A Song of Wraiths and Ruin (A Song of Wraiths and Ruin, #1)

by Roseanne A. Brown

It was the perfect time for a story too—that hour when dusk met night and the little sunlight that remained left the sky bright but the world below dark.

Her only living daughter, Karina silently corrected.

Your behavior these last few weeks has been unusually rash, even for you. Missing your lessons—” “They’re boring.” “—getting caught with stable boys—” “Hire uglier stable boys.”

Karina had molded her grief into a sword, poised to harm anyone who dared get close. But her mother had built hers into a wall, and no sword, no matter how sharp, could take down defenses so strong.

gazed up at the girl as if she were the sun and all he’d ever known was night.

They could discuss the lives they’d both left behind, and if doing so had been worth it to come to this strange place that simultaneously needed and hated them.

When you’re far from home, it helps to bring a little bit of home with you.”

“She told me that the people we lose never truly leave, but that only we get to define how they stay.”

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Malik’s eyes burned; tears had always come to him faster than replies during arguments.

All the things Karina wished to say crammed in her throat. I’m sorry, her heart whispered. I’m scared. I can’t do this alone. Aminata opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. “She’s not here!” Aminata yelled, slamming the door shut behind her.

“If I asked you to catch me the moon with your bare hands, how would you do it?”

All at once, the world was too much and not enough, as if one wrong word might break it into a million tiny pieces.

She mouthed two words to him in Darajat, two words only he in all of Ksar Alahari would understand.

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But she held within her all their love and their hopes and their dreams. She was neither a reflection of them nor a replacement, but rather everything they’d been, combined to form something completely new. Something more than she could have been on her own.

But space was never given to the people the world decided belonged at the bottom. It was taken.

Do not underestimate the strength it takes to be kind in a world as cruel as ours.”

“Even when my own mind is threatening to tear me apart, I fight. I struggle and I fail and I still fight, even when it seems pointless. That’s what you don’t understand about being human, and that’s why you can’t beat me.”

“Bahia murdered our son, and somehow I became the villain of this story.”