Best Served Cold

by Joe Abercrombie

War’s a dark enough trade, I draw the line at politics.

The dice came up six and one. The highest dice can roll and the lowest. A fitting judgement on Friendly’s life. The pit of horror to the heights of triumph. And back.

The people far prefer a leader who appears great, Bialoveld wrote, to one who is.

In my experience, life rarely turns out the way you expect. We must bend with the circumstances, and simply do our best.”

It’s always the poor who are crushed under rich men’s ambitions.

There was such a thing as too much truth, especially in the ears of powerful men.

“It’s true, then. You are still alive.” Monza had her breath back now, and her brother’s sword up. “It’s true, cocksucker.” “I always did admire the subtlety of your rhetoric.”

“Revenge. If you could even get it, what good would it do you? All this expenditure of effort, pain, treasure, blood, for what? Who is ever left better off for it?” His sad eyes watched her slowly stand. “Not the avenged dead, certainly. They rot on, regardless. Not those who are avenged upon, of course. Corpses all. And what of the ones who take vengeance, what of them? Do they sleep easier, do you suppose, once they have heaped murder on murder? Sown the bloody seeds of a hundred other retributions?”

Treachery is commonplace. Forgiveness is rare.

Strong leaders might like it when someone brings ’em a better idea, but weak ones never do.

When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact.

That was the difference between a hero and a villain, a soldier and a murderer, a victory and a crime. Which side of a river you called home.

There is a brief spell after a new leader comes to power, however it is achieved, during which they can do no wrong. A golden period in which people are blinded by their own hopes for something better. Nothing lasts forever, of course. In time, and usually with alarming speed, the leader’s flawless image grows tarnished with their subjects’ own petty disappointments, failures, frustrations. Soon they can do no right. The people clamour for a new leader, that they might consider themselves reborn. Again.

“It’s a war. There is no right side.”