The Lost Sisters (The Folk of the Air, #1.5)

by Holly Black

BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD, LEST THAT YOUR HEART’S BLOOD SHOULD RUN COLD.

Let’s start with a love story. Or maybe it’s another horror story. It seems like the difference is mostly in where the ending comes.

But Mom’s story is a lesson. All stories are lessons.

Fairy tales have a moral: Stay on the path. Don’t trust wolves. Don’t steal things, not even things you think no normal person would care about. Share your food but don’t trust people who want to share their food with you; don’t eat their shiny red apples, nor their candy houses, nor any of it. Be nice, always nice, and polite to everyone: kings and beggars, witches and wounded bears. Don’t break a promise.

It’s important that we learn the lessons our...

Fairy tales are full of girls who wait, who endure, who suffer. Good girls. Obedient girls. Girls who crush nettles until their hands bleed. Girls who haul water for witches. Girls who wander through deserts or sleep in ashes or make homes for transformed brothers in the woods. Girls without hands, without eyes, without the power of speech, without any power at all. But then a prince rides up and sees the girl and finds her beautiful. Beautiful, not despite her suffering, but because of it. And when I saw that note in my bag, I thought that maybe I was no longer stuck in a fairy tale, maybe I could be the hero of one.

don’t know if you’ve ever felt that way. Maybe I should have talked to you about it. Maybe I should have talked to you about a lot of things.

Faeries despise humans as liars, but there are different kinds of lying.

We pretended to be fine, pretended the possibility of being fine into existence. And when pretending seemed like it might be too hard, we just didn’t ask each other the questions that would require it.

You were bold and daring and breathtakingly stupid.

Isn’t it interesting how often those three go together

This will be over quickly, he’d said. But not everything is better for being fast.

I was scared. Really, really, really scared.

Yes Taryn we get it, that’s pretty much you summed up.

Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. Be good, but not too good. Be pretty, but not too pretty. Be honest, but not too honest. Maybe no one got lucky. Maybe it was too hard.

“Sometimes it’s easier to be mad at the people close to us,” Vivi said, “than to be mad at the people who deserve it.”

I suppose that’s one good thing about being obedient and faithful and good. People think you will never surprise them.

I realized that Locke might teach me lessons, but he wasn’t going to like what I did once I learned them.

And despite having put Cardan on the throne through my own machinations, despite scheming to keep him there, I cannot help being unnerved by how comfortable he looks.