More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Nghi Vo
Read between
January 12 - January 12, 2025
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.
Hate, however, was reserved for equals, and as far as In-yo was concerned, she had no equals in all the empire.
In-yo would say that the war was won by silenced and nameless women, and it would be hard to argue with her.
“Now, I didn’t say that. I merely said they look too ugly to be as delicious as the empress was saying.” “Sometimes . . . sometimes the ugliest things can be the most delicious.” I looked at him sideways as I said it, blushing even darker, and he stared at me. “Did— Was that a compliment? Did you try to pay me a compliment? Have you never paid one before?” “No!” He laughed so loudly that if mushrooms could run, we never would have found another one.
“As you live with anything, I suspect. You bear it, or you end it. So far, we have proved equal to bearing it.”
“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.”
“You could have kept him with us,” I said that night, brushing out her thick, wavy hair. I kept my voice softer than a whisper, so soft that the waver in it was ironed out almost completely. “I could have, but it might have cost me something else. I am sorry.”
I suppose it should have cost her my regard and my love as well. It might have, but as I moved to put the brush away, her hand came up to cover mine. She did not promise to make it up to me, because there was no such possibility, and she did not say that everything would be all right, because it never would be.
Her home was in the north, and mine rode east with the Minister of the Left, so we would have to do as best we could with each other.
“Save that anger,” Mai said with a sigh. “Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves.”
“And the new empress, who is even now preparing for her first Dragon Court?” Rabbit smiled. “Angry mothers raise daughters fierce enough to fight wolves. I am not worried for her in the least.”
“Well, Rabbit?” I jumped like my namesake, and it seemed as if time stretched out like thread from a reel. It was her gift to me, the best she could do. She could not give me Sukai’s life but, at the very least, she could give me the death of the Minister of the Left.
It was a terrible gift, but in it I could see her heart, broken when she left the north and then reforged and made hard by the capital of Anh and the waters of Lake Scarlet. It was all she had, and she was giving it to me. “Let him kill himself,” I said finally. “As long as he is dead, that is all that matters to me.”
Chih thought that even from the crowd, they would see in her face the trace of a migratory bird, a rabbit, and the empress from the north, fierce enough to fight wolves.
