The Bone Shard Emperor (The Drowning Empire, #2)

by Andrea Stewart

I’d thought I could set things right in the Empire if only I’d had the means.

First line

Maybe I was a hero. And heroes were idiots.

Or was she just as foolish as I was, hoping that a single person could begin to make things right?

The man they’d written a song about would have struck true, hair whipping in the wind, shoulders squared. Jovis leaned over his knees, winded as an old man. They certainly never wrote about being tired in the stories.

“If you know a person is lying, don’t countermand them. They’ll dig in. Just continue on with what you know is the truth.”

Iloh was an ass. It didn’t take me long to come to that conclusion. Some faces were worn a certain way from one too many smug expressions, their assedness carved into the lines around mouth and eyes. The lines on Iloh’s face were a map leading to only one destination: the capital of asses.

When you’re young, you think you can change the world. You think you can bend it to your will. When you’re old, you learn to change your small corner of it and live with the rest.”

“Is this just the way young people are? I don’t pity her. I see someone who is sad and I want her to be less sad. What’s so wrong about that?”

“Laws tell us what we can and cannot do; they do not tell us what we should and should not do.”

“A coward is not a man who feels fear. A coward is one who would volunteer others for the suffering he would not take on himself,”

Old men always think they know better than everyone else, even when the world has long since changed around them.”

A warm bath. I would murder everyone on the switchbacks for just one more chance at a warm bath and a hot meal. Which meant I still wanted to live. Which meant I probably should get up.