The Fate of the Tearling (The Queen of the Tearling, #3)

by Erika Johansen

“You are a selfish woman, and careless, and stupid. You should never have had the fate of others in your hands. I believe that I am a better person for having been raised by Barty and Carlin, for never having known you. I want no part of you at all.”

Blood did not make Elyssa a better mother, nor had it made Mhurn a father; he had knifed her in the back. Kelsea felt far closer to Barty and Carlin, even to Mace, than she ever had to her own parents.

“Only as strong as I want it to be,”

The circumstances of your birth don’t matter. Kindness and humanity are everything.

“We came so far, Lazarus. Did we really come all this way only to fail?” “Sometimes that’s just how it turns out, Lady.” But Kelsea didn’t believe that. Perhaps it was simply her long life of reading books, where plot was carefully scripted and every action taken was supposed to mean something. They had fought through too much together to fail now. There must be some option, even if she couldn’t see it.

She would learn to live with Pen’s indifference. There were more important matters to hand.

“The past always matters, you fool,”

Utopia was not the clean slate Tear had imagined, but an evolution. Humanity would have to work for that society, and work hard, dedicating themselves to an unending vigilance against the mistakes of the past. It would take generations, countless generations perhaps, but— “We could get there,” Kelsea murmured. “And even if not, we should always be growing closer.”

Mankind’s oldest dream . . . even the possibility was worth dying for.

Kelsea wasn’t a perfect atheist, not really; she took far too much comfort in the idea of the inevitable.

here—small-mindedness fed off religion just as surely as the other way around—but

A church was only as good or bad as the philosophy that emanated from the pulpit.

“You have a hole inside, and you’ll fill it with anything. Quality not required.”

Entire countries would close their borders and build walls to keep out phantom threats. Can you imagine?”

This problem, like so many, began in the past, and it was too late to fix.

she felt a horrible comfort there, the comfort of coming back to a house that had long since been wrecked but which was, nevertheless, home.

Only now did Kelsea realize how much of herself she had given away during the past few months, how much of her personality had been dead, dampened beneath the rigid control she had imposed upon herself in order to survive in the dungeon.

“It seemed easier to control the future by changing the present. The past is an unwieldy thing.”

“The past controls the future;

Everyone around her continued, oblivious, happy in this new world. She had not been left alone so much as left behind, and she could not imagine a loneliness more vast.

“You’re a healthy young woman, with your whole life ahead of you, and yet you sit here weeping for the past.”

“All these people. Surely you should be able to find something new to care about.”

What could she possibly do as Kelsea Raleigh? She liked her job at the library; she loved her little flat. Was that everything? How could it not be an empty life, after watching kingdoms rise and fall?

There was gain there, great gain, perhaps . . . but Kelsea did not trust herself to see it clearly. The past stood in the way.

To let go of the unrecoverable past and attempt to grasp a future . . . that would take courage, far more than she possessed. The past was too much a part of her.