And I Darken (The Conqueror's Saga, #1)

by Kiersten White

But in Lada she saw a spark, a passionate, fierce glimmer that refused to hide or be dimmed. Rather than trying to stamp out that fire for the sake of Lada’s future, the nurse nurtured it. It made her feel oddly hopeful.

she never could decide how to feel about him. Sometimes, when a smile broke across his face like sun reflecting off a stream, or she saw him relax into sleep, she was filled with an unaccountable sort of ache. It terrified her.

Love and life. Things that could be given or taken away in a heartbeat, all in the pursuit of power. She could not avoid her own spark of life. Love, however…

You can choose to be brave and compassionate. And you can choose to find beauty and happiness wherever they present themselves.”

She had been away from her land too long. Sometimes she wondered if she remembered it rightly. But here, now, she knew she could never truly leave it behind. It pulsed in her veins, beating through her. “I love Wallachia. It belongs to me, and I belong to it. It is my country, and it should always be mine, and I hate any king or sultan or god or prophet that proclaims anyone else has any right to it.”

Religion was a means to an end. She had seen it wielded as a weapon. If she needed to use it, she would, but she would never allow herself to be used by it.

“If they were not burning, we would never know they were there.”

Perhaps if she had more women in her life, she would not feel so outraged at the physical and social demands of being one.

that is why you become a dealer of death. You feed death as many people as you can to keep it full and content so its eye stays off you.”

Mehmed’s smile dropped away, his hands hovering reverently above the map. He touched Lada that way, sometimes, and it stirred a strange jealousy in her breast to see him look at a city with the same worshipful hunger.

She was even more afraid of having a child, of being broken from the inside.

Her spine was steel. Her heart was armor. Her eyes were fire.

Radu and Mehmed had both given her something she could not give herself, had seen her in a way no one else had and no one else ever would. They looked at her, ugly Lada, vicious Lada, and saw something precious.

she cut out her heart and offered it as a sacrifice. She would pay whatever price her mother Wallachia demanded.