The Empress of Salt and Fortune (The Singing Hills Cycle, #1)

by Nghi Vo

Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.

She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read.

Sometimes the things we see do not make sense until many years have gone by. Sometimes it takes generations.

“The abbey at Singing Hills would say that if a record cannot be perfect, it should at least be present. Better for it to exist than for it to be perfect and only in your mind.”

“Save that anger,” Mai said with a sigh. “Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves.”

That’s something I think peasants understand better than nobles. For them, the way down matters, whether you are skewered by a dozen guardsmen or thrown in a silk sack to drown or allowed to remove your robe and walk down to the shores of the lake before you gut yourself. Peasants understand that dead is dead.