More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It had once been an effortless thing to tell his wife he loved her—three simple words in a single breath. A goodbye at the end of a phone call, an invitation to make love, a whisper before sleep. Now it seemed an impassable emotional mountain. Every time he longed to make things right with Wen, anger yanked him back, like a hand jerking away from flame or Steel rising against a blade.
Andy Christopherson liked this
“Sister Shae, when is life ever like a story where the characters get exactly what they deserve, good or bad?
On the day of the Return, the gods would never be able to sort the deserving from the undeserving without breaking apart families. They should recognize everyone, flawed as they were, imperfect in the Divine Virtues—or recognize no one at all.
“Niko’s not like you, just like you weren’t like Lan. He’s smart, Hilo-jen. Observant. He’s always trying to deeply understand things, but he has to do it in his own way, even if it means going all the way over to the opposite side. You say he’s cold and selfish, but it’s because he keeps what he feels to himself. He does care. He cares what you think of him. And I think he needs to be free of it too.”
Was this what it truly meant to hold power, Shae wondered, almost detached from her own sense of ballooning fear. Passing on the worst consequences of your failure to others, whether you wanted to or not?
Jade had meaning because of the type of person one had to become to wear it. Jade was the visible proof that a person had dedicated their life to the discipline of wielding power, to the dangers and costs of being a Green Bone.
Perhaps that was the great tragedy of jade warriors and their families. Even when we win, we suffer.
“Was it worth it?” he asked. “Giving up whatever else you might’ve been, to take the path you didn’t think you would?”
When asked if he feared Ayt would kill him for speaking, the fallen kingpin of Ti Pasuiga chuckled. “Of course she will kill me,” he said, with a dismissive wave at the camera. “There’s a saying in Shotarian: ‘Marry the devil, get the devil’s mother.’ It’s the deal you can’t escape. The jade business is the devil and Ayt Mada is its mother.”
The way to defeat a chess master was not with greater genius, but by forcing her to play a different game.
“I miss him,” Niko whispered. “I loved him, and sometimes I think I hated him. I’m nothing like him and don’t want to be. Yet somehow all I want is to live up to him.”
