Shadow Scale (Seraphina, #2)

by Rachel Hartman

“Ah, children,” growled Dame Okra, watching him climb. “I forget what darlings they are. How I long for the opportunity to forget once more.”

Nedouard bowed cordially, hunched his shoulders, and disappeared into the falling night. Maybe I couldn’t see mind-fire, but I could see loneliness enshrouding him like a cloak. It was an old friend of mine. It weighed him down; he would surely join us.

A single action could derive from many motivations. I should never assume.

The sky was insultingly, offensively blue; it had no right to smile on anyone right now.

“I will see you both in Goredd, then, when I clasp your hands across the smoking ashes of my enemies.”

“Isn’t that what you’re hoping to avoid by sneaking up the Omiga?” Kiggs said. Comonot considered. “Yes, but I liked the sound of those words. Interesting.”

“Of course you do,” he said at last. “And I have to go home and help Selda, and this is how the world runs, pulling us apart over and over again.”

He smiled, leaning in a little, and said, “Because I found you again. However strenuously the world pulls us apart, however long the absence, we are not changed for being dashed upon the rocks. I knew you then, I know you now, I shall know you again when you come home.”

swiveling. “A gamble, but it worked. General Palonn was exceedingly pleased. He boasted to the doctors: ‘You’ve finally created something useful: a general from a lady.’ ” Mitha said lady in Goreddi, which startled me. “Did Palonn use that very word?” “It became her nickname,” said Mitha. “And she won the Old Ard more battles.” All this time we’d been assuming lady was a dragon name, not a word in our own language. Jannoula was the notorious General Laedi.

Holy crap! Didnt see that coming!

If I closed my eyes, I could hear what they were doing, tendrils of sound curling and responding to each other, like pea shoots spiraling around a stake. The stake was Mitha’s lyrics, the one steady point of reference. This was art, quigutl art, and in some oblique fashion it was what I’d been looking for, what Dame Okra had once mocked. I’d found my people and they weren’t even mine.

that. “The thing about reason,” I said slowly, thinking of Comonot’s earlier explanation as I spoke, “is that there’s a geometry to it. It travels in a straight line, so slightly different beginnings can lead you to wildly divergent endpoints. I think Eskar must have begun from the position that all reasoning beings are equal.”

Was it provably true that reasoning beings were equal?

“You will answer Seraphina’s questionth nicely. If you make any threatening move, I will pull out your eyeball, climb into the hole, and eat your brainth. My mate will lay eggth in your sinuseth.”

This made me laugh!

“Is Sir Cuthberte decent? In body, I mean. His mind is always in doubt.”

“You’ve got guilt,” he said, his voice like an audible pat on the head, a palpable comfort. “Guilt and I are old friends. It’s the gadfly that stings all night, the never-ending banquet. It’s what you feel when you rush back home to your fiancée, intending to tell her all that’s in your heart, but she won’t even see you.”

I could have wept. I hurt all over like one suffering terrible insomnia, when the body aches with longing for sleep. Somehow we both did find our portion of sleep there in each other’s arms.

The world is as it must be, and as it happens to be, and those are the same thing, connected and right, and you understand and love all of it, because you are all of it and all of it is you.” “In love with all the world,” said Kiggs, quoting Pontheus.

You couldn’t put words on something like that. Heaven, gods—these were concepts far too small.