Dunstan

by Conn Iggulden

If you can’t be born a king, be made a king, though that has thorns. When violent men secure your crown, they keep a knife at your throat ever after. Last, and not the least of these, is this: if you can’t be born a king or made a king, you might still anoint one.

man can run mad winding his life back – and it is always more tangled than a single thread. There is never one truth, one love, or one enemy.

A man cannot have two masters, he told me. I told him a simple man could not. An educated man could have three or four.

On the first day, all men sit the throne as if they are a child in their father’s chair. Yet as the months and years pass, they swell to fit the seat – and it becomes truly theirs.

Every coin had some blood on it, but then this world is the forge where the metal of our souls is tested. It is not a land of milk and honey, but a dark field of battle. Some will show clean and good and they will be rewarded. The rest will be cast away to burn.

We see death in the loss of sweet daughters and wives and fathers and old friends. Yet the world does not end, even in our grief. The sun comes up, the spring returns – and other families risk all their happiness to bring life into this vale of tears.