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.

The most skilled poets set grown men weeping with rage and passion.

Subtlety was cultivated out of necessity, by people who knew that power needed to be treated with care—who understood how easily it could be stolen or taken.

“Power can be looking after people. Keeping them safe, instead of putting them into danger.”

“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.

“No one goes to war for poets and whores,”

The silence followed behind her. It was the kind that had thorns.

There was something ugly and sweet about the feeling that ran through him in response to her pain. It was, he reasoned, the satisfaction of watching a lesson being learned.

“You could have been kinder,” she choked out. “You of all people, who suffered what I suffered—I thought I could trust you to be my brother.”

“Family don’t have a duty to be kind to you. They have a duty to make you better. Stronger. I am being true to our family.

The place where he had hurt her was like a burning star within her center, and she could not breathe around it.

She learned. Tears were a weapon of a kind, even if they made her fury smolder and rot and writhe inside her.

The apology dropped between them heavily, awkward as a stone.

She hated him for that, for stealing the quiet and strange intimacy of her and her own flesh and blood and making it a weapon.

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

There is power that is showy and fierce. And there is power grown slowly, and stronger for the time spent braiding its ancient strength.

She had new wrinkles, and a way of walking that spoke of pain.

A secret told to the dead is a secret still untold.

“What is the point of knowledge that isn’t used?”

Those shrewd eyes, and the sheer kindness of him, always folded around the shape of a joke, a laugh, a drink.

Beautiful

Malini wanted to explain that being monstrous wasn’t inherent, as Priya seemed to believe it to be. It was something placed upon you: a chain or a poison, bled into you by unkind hands.

But there is a subtle pain the conquered feel. Our old language is nearly lost. Our old ways. Even when we try to explain a vision of ourselves to one another—in our poetry, our song, our theater masks—we do so in opposition to you, or by looking to the past. As if we have no future.

The moment I saw you, I felt a tug. You are the feeling of falling, the tidal waters, the way a living thing will always turn, seeking light.