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January 2 - January 7, 2017
These people are so damned proud of their hatred! Hatred is easy, and lazy to boot. It’s love that demands effort, love that exacts a price from each of us. Love costs; this is its value. —The Glynn Queen’s Words, as compiled by Father Tyler
“Dear God,” he whispered, and even though he was currently walking through the oldest house of worship in the new world, he knew he was talking to no one at all. If God had ever been in the Tearling, he was long gone.
Dyer could not possibly hate Javel more than he hated himself.
It was a terrible thing, having hope.
“I belong to no one but myself.”
But hatred was stronger than memory, infinitely stronger, and in her hatred Kelsea felt an echo of the woman she had become in those last few weeks in the Keep: the Queen of Spades. Kelsea had meant to lay that woman to rest, but she did not rest easily.
Learn all the knowledge in the world, but your gut will always know best.
don’t let your past govern your future.”
The mistake of utopia is to assume that all will be perfect. Perfection may be the definition, but we are human, and even into utopia we bring our own pain, error, jealousy, grief. We cannot relinquish our faults, even in the hope of paradise, so to plan a new society without taking human nature into account is to doom that society to failure.
The future cannot be divorced from the past. Trust me, for I would know.
life. She had wanted to stride the world, stabbing out evil, had been dreaming of it for months. But she knew that the root of these dreams went back further, all the way back to her childhood,
Oh, how she had missed her rage in these past weeks, missed it in a way she would not have imagined possible, and now she felt as though she were reuniting with herself, becoming whole.
“No one owns me,” she whispered.
There was no quick and easy eradication of evil. There was only the passage of time, of generations, of people raising children who would hold all other lives just as valuable as their own.
Her kingdom might be flawed, but it was still worth fighting for, and more than anything, Kelsea simply wanted to go home.
Some people are simply broken.
The longing to be back in her own land, standing on Tear soil, was so sharp that it wrenched something inside her.
“Of course I do. You were raised to believe in something. Many things.” “And you believe in nothing?” “I believe in myself.”
Surely the world was better when unusual things could happen.
She was helping, helping to save the weak and punish those who needed punishment.
She wanted no invisible sky fathers hanging over the Town, mandating irrational behavior. She didn’t want to hear prayer around every corner.
“Everyone’s frightened. But not all of us are dumb enough to go looking for Jesus.”
Behind them, the unseen penitent had started up again, a steady stream of pleas to God, and Katie felt as though she could cheerfully brain him with her shovel.
The outbreak of religious fervor, a phenomenon that Katie had never seen before, seemed to have lodged itself inside this second town like a parasitic growth.
Those who had been saved—and there was a word, saved, that Katie had never trusted—had apparently earned the right to forget that they had once been sinners, too, as though baptism could erase the past.
“We forgot. We forgot everything we should have learned.”
For a terrible moment, she wondered whether she had ever known Row, or whether she had simply invented the boy she thought she knew from whole cloth. Nothing seemed certain any longer.
“Well,” Katie said awkwardly, and in that awkwardness she felt as though a door was closing somewhere, walling off everything that had come before, all of the times they had snuck away from their parents and decided to run away, the forts they had built in each other’s backyards, the times Row had helped her with her maths homework, all the way back to that day against the wall of the schoolhouse when Row had smoothed a hand over her aching scalp and made her forget that someone had been cruel. The door closed, deep in her mind, with a hollow boom that Katie heard rather than felt, and when
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He never apologized, Katie realized suddenly. All these years and he never apologized for stranding me there and leaving me for that thing— The thought tried to crystallize, to become anger, but before it could, Katie shoved it away. She still loved Row; she always would. She would miss him while he was in the mountains.
Don’t be fooled by the reprieve, he told her. In the end, we all burn.
“I put my trust in fiction.”
I know how you conducted yourself. Slaves tortured and raped—and the men too; don’t think I haven’t heard about your predilections. People enter your laboratories and never come out. That’s not necessity. That’s carte blanche.”
She had wanted to be herself again, but only now did she understand how much that wish would cost.
Few things are more dangerous to an egalitarian ideal than the concept of a chosen people, and the divide drawn by the early iteration of God’s Church helped to exacerbate the many ideological faults that already underlay the landscape.
Our species is capable of altruism, certainly, but it is not a game we play willingly, let alone well.
Sometimes I think: if they want to walk around armed and build fences and let a church tell them what to do, let them wallow in it. They can build their own town of closed thinking, and live there, and find out later what a shitty place it really is. It’s not my problem.”
“No one ever wants the fight, Jonathan. But if it comes to you, and it’s a righteous fight, you don’t walk away.”
The faithful are easy. Easy to convince, easy to direct, easy to discard.
All the contempt she felt for the people in the Town—fools with so little sense of self that they needed to believe in an invisible God who would peek inside people’s bedrooms—that contempt suddenly overwhelmed her,
trying to do the right thing so often ended in wrong.
but you once told me there was nothing to be gained by dwelling on the past. The future, now, that’s everything.”
“Empathy. Carlin always said it was the great value of fiction, to put us inside the minds of strangers.
My suffering was real, she insisted. Perhaps. But do not let it blind you to those who suffer worse.
She nodded slowly, feeling something like sorrow break inside her. They had not had many nights, the two of them, but they had been good nights, somewhere halfway between love and friendship, an oasis of sweetness in the harsh desert that comprised Kelsea’s life since leaving the cottage. She would miss that side of Pen, but deep within the pain was a kernel of respect for him, growing larger every second.
We’re alike, she thought, staring at Pen’s face. Behind her eyes, she suddenly saw her city, its rolling hillsides aflame, and she realized that this work, the great work of her life, outweighed anything that she would ever want for herself. There might be more men, many of them, but none of them would ever get in the way of the work. She would not allow it.
Hell? Hell is a fairy tale for the gullible, for what punishment could be worse than that we inflict upon ourselves? We burn so badly in this life that there can be nothing left.
Even if Kelsea had been pretty, that was not the praise she waited for, because even in her youngest years, she had already known how little it truly meant.
Sometimes she thought she would do anything to bring her crumbling country back together, but there was a low beneath which she wouldn’t sink . . . wasn’t there?
This woman-child could never comprehend the magnitude of her mistakes. There would be no explanation, no accountability. There would be no catharsis. No one for me to hate.
In a book, the thought would perhaps have been liberating, would have healed something deep inside Kelsea. In reality, it was the loneliest idea she could have imagined. All of the strength faded from her arms, and she backed away.
