A Gathering of Shadows (Shades of Magic, #2)

by V.E. Schwab

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.

Delilah Bard had a way of finding trouble. She’d always thought it was better than letting trouble find her, but floating in the ocean in a two-person skiff with no oars, no view of land, and no real resources save the ropes binding her wrists, she was beginning to reconsider.

What a way to start a book.

humming to herself. A shanty about the Sarows, a phantom said to haunt wayward ships at night. How do you know when the Sarows is coming? (Is coming is coming is coming aboard?)

When the wind dies away but still sings in your ears, (In your ears in your head in your blood in your bones.)

When the current goes still but the ship, it drifts along, (Drifts on drifts away drifts alone.)

When the moon and the stars all hide from the dark, (For the dark is not empty at all at all.) (For the dark is not empty at all.)

How do you know when the Sarows is coming? (Is coming is coming is coming aboard?)

Why you don’t and you don’t and you won’t see it coming, (You won’t see it coming at all.)

How do you know when the Sarows is coming? (Is coming is coming is coming aboard?)

Reckless, whispered a voice in her head, and she was rather disconcerted to find that where once the voice had sounded like Barron, it now sounded like Kell.

People survived by being cautious, but they got ahead by being bold.

“Oh don’t go dumb on me now, Bard,” he said. “You’re just becoming interesting.”

Were they really one of a kind, or two?

“The ability comes naturally,” replied Kell. “The proficiency takes work.

the Essen Tasch—the Element Games—

Kell had demons of his own, but he knew he couldn’t drown them.

Nothing could kill Rhy. Because it wasn’t Rhy’s life that held him together anymore. It was Kell’s. And as long as Kell lived, so would the prince.

An ordinary magician would never risk the punishment. Kell wasn’t an ordinary magician.

His heart raced, and magic surged through his veins. He felt something on his face, and it took him a moment to realize that he was smiling.

Only two statues remained,

They were likenesses of the old rulers, Athos and Astrid Dane, carved in white marble. Both figures were on their knees. Athos Dane stared down at the whip in his hands, which coiled like a snake around his wrists, his face twisted in pain, while Astrid clutched the handle of a dagger, its blade buried in her chest, her mouth stretched in a soundless, immortal scream.

She’d felt his power even then, before it passed between them, pulsing beneath his skin, and she wanted it, needed it, like air.

She straightened and met his eyes: one green, the other black. “Call me Holland.”

And then a shock of white hair caught his eye, the pale figure of Athos Dane sliding like a serpent through the crowd.

“Flower boy,” cooed a voice in his ear, and he spun to find Astrid, covered in cracks as if someone had pieced her shattered body back together.

“Too late,” came Holland’s voice from nowhere. Everywhere. “Once you let it in, you’ve already lost.”

And then in the silence, he heard a sound: not a sob, or a scream, but a laugh. And it took him a moment to recognize the voice. It was his.

Maxim kept grudges like scars. They faded by degrees but always left a mark.

A land map was an ordinary thing, but a sea map was a special thing, showing not only the open sea but its secrets, its hidden islands and towns, the places to avoid and the places to go, and who to find once you got there. A sea map was never to be taken off its ship.

If any man of the waters—or any man who wished to keep his head on his shoulders—saw a sea map on land, he was to burn it before it burned him.

She was halfway back to the weapons stall before she realized she’d never told the merchant her name.

“Everyone’s immortal until they’re not.”

He’d taken the map with him, the last trinket he’d ever smuggle.

“Politics is a dance until the moment it becomes a war. And we control the music.”

It was such a peculiar thing, to know your pain was tethered to someone else’s, that every time you hurt, they felt it, and every time they hurt, it was because of you.

Rhy held Kell’s pain in his hands, while Kell held Rhy’s life in his.

He didn’t know the exact words his father had used, but he was fairly sure they included don’t let them and out of your sight and possibly on pain of death.

“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.”

Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling—the hope—that everyone was born with the ability to do something, that if he just searched hard enough he would find it. His gift. His purpose.

He sometimes worried that the coat had a mind of its own. The only other person who’d ever managed to find what they wanted in its pockets was Lila. He’d never found out how she’d done that. Traitorous coat.

Kell had wondered at the sudden appearance of this one, so unlike the others, but now, as he shrugged it on, he realized that was because this coat didn’t belong to him. It belonged to Kamerov.

“You know,” he said, taking up the mask, “if you can rule half as well as you can lie, you’re going to make an incredible king.”

So many nights in her past life, she had gone to bed shivering. Nights she couldn’t afford wood or coal, so she’d put on every piece of clothing she owned and huddled down and froze. Heat cost money, but so did food and shelter and every other blasted thing you needed to survive, and sometimes you had to choose.

This paragraph made me tear up. Brings back memories.

She was determined to master it, not just because fire was useful or dangerous, but because it was warm, and no matter what happened, Lila Bard never wanted to be cold again. That was why Lila favored fire.

There was a heavy quiet to this place, like shelves beneath long-settled dust. An abandoned house. A body without breath. Until Holland gasped.

While the world to every side had the bleak stillness of a winter landscape, the ground beneath Holland, the place where his blood had soaked into the soil, was a rich and waking green.

Either there was no one here to need the light, or what remained preferred the darkness.

and the stretch of green at Holland’s feet made him wonder if the world was truly dead, or merely waiting.

the man before him, cast in shadows, wasn’t made of flesh and blood, but glassy black stone. Just a statue seated on a throne.

The statue was alive.