More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She had enjoyed the vague fantasy of raising powerful, forward-thinking young women with the courage to amount to more than their mother, but it was just that: a fantasy. Misaki had long since let go of the idea that she could raise her children the way she wanted—or that they were even her children at all.
It wasn’t her bulky frame; it was the way she threw it around with careless confidence in a world where everyone, ladies and swordsmen alike, stepped so lightly.
It was easy to forgive a young man following orders.
Flayed and boneless, he faced the creature he had awakened, this woman of gods’ blood and fury.
Somehow, he had broken her anyway, but she hadn’t broken quietly like porcelain. She had broken like black glass and ice—jagged and more dangerous than ever.
And he saw them both for what they were: a woman who needed her husband, and a man who needed his wife.
In the falling snow, Takeru stared at the woman he had married and saw her for the first time.
The Empire may have refused to let the people of Takayubi mark the graves of the dead, but the mountain didn’t forget.
Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.
Red seeped from the sky like blood washed out to sea, leaving only the blue waves of evening.