The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos, #1)

by Samantha Shannon

Her heart was a fistful of thunder. She dared not speak, for to show she knew his language was to forge a link between them, and to betray herself. To betray the fact that just as she was now a witness to his crime, he was a witness to hers.

The dragons watched her. It was said they could see the deepest secrets of a soul, for human beings were made of water, and all water was theirs.

Ead knew the scent of a secret. She wore it like a perfume.

As if they knew about the Priory.

difference in religion

an unexpected taste entered her mouth. The taste of the truth.

the way i felt the tension without even knowing whats next

What the Inysh did not know was that it was Cleolind, not Galian, who had banished the Nameless One. They knew nothing of the orange tree.

“You do have the tongue of a storyteller—but I suspect you have heard too many stories, and not quite enough truth.

There had been some trouble that had concluded in his departure from Inys, but the nature of the incident was a closely guarded secret.

Siden, the gift of the orange tree—a magic of fire and wood and earth. The Inysh in their witlessness would call it sorcery.

A woman so quick to insult those beneath her must be vulnerable to flattery.

there is something odd about the Berethnets. Each queen only having one child, always a daughter, and they all look so similar . . . I don’t know. Sounds like sorcery to—”

“Fýredel, the right wing of the Nameless One, appears to have woken from his sleep.”

What if the continuation of the House of Berethnet is not what keeps the Nameless One at bay? How had a young woman of Virtudom come to this heretical conclusion?

That is the problem with stories, child. The truth in them cannot be weighed.

We may be small, and we may be young, but we will shake the world for our beliefs.”

“Here I am,” she said softly. “Here I am.” The High Western let out a scream of rage.

this is dope

Sea sisters, Susa had called them once. Two pearls formed in the same oyster.

“You have not seen death, my lord. You have only seen the mask we put on it.”

blood of the Mother. It tasted like sunlight and laughter and prayer.

Eadaz du Zāla uq-Nāra, a handmaiden of Cleolind.

It is the Mother who compels you, not this Inysh queen.”

“I have a sense,” he said, “that you do not think well of me, Mistress Duryan.” “I do not think of you often enough to have formed any opinion of you, Your Grace.” The corner of his mouth flinched. “A fine hit.”

“Niclays was exiled from court because he failed to make Queen Sabran an elixir of life.”

“In darkness, we are naked. Our truest selves. Night is when fear comes to us at its fullest, when we have no way to fight it,” Ead continued. “It will do everything it can to seep inside you. Sometimes it may succeed—but never think that you are the night.”

“Queen Rosarian died fourteen years ago,” Loth stated. “Then . . . Sigoso did not do it under Draconic control.”

Consider the way she had to go, Think of the hungry snare, The net she herself had woven, Aware or unaware

In the story, she had no name, like too many women in stories of old.

No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.

“You are in the Priory of the Orange Tree, Lord Arteloth. In Lasia.”

“The ichneumon.” Chassar poured himself a drink. “They are old allies of the Priory.”

“You know the story of the Damsel and the Saint. You know how a knight rescued a princess from a dragon and took her away to a kingdom across the sea. You know that they founded a great city and lived happily ever after.” He smiled. “Everything you know is false.”

She was reborn as a living flame.

There, she founded the Priory of the Orange Tree, a house of women blessed with the sacred flame. A house, Lord Arteloth, of mages.”

“The Priory’s purpose is to slay wyrms,

It was twilight. Or dawn. The sky was bruised with cloud, but the sun had left a finger-smear of honey.

“You believe,” Ead said, frustrated. “As others believe in gods. Often with less proof,” Truyde pointed out.

“Go to Queen Sabran, Ead. Leave me to my beliefs, and I will leave you to yours,” she said. “We will see soon enough whose truth is correct.”

The sea had turned itself to glass, so the heavens might finally look upon themselves.

The Queen of Inys did not have the plague, but she would never bear a living child.

She was lost and found and wandering, all at once.

It would light a flame of scandal, and the fire would rise until it scorched them both. But Ead called fire her friend, and she would plunge into the furnace

It is my work in the shadows that allows courtesy to maintain its face at court.” Combe observed her for a few moments.

“May the Saint go with you.” “I know no Saint,” Ead said honestly, and saw her friend’s confusion, “but I take your blessing, Meg.”

“Love and fear do strange things to our souls. The dreams they bring, those dreams that leave us drenched in salt water and gasping for breath as if we might die—those, we call unquiet dreams. And only the scent of a rose can avert them.”

Pain flowered sharply in her midriff. She closed her eyes, imagined that pain as a candle, and snuffed it.

where is art???

And the heat cracked her open, like the clay she was, and made her body cry out to the world. All around her, the world answered.

“You have a ghost, Niclays. Do not become a ghost yourself.” How many years had it been since anyone had touched his face, or looked at him with sympathy?