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“You can take a thing when no one’s looking. But defending it, even with all the advantage on your side, is no easy task,” Madoc told her with a laugh. She looked up to find him offering her a hand. “Power is much easier to acquire than it is to hold on to.”
There is only now. There is only tomorrow and tonight and now and soon and never.
“For a moment,” he says, “I wondered if it wasn’t you shooting bolts at me.” I make a face at him. “And what made you decide it wasn’t?” He grins up at me. “They missed.”
After all, if the insult to me is pointing out that I am mortal, then this is my riposte: I live here, too, and I know the rules. Perhaps I even know them better than you since you were born into them, but I had to learn.
When I look at my new clothes, though, I think of all the good things that come from someone knowing you well enough to understand your hopes and fears.
I’ve wanted this and feared it, and now that it’s happening, I don’t know how I will ever want anything else.
“Your ridiculous family might be surprised to find that not everything is solved by murder,” Locke calls after me. “We would be surprised to find that,” I call back.
He lifts his mug in a salute. “To the triumph of goodness, just not before we get ours.”
The Folk doubtlessly learned this lesson long ago. They do not need to deceive humans. Humans will deceive themselves.
It occurs to me that maybe desire isn’t something overindulging helps. Maybe it is not unlike mithridatism; maybe I took a killing dose when I should have been poisoning myself slowly, one kiss at a time.
One hand goes to the hilt of my sword; all the frustration I feel over everything I cannot control bends toward fixing this one thing.
