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Magic and magician must between them balance. Magic itself is chaos. The magician must be calm. A fractured self is a poor vessel for power, spilling power without focus or measure from every crack.
People survived by being cautious, but they got ahead by being bold.
She was still busy being offended when the man lunged.
Not her first kill, but the first that stuck. The first that hurt.
Kell would say it was impossible. What a useless word, in a world with magic.
Kell swallowed. He still wasn’t used to the design—once black, now silver—that tethered them together. Their pain. Their pleasure. Their lives.
Maxim kept grudges like scars. They faded by degrees but always left a mark.
“Everyone’s immortal until they’re not.”
“Politics is a dance until the moment it becomes a war. And we control the music.”
Magic was power, of course, but it wasn’t the only kind. Rhy told himself he could still be strong without it.
“Strength and weakness are tangled things,” the Aven Essen had said. “They look so much alike, we often confuse them, the way we confuse magic and power.”
“I’ve never been a fan of farewells. Or hellos, for that matter. Unnecessary punctuation. Besides, they’ll see me again.”
People either stole to stay alive or to feel alive. She had to imagine that they ran away for the same reasons.
“Fix your crown, my prince,” he called back as he reached the door. “It’s crooked.”
If magic coursed through everyone and everything, was this what it felt like when it found itself again?
“Everyone thinks I have a death wish, you know? But I don’t want to die—dying is easy. No, I want to live, but getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. And once you do, it makes you realize that everything you were doing before wasn’t actually living. It was just making do. Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.”
“If you decide to leave—when you decide to leave—don’t do it without saying good-bye.”
He kissed her until the fire burned up the panic and the anger and the weight in his chest, until he could breathe again, and until they were both breathless.
“Why am I the only one in this fucking world to be held accountable for my actions?”
“What are the charges?” he snarled. “Treason,” said Emira, at the same time the guard answered, “Disobeying the king.” “I disobey the king all the time,” said Rhy. “You haven’t arrested me.”
