A Heart of Blood and Ashes (A Gathering of Dragons, #1)

by Milla Vane

Walls were not strength. The alliance that had formed between the riders of Parsathe and the five southern realms in the wake of the Destroyer—that was strength.

Maddek could not claim to know whether the goddess of law cared for crops and water, but he thought her favor had been helped along by Ephorn’s location.

The duty of serving the alliance and protecting their people left his warriors covered in sweat and filth, and he would not pretend a warrior’s work was a clean work.

They obeyed, as Maddek knew they would. They were soldiers, not warriors—and one warrior might follow another, as his warriors followed him. But soldiers followed orders and Zhalen’s son had given them none. So they would obey Maddek’s orders, instead.

His color heightened, his anger heating. Because he’d expected her to balk, she realized. She never would. Best he learned that now.

will bear it. I daresay the pain of freedom is far more tolerable than the comfort of prison in my tower chamber.”

Though it hurts. That was how she’d done everything her entire life. So she would this, too.

Whatever I must do, I will do it. My people will see that, and they will know that every step I take is a better direction for us all.”

A clever wife was not something to lament—and a clever queen was something to celebrate.

Not to be the best of his people. But to be like those who were. What mattered was not that Maddek was the finest of them—for one man could never be—but that he would never stop striving toward that goal.

Her silence did not mean punishment. It meant she was hurt. All this morning she had been.

“We cannot always choose our fathers—or heal our mothers.”

“But if you wish to be a warrior, you must tell us when you have been wounded. A warrior has the duty and the honor of tending to a fellow warrior’s injuries, just as you have tended to Toric. Do not deny us the honor of tending to you.”

Even from pain, sometimes beauty emerges. Your rage is beauty. Your courage is beauty. Your compassion is beauty.

Because when facing inevitability, trying was the most one might hope for.

Her word is law—but sometimes the only justice is burning rule and law to the ground.”

she also said you made the hardest decision that can ever be made: doing what is right and good, while knowing how painful the consequences might be.

Family has the special ability to lower even the most reasonable among us to the level of slinging blades and meats.”

“If ever you touch another, I will boil the meat from your cockbone with asilor poison before slitting your throat. You will not.”

“And what will you be?” “Yours,” he said

“What have I done, never saying this to you?” he said hoarsely. “Never telling you these words that I should have said over and over again. What have I done, that you do not know how I would ride across the world just to lay my gaze upon your face? That I would crawl there on the mere hope of knowing your touch again? What have I done, that as I kneel here, you still do not know that with my full heart, I love you?”

You are my heart, Yvenne, and my strength—and certainly my brains.”