An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell, #6)

by Deanna Raybourn

Ask them all—Alexander, Caesar, Napoléon—they were authors of empires and what did it profit them? They died as all men must. And their empires crumbled to dust.”

There was a little stutter on the “G,” a hesitation as I held the pen poised over the paper, ready to commit forgery on an international and most likely felonious scale.

“Fecklessness! We are never feckless,” I told her coldly. “We are full to the brim with feck. Now, kindly put down your weapon and let us discuss this like rational people. It is obvious that you strangled Yelena after murdering Alice Baker-Greene.

“There is no call to be in a temper,” I said. “Just because we have been abducted. Again.”

said. This would never do. He was distinctly in the grip of “the morbs” and I would not stand for it.

“You are not an optimist. You are a fantasist. You cannot really believe that just because we have eluded a fatal conclusion to every previous unexpected peril that we must do so again.

For some, grief was a devil, to be shut out upon the doorstep and ignored. But the notion of accepting that it would be a

constant visitor in one guise or another seemed to me the beginning of wisdom.

Death is part of life, child. It is not the end. It is not even the middle. It is merely a doorway. Alice is no further away from me than if she had stepped into the next room.”

Alice saw the cage for what it is. Gilded and studded with diamonds, but it is still a cage.

men. “Miss Speedwell, you have known Maximilian a few short days. I have known him all of his life. He is a good man. He just does not know it

“My own personal happiness matters nothing when weighed against the well-being of my people.”

the air was heavy with the scent of the blossoms of St. Otthild’s wort.