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They had crossed the white pine copse earlier that day, and though they could see the remnants of a road underneath the overgrown bracken and fallen boughs, it wouldn’t have let a dogcart through.
She sounded a little like the former Divine, who had always encouraged their acolytes to speak to the florists and the bakers as much as to the warlords and magistrates. Accuracy above all things. You will never remember the great if you do not remember the small.
I got to know the palace by the baseboards, the wood of the floors, the smell of the paper screens, and the way that lamp oil burned all night, never letting the darkness approach His Most Divine Presence the Emperor of Pine and Steel, Emperor Sung.
History will say that she was an ugly woman, but that is not true. She had a foreigner’s beauty, like a language we do not know how to read.
Those who bear children hold the keys to life and death, and their ill wishes are to be feared.
Instead, her most august setting only made her seem cruder, a paste gem in a setting of gold filigree.
Kazu drooped like a poplar in drought,
Years later, In-yo tried to find Kazu, looking with both the chroniclers and the executioners, who kept their own secret records.
He moved like a bucket on a rope, always on the verge of spilling all its water, tottering back and forth, faster than he intended to go.
At first, I tried to keep my lips squeezed tight, because I do not think that kind of thing ought to be encouraged, but then my mouth started to tremble, and the laughter, never so much a presence in my life, bubbled up out of me, and I started to laugh.
the lake glowed like a baleful eye, eerily beautiful.
The Minister of the Left could not argue with her. He could bully, he could imply, and he could outright lie, but in the end, she was the empress, a step away from divinity, and he was only a man.
With every step we took into the cooling world, In-yo’s hair grew blacker and her eyes brighter. She woke up in the morning and breathed in great lungfuls of the cold air until she was almost drunk with it. She looked north, and her eyes shone with a viciously bright light.
