More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Should I have surrendered last week? To the boy?” Saevar turned to look at the Prince in the blended moonlight, disbelieving. He was speechless for a moment, then found his voice. “I would have gone home from that surrender,” he said, with resolution, “and walked into the Palace by the Sea, and smashed every sculpture I ever made of you.”
“I wanted,” said Alberico of Barbadior, “to look upon the coffin of your father. To look, and to laugh.” He showed no trace of an inclination toward amusement.
There is also a well-known truth about men and their gods—whether of the Triad in the Palm, or the varying pantheon worshiped in Barbadior, whether of mother goddess or dying and reviving god or lord of wheeling stars or single awesome Power above all of these in some rumored prime world far off amid the drifts of space. It is the simple truth that mortal man cannot understand why the gods shape events as they do. Why some men and women are cut off in fullest flower while others live to dwindle into shadows of themselves. Why virtue must sometimes be trampled and evil flourish amid the beauty
...more
After one such adjective-bestrewn effort of Doarde’s she’d suggested to Brandin over a late, private supper that one of the measures of difference between men and women was that power made men attractive, but when a woman had power that merely made it attractive to praise her beauty.
It would truly be gone then. Wiped out. Seventy or eighty years wreaking as comprehensive an obliteration as millennia had on the ancient civilizations no one could now recall. Whole cultures that were now only an awkwardly pronounced name of a place, or a deciphered, pompous title—Emperor of All the Earth—on a broken pottery shard.
He looked at the two of them and he couldn’t have said which man he admired more in that moment. The one who had asked, knowing what he asked, or the one who had given, knowing what he gave.
it is possible to differ on such matters, and to reach a place as terrible as that one was for both of us. I am learning so many things so late. In this world, where we find ourselves, we need compassion more than anything, I think, or we are all alone.”
the truth is that you are the law of mine. I knew it when I saw you in that window. In the moment before you leaped I knew that I loved you. Bright star of Eanna, forgive me the manner of this, but you are the harbor of my soul’s journeying.”
seemed to Catriana in that moment as if that new-born trialla in her soul began to sing. Of trials endured and trials to come, of doubt and dark and all the deep uncertainties that defined the outer boundaries of mortal life, but with love now present at the base of it all, like light, like the first stone of a rising tower.
