A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (The Shadow Histories #1)

by H.G. Parry

“Do you hear the walls singing?”

“Words have a magic of their own, William,”

It was a cold, irrational fear lying beneath his knowledge of their potential danger that had nothing to do with what they were or what they might do to him, and that he had never been able to explain to anyone.

The world had shifted under his words.

“Everyone does things that are wrong, but that wasn’t really the point. It was that I wasn’t doing anything right.

We have abolitionists and social reformers in our country as well, you know. They’re a troublesome species.”

“Revolution. An overstatement, surely?” “It’s always an overstatement,” the man said. “Until the rioting starts.”

He’s only there when he runs out of money and has to return to his parents, and when he is, he offends everyone. And God knows what he gets up to in Paris.” “No worse than most get up to in Paris,”

“But he’s weak, and the Templars are frightened. Once you’ve been in this game a little longer, Wilberforce, you’ll realize that fear is the most dangerous obstacle to reform that there is.”

It’s not a tide waiting to rise. It’s a powder keg, and it’s waiting for a spark.”

Like the monarchy, their power was symbolic when it came down to it. Symbols had power only as long as people gave it to them. It seemed that the time of the people had come.

The king betrayed us. I told them. He’s dangerous.” “Fools always are.”

He believed what he wrote at the time, fully and absolutely, but then moved on, leaving the afterimage of his words. And behind him, those words took on a life of their own.

Massacre.’ A good word, isn’t it? It sounds much worse than a few deaths. People don’t forgive a massacre.”

So they believed her, in the way that stories are believed. Their whispered blessings followed her to the door and helped her turn back once to wave them goodbye, even though she thought her heart would break.

It was a matter of greed—and, more dangerously, of fear.

“You can’t blame people for being afraid,” Thornton said, but in a softer tone. “I can blame them for letting their fear dictate their actions,”

You must have noticed by now that even very clever people do misguided things without regard for political consequences all the time. Especially when they’re frustrated and angry.”

But how am I supposed to… physically live through them? How am I supposed to bear her absence, every day, with only the promise—or the threat—that I will one day forget her?”

I sometimes think ‘just this once’ is the most dangerous phrase in the English language.”

“I’m truly ready. It isn’t murder if we do it in the name of liberty.” “It certainly is,” Camille said. “I don’t see the point of calling it anything else. If you can’t face the thought of murder, then you have no business calling for bloody revolution.”

“I’m not sure war works quite that logically,” Wilberforce said. “I don’t recall Achilles or Priam having a chancellor of the exchequer to advise them on finances.” “I daresay someone was giving them some thought,” Pitt said dryly. “It’s just not good manners to mention them in an epic.”

he knew what Clarkson meant when he said that brilliance and honesty weren’t enough. Words needed somebody to listen to them.

As soon as words had become state crimes, it was only a step to transform into offenses mere glances, sorrow, compassion, sighs, silence even…”

“Then what marks them from you? If the enemies of the Revolution can speak its language as well as you, then how do we know you are not such a one yourself?”

“I’m sorry for speaking when I shouldn’t have, before,” she said, and knew she was delaying. “When you shouldn’t have? You mean when I didn’t want to hear it? They’re not necessarily the same thing.”

He was bound himself now, to the French, and to the stranger. But it was a bondage he had accepted willingly, for his people, and if he paid for it, he would do so by his own choice. Perhaps that was part of what freedom meant too.