The Queen of Attolia (The Queen's Thief #2)

by Megan Whalen Turner

I see you surrounded, even here, by people you can trust with your life. You are safer than I am, and it is my home, not yours.

“He is not too young. You are not old. You only feel old because you have been unhappy for so long, and this is not his revenge,”

“I have been living with your grief and your rage and your pain ever since. I don’t think—I don’t think I had felt anything for a long time before that, but those emotions at least were familiar to me. Love I am not familiar with. I didn’t recognize that feeling until I thought I had lost you in Ephrata. And when I thought I was losing you a second time, I realized I would give up anything to keep you—my lip service to other gods, but my pride, too, and my rage at all gods, everything for you. Then I see you here, and see what I have done to you.”

She thought of the hardness and the coldness she had cultivated over those years and wondered if they were the mask she wore or if the mask had become her self. If the longing inside her for kindness, for warmth, for compassion, was the last seed of hope for her, she didn’t know how to nurture it or if it could live.