Priest of Bones (War for the Rose Throne #1)

by Peter McLean

Will kills a man he weeps afterward. Mind you, he’s killed so many fucking men it ain’t funny no more,

‘This is the Mother Inferior,’ Aunt Enaid said to me. ‘How dare you!’ the other woman screamed at her. ‘I’ll have you switched to within an inch of your life for that!’ ‘Switch this,’ Aunt Enaid said, and punched the Mother Superior full in the face.

YES

‘It’s late and I’m tired,’ I said. ‘If Billy wants to float in the air, then I can’t see it’s hurting anyone.’

I feel like this is how I'd react. "I'm too fucking tired, let him float if he wants to."

Simple Sam grinned and confessed that he had pissed in Jochan’s brandy bottle one night when Jochan had passed out, then Jochan had woken up and drank it and not noticed the difference. Simple Sam held that that was funny, but he felt he ought to confess it anyway, and I told him that I thought it was funny as well, but he didn’t ought to do it again or Jochan would hurt him, and I forgave him and sent him on his way.

a god who had nothing better to worry about than who you might choose to fuck didn’t sound like he was worth much, to my mind.

‘Stop calling me “the Woman”. Your brother Jochan came up with that name and I’ve never cared for it. Maybe I wept when I done hard things, but who hasn’t? It ain’t only women who weep.’

Abingon. I remembered smoke and dust and noise, the siege cannon firing day and night to bring down the great walls. There had been flames everywhere, in the city. Disease was rampant. Wounds got infected and men died screaming in their beds. Supplies were lost or looted, and men starved. Even Cookpot couldn’t produce forage from thin air, but he had caught rats for us to eat rather than see us go hungry. The water was almost always bad, and it wasn’t uncommon to see men fighting with liquid shit running down their legs from their poisoned guts. Abingon, where I had seen men driven so mad by the constant noise of the guns that they didn’t know their own names any more. I remembered a fellow brought before me for confession, dragged between two of the colonel’s bullyboys. He was a man broken with battle shock who had fled the field the day before when he simply couldn’t stand it another second longer. They brought him to me to say his confession, but all he could do was weep. Afterward, they executed him for cowardice. No, there couldn’t be another Abingon. Not here, not now. Not ever.

Visceral.

Where is the difference between holy and possessed? I wondered. When does miracle become magic, magic become witchcraft? Is it in the nature of the deed itself, or in the eye of the beholder? Is it decided in the telling after the fact, and if so does it depend on who does that telling?

One thing I have noticed in life is that the men who speak the most of honour are usually those who have the least of it.

At first you think you want to pour out your feelings into the bottle, but you come to realise that you don’t. You just want to drown them, to burn them away with alcohol until it stops hurting.

Home = hit.

knowing that a thing is foolish and doing something to change it are different matters.

When people have run out of food, and hope and places to hide, do not be surprised if they have also run out of mercy.