More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“And what lesson am I to learn from this story?” asked the beast when she was done. “That there are better things than princes.”
Ayama thought of the king who had imprisoned a monster when he might have raised a son, a king who blamed that monster for his people’s suffering while doing nothing to ease it.
“I will love an honest monster before I swear loyalty to a treacherous king.”
it was you who slaughtered our herds and mowed down our fields just so that we would fear a false villain, instead of seeing that a fool sat the throne.”
“A man like you is owed no words. I trust Ayama to tell my story.”
They pray that their children will be brave and clever and strong, that they will tell the true stories instead of the easy ones. They pray for sons with red eyes and daughters with horns.
“I haven’t been safe since I slipped yowling from my mother’s body.”
The fox licked his chops. He’d waited all morning for the girl to leave her brother’s house and had missed his breakfast. But he knew better than to take food from the hand of a human, even if the hand was soft-skinned and finely made.
“Just because you escape one trap, doesn’t mean you will escape the next.
The fox fell asleep with his head in the girl’s lap, happy for the first time since he’d gazed upon the world with his too-clever eyes.
Koja moaned. “I wanted to help you.” “You always do,” murmured Sofiya. “Few can resist the sight of a pretty girl crying.
Jurek who had filled their house with people so he wouldn’t have to be alone with her?
“It is always the same trap,” she said gently. “You longed for conversation. The bear craved jokes. The gray wolf missed music. The boar just wanted someone to tell her troubles to. The trap is loneliness, and none of us escapes it. Not even me.”
His new bride was troubled by his sister’s mad ramblings of foxes and wolves.
The fox and the nightingale made a quiet life together. A lesser creature might have held Koja’s mistakes against him, might have mocked him for his pride. But Lula was not only clever. She was wise.
Real fear came upon the town. In the past, girls had vanished every few years. True, there were rumors of girls being taken from other villages from time to time, but those children hardly seemed real.
The khitkii were spiteful forest spirits, bloodthirsty and vengeful. But in stories, they were known to hunger after newborns, not full-grown girls near old enough to marry.
The khitka might take any form, but the shape it favored most was that of a beautiful woman.
As his family went hungry, his wooden dolls gathered on the mantel, like a silent, useless choir.
“I will warn you just this once,” hissed Karina Stoyanova. “Go.”
He’d seemed calm after the wedding, nearly happy, but with every passing day, he grew more restless.
On the rare occasions Maxim showed Nadya any affection, Karina would appear, hovering in the doorway, her black eyes greedy, a rag twisting in her narrow hands.
Hope made her stubborn.
But mostly, she helped Magda with her cooking. It was not all food.
“Milaya,” the woman crooned. Sweet girl.
“I want to go home,” she muttered to her plate. “So go,” said Magda.
She learned which herbs were valuable and which were dangerous, and which herbs were valuable because they were dangerous.
“I want my father to be free of Karina. I want Duva to be safe. I want to go home.”
“You know that you are welcome to remain here with me,” said the witch. Nadya stretched out her hand.
Nadya, elated from the feeling of her wings and the wind spreading beneath them, did not see the sadness in the old woman’s gaze.
Karina hovered behind him, watching as she always had. There was fear in her eyes, but something else, too, something troubling that looked almost like gratitude.
But when Karina spoke, her voice was gentle. “Fly away now, little bird,” she said. “Some things are better left unseen.” Then she disappeared into the dusk.
Before that … before that, girls had gone missing from other towns, one here, one there. Stories, rumors, faraway crimes. But then the famine had come, the long winter, and Maxim had been trapped,
She spent long days in silence, working beside Magda, only picking at her food.
It was not her father she thought of, but Karina.
Karina who had given herself to a monster, in the hope of saving just one girl.
your feet may carry you to the silent streets and abandoned houses of Velisyana, the cursed city.
This is the sound of a heart gone silent. Velisyana is a corpse.
the beauty of Yeva Luchova, the old duke’s daughter.
There is some debate over what Yeva Luchova actually looked like,
It is not the particulars of her beauty but the power of it that concerns us,
Of course, that peace did not last, for Yeva only grew more beautiful as she aged.
had her image stamped on every bag of flour from his mill. So women in their kitchens came to wear their hair like Yeva, and men from all over Ravka traveled to Velisyana to see if such a creature could be real.
By the time Yeva was fifteen, it was no longer safe for her to leave the house.
“Enjoy this power, Yeva. For one day you will grow old and no one will notice when you walk down the street.”
You must choose a husband for Yeva and be done with this madness before the town is torn apart.”
But he enjoyed the attention Yeva received, and it certainly sold a lot of flour. So he devised a plan that suited his greed and his love for spectacle.
Yeva said, “Papa, forgive me, but what way is this to choose a husband? Tomorrow, I will certainly have a lot of firewood, but will I have a good man?”
“I’m sure you will be just as successful at the second task!”
what he had done, she said, “Papa, forgive me, but what way is this to find a husband? Soon I will have a fine mirror, but will I have a good man?”
