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‘I want to stop being afraid,’ not knowing that it was the bravest thing she could have said just then.
every one of them had their own tale, every one had made the same choice. ‘I think . . . I think we get to be what the world needs us to be.’
He’d told me the world could be the most lovely place you could imagine, so long as your imagination was fuelled by love.
I could tell you every detail because I’ve made myself remember them, but only as words. We had been poor, so there were no paintings or sketches of her. The sight of her was lost to me for ever and there was only one way to get it back.
‘Besides, there are laws, even in times of war.’ ‘Aye. But you don’t seem to have learned the first one: it’s the victor who makes the laws.’
‘It’s over,’ I said, and was surprised by the strange calm that came over me. There’s a serenity that comes in knowing you’ve got only one thing left to fight for.
‘Maybe they can win,’ Kest said. ‘Not now, not today, but in the future. Maybe this is how it starts.’
It had never occurred to me to think of them as men who had hopes and dreams of a life outside the confines of their armour.
‘We live in dishonourable times, in a corrupt country. I suppose one could say the Duke is as honourable a man as such a world allows.’
Sometimes the dead speak to us in a language so plain it needs no words,
But there was something else the three of us shared too: a belief that there are some fights you don’t walk away from, no matter what the cost. That’s why I knew, at that moment when the Tailor offered us respite and resignation from our duty, that none of us would take it. We’d stood in that room and locked eyes and without having to speak it aloud, shared a single silent promise: if the world is going to fall apart, then we will go down with it. Fighting.
Pride, they tell us, is the gate that stands between us and the Gods. Fuck the clerics, I thought. I’ll keep what pride I can hold onto for as long as I can.
‘The Bardatti tell stories, yes, and you’re too quick to dismiss them, by the way. It’s stories that inspire people to change. It’s stories that make them believe things can be better. But we also collect stories. Ours is the job of travelling the land to capture the great changes in the word,
‘That’s the trouble with you Trattari. You don’t know your history. There’s always someone worse, Falcio,
‘We need justice to be a river, Falcio, always flowing, always wearing against the rocks that stand in its way, not a sword that shatters when you strike it against stone.’
We are like very tall, very pretty glass vases: throw one stone and we fall to pieces.’ She spread her arms out in a beatific pose. ‘We are full of useless beauty.’
I smiled, perhaps because I knew it would annoy her, perhaps because, no matter how broken these people were, they were people I loved, or perhaps simply because smiling in the face of death is what you do when there’s nothing else left to try.
‘I do,’ I replied, ‘and it’s a song about Knights, in fact: about the code that the Knights of Tristia once followed. They lived and fought and died by rules that remained unbroken for a thousand years. How many of you, cowering beneath your kite-shields as you prepare to massacre those whom you should be defending, first took up armour and shield dreaming of those better men? Of that better code? How many of you swore you would die heroes one day?’
It was a sublime, righteous vengeance, admittedly, but still vengeance, not justice. Why does a trial matter when there are no questions of fact to be determined and no mitigating factors to be considered? What does it matter whether the blade falls now or after a verdict? Because the law only matters if we hold it higher than ourselves
‘Get the hells out of here, Brasti Goodbow,’ I said, trying to keep the laughter from my eyes and the terrible sadness from my voice.
No, I thought. No. Even if our lives must be lived apart, I still get to know that she was here, that she was real, and that in another life she could have – would have – been mine.
There is no crime in feeling fear, nor any virtue in acknowledging it.
I’ve found a shield you can’t penetrate with your needles and your pins. Acceptance. I accept. What will you do now, Heryn? I accept everything: the pain, the misery, the regret. I want it. I welcome it.
I felt the faintest touch of tears underneath the lower lashes of my eyes. The sensation was so small, and yet I felt it just as strongly as the splitting pain in my bones and the stabbing ache in my flesh.
Our greatest strength is our judgement; our finest weapon is our knowledge of the laws. It sounded so trite, but what else was left?
Fine, I thought to myself. Let the last thing they hear from me be the thing that hurts them most. Let the last knife I wield be the one with the truest edge.
You want to know why I waited so long to save you, Falcio? It’s because until that exact moment I couldn’t decide which side I was on.’ She left. The world is made of fragments.
Happiness is a series of grains of sand spread out in a desert of violence and anguish.
‘Do you always run headlong into certain death?’ ‘Sometimes he walks,’ Dariana said. ‘Occasionally he shuffles. Once I’m pretty sure I saw him amble into certain death.’
our time together was a gift and anger the thief who would steal its most precious moments.
‘And what world is left for me if you’re not in it?’ she asked. ‘The one where I loved you.’
The most important fights are never won on skill.
‘Because the fights that matter most aren’t won on skill,’ I said. They’re won on sacrifice.
Disappointingly – and I really hated to admit it, but this kept happening to me – life failed to live up to my expectations.
‘No, I became exactly what the world needed me to be, nothing more – and nothing less.’
