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She wrapped her arms around herself. ‘We don’t always get to be who we want to be, do we?’
She was just like I had been, years ago, when I first met the King. He’d believed in me, and he’d made me believe in myself. King Paelis was an idealist and a romantic and a dreamer. But the Tailor was none of those things.
‘The Gods don’t appreciate humans growing above their station, Falcio. Haven’t you figured that out yet? It’s the way of all things in the world: we all have a place and a purpose, and there is a cost to defying it.’
In case I’ve never mentioned it before, in Tristia the Saints only answer the calls of the very rich, the very powerful, or those blessed by the Gods. I had never been any of those things.
It’s one thing to see a child dead, but quite another to force yourself, step by step, to envision the moments up to their death. It felt wrong, cruel. Perverse, even.
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.
‘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.’
fight isn’t won on strength or speed, nor on the back-and-forth trading of blows and parries. Those are all preamble. A fight is won by the single attack that outwits or overwhelms the opponent’s guard and takes his life. If you could devise just one sequence of movements to accomplish this, you wouldn’t need to bother with anything else.
