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

by Nghi Vo

Haha - napping in the morning, sleeping early in the evening.

Simile extended

Haha

“As you live with anything, I suspect. You bear it, or you end it.

I didn’t say that

I’d cried the first time I saw the luminescence of the lake.

If it was a monster of some kind, it was a monster that watched over me, and, at the very least, it had not devoured me yet.

Haha

Back to thirds person Chih p.o,v.

In Singing Hills, they sold a little perfumed wax figure of a perched hoopoe, and Chih noticed that there was no such token in with the rest.

There was something almost sinister about the tokens and the itinerary,

Thriving Fortune itself seemed to be a place made of stories and plots, conspiracies and fury.

Chih thought of the fairies that could do anything, if only they were asked with exactly the right words.

Anh empress in exile,

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.

sometimes I think she must have reckoned the cost cheap.

all it cost her was one fortune-teller.

The empress would release doves along the way,

Mai,

one of her clever birds took to the air with the others released, and then it winged its way north, a message in code wrapped around its thin leg.

Phuong’s

the lake where his wife had turned into a kingfisher.

his age making him no threat to the young wives who wanted their fortunes read and perhaps had a little taste for treason.

Matulan the turtle god,

Mai

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

Mai

Maybe she was a fox girl after all, come to bedevil an empire when it was at its most fragile, or perhaps she only has a daughter.

My allegiance lies with the dead, and no matter what the clerics say, the dead care for very little.”

the new empress, who is even now preparing for her first Dragon Court?”

Painting of the rabbit

Painting of the fox mother

Hanging box containing a robe.

In-yo came from people with conquest in their blood just as much as the people of Anh have. All of us believe in trophies.”

Haha

Haha - she’s from the north.

Ha - as a hostage from the invaders.

with the mammoth cavalry of the north crossing the Ko-anam Fords, even with troops following the mammoths

assassins killing off the nobles who would not be swayed,

the most beloved daughter of the nor...

the Palace of Gleami...

Haha chilling.

It was a terrible gift, but in it I could see her heart,

I stayed in Thriving Fortune.

There were reports to take and counter-insurrectionists to fight, and more than one assassination attempt to deal with.

Where? Question

Mai carved a gravestone for him, marked with a sukai bird because she did not know how to write.

I went into labor four weeks after we returned to Thriving Fortune.

From where? Question

“Are you sure?” asked In-yo, and I nodded.

Question - to substitute the moms.

Haha cool idea.

There is a story on the books, of the emperor of Anh coming to In-yo in a dream and pressing a seed into her belly.

it isn’t as if the history books aren’t full of such things.

Haha

what happens next is a matter of record.