The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War, #3)

by Mark Lawrence

Being on a galloping camel bears several resemblances to energetic sex with an enormously strong and very ugly woman.

‘Fear can be a useful friend – but it’s never a good master.’

The Broken Empire never had a big demand for slaves. We have peasants. Much the same thing, and they think they’re free so they never run off.

‘Give him what he wants,’ Jorg had said. ‘Then take what you want. Nobody is more vulnerable than in their moment of victory, and you know that whatever you do this man will never let you go while he lives.’

Life is the same for many of us – a few scant years of golden youth when everything tastes sweet, every experience new and sharp with meaning. Then a long slow grind to the grave, trying and failing to recapture that feeling you had when you were seventeen and the world rolled out before you.

Pride lets a man be skewered on the point of other people’s expectations.

‘A life lived well is one you’re not prepared to compromise just in order to draw it out for another day.’

‘Interesting,’ I said, by which I meant ‘shut the fuck up’.

‘Fear is a necessary metric without which the modelling of risk and consequence would serve no purpose.’

‘The light of the sun is new-born, hot from the fires of heaven, and speaks cruel truths as the young are wont to – but starlight, starlight is ancient and reaches across an emptiness unimagined. We are all of us young beneath the stars.’