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The nurse did not think Vlad looked much like a man in mourning.
Rather than scolding Lada, their father laughed and boasted of his daughter, as wild and fierce as a boar.
You do not get angry at the mud for clinging to your shoe. You wipe it off and never look at it again.”
The armor she imagined his love had given her had been stripped away, and without it, she was naked and vulnerable.
She recoiled from the memory of that woman. Powerless. Broken. An abandoned alliance had left her a prisoner in someone else’s home, someone else’s country.
All those years working toward her father’s love and approval had led her here. It had made her a prisoner.
Love and life. Things that could be given or taken away in a heartbeat, all in the pursuit of power.
the Latin so formal it created a barrier between himself and God.
But you have a choice.” “I do not feel like I have any choices left to me.” Kumal nodded. “It may seem that way. But you always have a choice. You can choose to find comfort and solace in God. You
can choose to be brave and compassionate. And you can choose to find beauty and happiness wherever they present themselves.” He smiled. “I think you already know this, though. I hope you can hold on to that through the coming years, because you have much to offer the world, Radu.”
but he stole a portion of it, tucking it away for the coming days when he knew he would need it.
It was a lonely, cold thing to live without expectations.
If Halima and Mara were different seasons, Huma was nature itself.
There is power in stillness. There is power in watching, waiting, saying the right thing at the right time to the right person.
What will you let be taken away so that you, too, can have power?”
“Yes, when otherwise I could be sitting in this room with you, invisible, sewing and growing old. How strange I should choose something else.”
He threw out the laws that prevented him from marrying an actress, and she was crowned empress. Not empress consort, mind you. Full empress, full partner with her husband. Imagine.”
“She went from entertaining men on stage and behind it, to ruling all of Byzantium. She crushed a rebellion when her husband would have run, she improved laws for all women under her rule, and she helped build the most beautiful cathedral in all the world—the Sancta Sophia.
hundreds of hours of work that had gone into the stitches were nothing.
That was what fathers did. It was up to daughters to figure out survival by any means possible.
“Someday you will go, and your life will be blessed for it. But it will not fix you—all your troubles will still be here, waiting. First you should strive to find peace where you are, and then you can make the pilgrimage to celebrate that peace.”
have to make hard choices, but I try to do so with a prayer and the welfare of my people always in my heart. I have made mistakes, but I try to use regret as motivation to be more thoughtful, to consider things more carefully, and to be kinder and more generous in all my dealings.”
Artillery light enough to be easily transported would not do much more damage than Petru’s beloved crossbow, but the noise and newness of the cannon could be used as an intimidation tactic to break lines and trigger a retreat.
“There is sickness?” “A camp that large? There is always sickness.”
“When do borders ever stay as they are? Our own people were driven from the east, fleeing from destruction. They saw cities and walls, and they wanted that. So they took them. If they had not taken them, they would have died. And someone else would have come and taken the cities instead.”
You can be the aggressor, you can fight against crusaders on their own land, or you can stay at home and wait for them to come to you.
We expand, because if we did not, we would die. It is Murad’s responsibility to see that we live.”
it was the first time that a man she loved had come back for her.
Some victories are merely defeat wearing the wrong clothing.”
Less than two hundred years ago we were nothing but a tribe, running from the Mongols,
His clothes were deep purple, the traditional color of the Roman emperors.
During the longest, loneliest hours of the night, it had been all Lada could do to keep herself from waking him just to see the way his eyes changed when he saw her, the way his lips formed around words and intentions. She liked who she was when he looked at her, craved it. But
You must know that husbands are useless in all things unless properly instructed. Particularly in the pleasuring of their women.”
Perhaps he spoils her, and let her pick her own match.”
Saint George slaying the dragon.
Worse had been the fear that, no matter what, his nurse would always love Bogdan more. No matter how hard Radu wished, Bogdan was her child, Radu her charge.
safe and dark with their childhood between them.
He had said this was his home. He had told the truth, and he had lied. Because Lada was his home, too, and now she was gone.
Radu released everything to God.
