The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

“Young girls should have more on their minds than lipstick and giggling, or they will grow from silly girls to sillier women.

Control was what separated men from beasts, and they were the beasts.

Women love ’em tall, dark, and tragic. You’re six long-lean-and-mean feet of heroic war stories and unhappy past—”

She was born of lake water and madness.

“If I teach you anything,” he whispered, “let it be how to move through the world without making a sound, Nina Borisovna. If they can’t hear you coming, they’ll never lay hands on you.

You fear nothing, you get stupid. It’s better to fear one thing, Nina Borisovna. Put all the terror into that, and it leaves you just careful enough.”

We’re standing in the ashes of a war like no other—if we don’t try harder to see the shades of gray involved, we’ll find ourselves in the thick of a new one.”

There was some relief in the thought, some regret, some pleasure. No need to rank one over the other.

Loneliness was as effective a tongue loosener as brandy.

I’ve come thousands of kilometers across Russia, and I haven’t seen any part of it I liked except the skies.

“Fathers want to build something they can leave to their children. Sometimes they don’t stop and think if what they’ve built is anything their children want to be saddled with.”

“Is a Russian thing. Sit around, drink too much, talk about death.” She pushed her empty plate away. “It makes us cheerful.”

“We’re good together.” Jordan made herself go on before she lost her nerve. “But is it love, or is it habit?”

I can’t give up my homeland and my oath for love.” She managed a small smile under swimming eyes. “That’s the kind of thing that makes men say little princesses have no place at the front.”

“Nice boys are dull,”

“He knows how to look. Really look, when a woman is talking.”

“Some men ogle, some men look. The first makes us bristle, and the second makes us melt, and men are at an utter loss knowing the difference. But we do, and we know it at once.”

“It was the first thing I noticed about him. He could admire a lady as though he were admiring a beautiful porcelain vase, without making her feel he was affixing a price tag.”

To look back was to drown. To look forward was to fly.

The farther east from the Rhine, the darker the fairy tales.”

“There are two ways to learn a language fast, and one of them is when you’re under ten and have a pliable young brain.” “What’s the other?” He grinned. “Over a pillow.”

“An interpreter tries to work a step removed. You’re not really there, in a way. You’re like a set of interphones; you make it possible for the two people on either side to hear each other. And that’s everything, when you come down to it. That’s it, in a nutshell: if people would just hear each other—”

The lens removes me from the scene I’m recording, in a sense. I’m a witness to it, but I’m not part of it.”

work and play and passion and friendship blending together into something so very easy.

Anyone completely unafraid when standing outnumbered among filthy strangers in a war zone was either idiotic, saintly, or dangerous.

I am the rusalka. Born from a lake to find home in the sky, come back to the lake.

“Why have a bat if you don’t hit people?”

Children could be very boring, Nina thought, even if you liked them.

The dead lie beyond any struggle, so we living must struggle for them. We must remember, because there are other wheels that turn besides the wheel of justice. Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back. We slouch yawning to a new horizon and find ourselves gazing at old hatreds seeded and watered by forgetfulness and flowering into new wars. New massacres. New monsters