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Kindle Notes & Highlights
When a man has had great wounds done to him, the urge to wound in return is an unbearable thing.
Then, in the most beautiful French Harry has ever heard, the boy whispers, ‘Of course I can fucking swim, you great Sassenach idiot. I grew up in a tower in the middle of a loch.’
This made me laugh out loud!
‘You honestly expect me to congratulate you on that being the least shit thing that’s happened to me this week?’
Harry lies there and tries to glimpse the divine reason for Sir Simon’s death. For his mother’s. Because the alternative thought – that God doesn’t have a plan, that all this random pain and cruelty is merely the purposeless lurching of the human animal as it comes howling into the world and then goes screaming out of it – is unbearable.
This, is how I feel about religion (in my opinion)
‘Don’t mistake being soft as treating someone with a modicum of human decency,’
Harry’s breath fails him. Iain’s hair has been cut. His face is exposed to view, no longer hidden behind dark, matted locks. Harry’s heart fails him next, skittering strangely in his chest. Iain is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.
‘I give you myself. I have never knelt for any man, nor did I ever think I would.’ He looks up. ‘This is all I have to give. Please accept it.’
‘He is my entire world, Alys. I loved him as a Scottish orphan; I love him as a prince of France, I love him. I love him.’
‘Did someone hurt you?’ Iain growls, soft and low. ‘Tell me. Tell me and I will kill them.’
Protective trope
The hurt is all he has left. Once it’s gone, he won’t feel anything at all.
Not for a different reason. Not because he’s in love with Death, and keen to chase him across the French countryside.
‘It’s not that,’ says Harry, though the dead visit his dreams as well. ‘My ghost walks in daylight.’
This quote oof
‘Iain,’ he says softly. ‘If you’re in heaven, I cannot let you go. I keep seeing you, trying to put you back in the world by sheer force of desire. I saw you in the Black Knight, and I feel like every step I make in this palace I am walking in your footprints. If you really are here, please know that I still love you more than anything in the world, and would make any sacrifice to have you with me again.’ He shuts his eyes. ‘And if you are but a spirit, protecting me, thank you for that. I have needed it. I have always needed you.’
I'm not crying
‘Hello,’ Iain says. ‘I’m your Uncle Iain. I can’t speak very loudly so we have to whisper, like we’re telling secrets. I’m going to teach you all sorts of terrible things to say in Gaelic. Would you like that?’
I cried so hard
‘Mummy! We have so much family now!’
