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January 25 - February 2, 2025
She looked that word up too, hoping to understand it, as understanding gave her power over things.
He had been a smith, and he was generous to everything he made, including Baru.
“Your help is a fishhook.”
I must learn it all. I must name every star and sin,
what had happened to the woman who was a thunderbolt, a storm cloud, a panther. Of all things Pinion looked most like a wound.
Could power be real if someone else gave it to you?
I am a part of this, but I do not have to love it. I only have to play my role. Survive long enough to gather power. Gather enough power to make a difference.
A man who does not know who he is cannot have self-interest.
“I deal in costs, not faiths.”
Perhaps here cleverness was not a strength at all, compared to the knife.
“All I meant to ask was: isn’t this the farthest you’ve ever been from the sea?”
“I have a theory,” Tain Hu said, “regarding your attention to birds.”
“It’s the only tongue of your homeland that you can still hear spoken aloud.”
“Money is only one kind of power. Faith is power, too. Love is power. Slaughter and madness are both roads to power.
“A cormorant is a fishing bird. In Iolynic fisher means a weasel who fishes. They’re a symbol of ykari Devena, the Fulcrum.”
“Just the colors. How dark the earth was, how clear the sea. We were alone with the stars and the waves and I used to think … when I stood with my fathers to watch the merchant ships go out, I used to think the ships would fall off the edge of the world, and we would remain.
“But the arm moves the sword. Is the arm to blame for murder? No. The mind moves the arm. Is the mind to blame? No. The mind has sworn an oath to duty, and that duty moves the mind, as written by the Throne. So it is that a servant of the Throne is blameless.”
his exotic color (so pale…),
Your error is fundamental to the human psyche: you have allowed yourself to believe that others are mechanisms, static and solvable, whereas you are an agent.”
Was it really slavery if the slave was grateful? If that gratitude had been hammered into the alloy of his being?
Why should she be punished for her chastity? Why should her bedroom matter more than her books and coin?
As a child Baru had watched the birds as much as the stars—watched the beat of their wings in flight, and tried to decipher the technique.
It’s not what the Masquerade does to you that you should fear, she wanted to tell Ake. It’s what the Masquerade convinces you to do to yourself.
The secret of secrets rose in her like a rotten thing trying to retch itself up, and just to stop it, to head it off, to do anything but say it or feel it like a pole of obsidian strapped to the curve of her spine,
I had the ships and I had the hate. But I couldn’t find the way.
truth. “I have been a servant too long. I want to help make something free.”
She stood at the prow and watched the dawn, trying to see the curve of the world, to imagine it turning beneath the sun, the great patterns of trade and sickness and heredity and force moving on its face. The very ink and grammar of history. Driven by and made from and ultimate master of hundreds of millions of people.
Light on the water like a drowned moon.
as she traced the chain, the knot, the map of all the roads that had brought Muire Lo to ash in the forest—at the center of the map, between the thickets of empire and revolt, she came, again and again, to herself.
“This is my vow: in life, in death, I am yours.”
She had always loved the stars. But in the desert of winter it was impossible to forget that they were cold, and distant, and did not care.
“There will be death before we take Treatymont. Let us make a companion of it.”
The accountant waking inside the woman.
There was so much more to Tain Hu. So much left to be discovered. An inner sky, constellations barely hinted at, waiting to be mapped.
Baru put her face against her horse’s flank and bristled her face, her eyes, with the hair and the stink, trying to weep again, to break open and run into the grass like pus. Nothing would come. Her heart had clotted.
“There is nothing behind you. You understand? Everything lies ahead now.”
He’ll kill me, she thought. And she felt joy.
How could you know something for a fact and ignore it?
found some way to betray her own betrayal.
If she wanted to die, she did not want it enough.
She accepted the bargain without understanding the price. A terrible mistake, for an accountant.
Your brain can no longer understand that half of the world. The left hemisphere of your vision is your entire universe.
A traitor either way.
“Does the Qualm console you, my lady?”
“What grief would I need consoled?”
Baru always forgets: there are other players.
In an orgy of self-punishment, between swallows of salt,
the memory of crimes more beautiful and dear than rebellion or treachery.
“Why would you give me anything?” “Because it was no lie,” Tain Hu whispers, and turns away. Baru sits, and stares, and tries to make something of the hollow in her chest.
But I will not be bound as you are. I will walk among your council and you will tremble at what you have unleashed.
