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the tutors their children needed to actually pass. Well, fuck the heavenly order of things. If getting married to a gross old man was her preordained role on this earth, then Rin was determined to rewrite it.
“Power dictates acceptability,” Kitay mused. “If the capital had been built in Tikany, I’m sure we’d be running around dark as wood bark.”
“So you’re not dying, sweetheart, your body is just shedding your uterine lining.” Rin’s jaw had been hanging open for a solid minute. “What the fuck?”
But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.
“I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.”
Youth, Rin thought, was an amplification of beauty. It was a filter; it could mask what one was lacking, enhance even the most average features. But beauty without youth was dangerous. The Empress’s beauty did not require the soft fullness of young lips, the rosy red of young cheeks, the tenderness of young skin. This beauty cut deep, like a sharpened crystal. This beauty was immortal.
When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.
“What does it matter? They’re coming, and we’re staying, and at the end of the day whoever is alive is the side that wins. War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”
Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.
Amateurs obsess over strategy, Irjah had once told their class. Professionals obsess over logistics.
