Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

“I hate you all,” said Mercymorn passionately. “I have hated you for millennia … except you, my lord.” “Thanks,” said God. “I merely want to put you in a jail,” said his Lyctor, now meditative, “and fill up the jail with acid once for every time you made a frivolous remark, or ate peanuts in a Cohort Admiralty meeting, or said, ‘What would I know, I’m only God.’ Then at the end of a thousand years, you would say, ‘Mercy, I have learned not to do any of these things, because I hated the acid you put on me.’ And I would say, ‘That is why I did it, Lord. I did it for you, and for your empire.’ I often think about this,” she finished.

Harrow remembered that Palamedes Sextus had made a war of his whole life in order to prosecute his desire to marry this woman.