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She tried to hold on to both thoughts at once: her power and her smallness, each a comfort in its own way.
would you like to hear about how Dindrane had her sister-in-law put in a holding cell for breaking curfew?” “Yes, please. I am so glad someone is living out their happiest dreams during this tumultuous time.”
she was good at snapping and criticizing, but kindness still felt like a muscle she had never used.
Dindrane was small and mean because the world around her was small and mean, and she became so used to striking back however she could that she had eventually started striking first, lashing out with her tongue before she could be hurt.
“Hush, you wretched girl, or I will make all your hair fall out using my magic.” “Try it and I will make all your blood fall out. Using my ax.”
“Sometimes we have to be false in order to be true.”
He was a melody she felt in her soul.
I like beautiful women. And ugly men. Faces like rocks.
Inheritance should always go through the mother’s lines so it does not matter who the father is, and that way everyone can worry less and just be with who they desire.”
“I wish I could be Arthur for you. I really do. Walk in the sunlight, cut through the world with a sword of justice and absolute surety. But I am the night. My eyes have always been open to the darkness, and there are so many shades once you get used to the dark. So many subtleties. I cannot unsee them, or unfeel them.”
I hate that you could love him, and I also understand, because how could you not?
if Guinevere demanded that her apology be listened to or accepted, she would be doing it for herself. Lancelot deserved to feel however she needed to, and Guinevere deserved Lancelot’s anger.
“It makes me sad that he would be rejected for that, when there are so many better reasons to reject him,”
I knew a woman whose mother was a fairy. The tattoos she created were magnificent. If you looked closely, the animals moved. What started as a fawn on a young woman became a doe as the woman aged. Flowers bloomed around loved ones’ images, then wilted when that person was sick or dying. There was a man who had a serpent wrapped around his arm that bared its fangs in the presence of anyone who wished him harm.
Kindness could be just as powerful, just as useful as force.
They are all embroiled in things larger and deeper and older than themselves, and they cannot see anything small anymore.
Life is short. Death is swift. Some sorrows are sweet enough to be worth feeling.
But now she knew she could hold the wrongness of what he had done and at the same time forgive him, because people were so much more than the worst things they did.
She had been in Camelot’s chapel, but that was a worship space for men. This was a worship space for nature, and as such was more beautiful and more dangerous.
Just because violence shaped you does not make your very existence an act of violence.”
I can tell you what you have done, and what you do, and who you are. You look at people, and you see what they can become. You reflect the best versions of themselves, and, in doing so, you allow them to grow into what they could have been but never would have without you.
A person did not have to be good for there to be loss when they left this world ahead of their time.
How might things be different if he had been raised by a caring family? Been taught that pain and anguish and hurt were things he was allowed to feel, that sadness was not something to be fought but something to move purposefully through?
The rules and laws in Camelot were made and administered by men, always. The ways that women had power were subtle and quiet, overlooked.
Was life nothing but a series of dying and being remade?
Everyone who lives does so at the cost of others, in one way or another. For some of us, the cost is higher.
“Yes,” he gasped. “Yes, I am—I would—that is acceptable. Very acceptable. The most acceptable. I have never heard a more acceptable plan.”
“Things do not have to be perfect to be good,”
Swords do not save. They kill,
Even amid the soul-crushing dread, Guinevere and Lancelot hand in hand was as true as anything she had ever felt.
Without nature to remind them of how small they are, without the constant struggle to eat, to stay warm, to hunt or to avoid being hunted, mankind turns its violence outward.
“I wish you were slightly less good.” Mordred smiled ruefully. “But then you would be slightly less you, and I never wish to see you diminished.”
I guess I should thank all the many, many Arthurian stories that participated in the long history of treating their women characters like garbage. My rage fueled this trilogy. All your women belong to me now, and you can’t have them back.
