A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan, #2)

by Arkady Martine

To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles—this they name empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

she was a soldier, it was the nature of being what she was to commit small atrocities, like it was the nature of stars to emit radiation that burned and poisoned as much as it gave warmth and life.

But it left all the doors of future action open. Keeping secrets always did.

Loyalty wasn’t transitive. It didn’t move up and down the chain of command smoothly. It could get cut off, or rerouted.

Oh, look, another war. Someone else’s atrocity, far away on the edges of the known world. But she was very close to those edges now.

Wait for the real problem, Your Excellency. Don’t borrow trouble that doesn’t come to you on its own.”

there really was no way for a barbarian to say no and keep being the kind of barbarian the Empire thought of as a person.

whatever cease-fire they had brokered was holding. For now. Nine Hibiscus let herself wish it hadn’t, wish it as savagely and miserably as she liked—she was a soldier, a leader of soldiers, she was not meant to have ended a war like this—and then locked her wishing away, as if she’d swallowed slow poison her own self.