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There is, Tarats believes, a kind of inevitability to empire unchecked.
He thinks: At long last, perhaps there is an empire larger than the Empire that has been devouring us by inches. Perhaps now it comes. Perhaps now I will be able to stop waiting.
He said it in the Teixcalaanli language, which made it a tautology: the word for “world” and the word for “the City” were the same, as was the word for “empire.”
There was nothing safe; there were only gradations of exposure to danger. She felt deliriously unmoored, and that was before any cyanide exposure.
At last, there are words for how I feel, and they aren’t even in my language—> Yes, Mahit says. Yes, she does. That ache: longing and a violent sort of self-hatred, that only made the longing sharper.
Electric fire in her nerves, the sweetness of being known.
Seduction’s a matter of poetry. Of a story he wants to be true.
And she has been flirting back,> Yskandr went on. <When you’re not in the middle of a coup attempt, you might want to do something about that.
Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.
Empire was empire—the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died.
“I am terrified of you, Your Excellency,” she said, using the word for “terror” which, in poetry, could also mean “awed.” The sort of adjective that was applied to atrocities or divine miracles. Or emperors, which Mahit assumed were in many ways both at once. “The perils,” said Nineteen Adze ruefully, “of getting to know someone.”
I carry exile in my heart. It animates my poetry and my politics;
It would be so useful if she felt nothing. If she could be purely a political tool, purely an instrument of preventing Teixcalaan from annexing Lsel.
<Nothing empire touches remains itself,> Yskandr murmured to her.
“This is—the whole world is changing and I’m crying over my friend,” she said. “Some poet I am.”
