.”
What does it matter if ten thousand men think the man I care for a tyrant, as long as I see him in a different light? Our lives are too brief to worry about the judgment of others, let alone that of history.
It was silly to make a fetish out of love, and not to accept that love was like food, and each dish had its own flavor. The heart surely had room for more than one.
It might be true that a heart has room for more than one love, but in this world, a woman still had to make choices that a man did not have to. Jia looked away.
