The Jasmine Throne (The Burning Kingdoms, #1)

by Tasha Suri

As if a choice, carefully bred into your nature by grief and training and hardship, was any choice at all.

there is no meaning in the universe: no fate, no high blood, no rights of kings over land. Everything is emptiness. The world only has meaning when we give it meaning.”

“We should not do what powerful people tell us, simply because they tell us,”

But some men dream of times long dead, and times that never existed, and they’re willing to tear the present apart entirely to get them.

“Weeping does not make you any less yourself,” her mother replied. She touched her fingertips to Malini’s shorn hair. “Be careful with your tears,” her mother added, in a voice of cultivated restraint. “They’re blood of the spirit. Weep too much, and it will wear you thin, until your soul is like a bruised flower.”

She knew how many faces people possessed, one hidden beneath the other, good and monstrous, brave and cowardly, all of them true.

“That… that the people you care about can be used against you. And strength—strength is a knife turned on the parts of yourself that care.”