The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #1)

by Seth Dickinson

She traced the facts of stone and water that boxed Aurdwynn, made it small and desirable and impossible to escape—an arena, a cage, a pulpit. Empires had grappled and died here.

The Masquerade had taught her all the names of sin. But her parents taught her first.

Now. How do we use this to detect rebellion?” “I think you’d like it better if I pretended not to understand, so you could tell me.” “Very good. You’re a fine secretary.

Justice for Muire Lo

“Money is only one kind of power. Faith is power, too. Love is power. Slaughter and madness are both roads to power. Certainly, symbols are power—you wear one wherever you go, that purse you carry. And you wear others when you decide how to dress yourself, how to look at men and women, how to carry your body and direct your gaze. And all these symbols can raise people to labor or war.”

Heingyl led the first charge, which killed Radaszic’s sons and drove into the heart of the column. And there upon a lance tip, maybe Heingyl the Stag Hunter’s lance tip, maybe not, the line of Radaszic ended, and went into the ground to feed the flowers that would feed the bees.

Inaction is succor. Negligence is succor. Collaboration is death. Give us Baru Fisher.

Scary as fuck!

want to make a new empire for my people. I want to reclaim my blood and history from the interloper out of Falcrest. I differ from Nayauru in one great respect: she is dead, I am ascendant, and my children are going to fuck her name out of every song and book of noble lineage.

Damn, bitch

“Every moment is an edict spoken by its past. The past is the real tyranny.” “I regret, then, that we cannot aim your bowmen at anything but our future.”

Xate Olake’s little crossbow snapped. The quarrel took his target beneath the jaw. Duke Lyxaxu, the scholar-lord of High Stone, husband and father, fell from his saddle without any final word or expression, without even a moment to know that he had died and to consider the ontology of it.

This book describes death in such a cold, detached way it made me gasp essentially every time