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“You can’t live somewhere,” he told me, “if the people don’t want you to be there. They can kill our cattle or poison our streams, and we would never know who did it. You either slaughter them all or learn to live with them.”
Start your killers young, before their consciences are grown. Start them young and they will be lethal.
was a Dane and I had been given a perfect childhood, perfect, at least, to the ideas of a boy. I was raised among men, I was free, I ran wild, I was encumbered by no laws, I was troubled by no priests, I was encouraged to violence, and I was rarely alone. And it was that, that I was rarely alone, which kept me alive.
An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.
War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.
Ravn had given me much advice and all of it was good, but now, in the night wind, I remembered just one thing he had said to me on the night we first met, something I had never forgotten. Never, he had said, never fight Ubba.
We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness. It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.
