What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

I had a strong urge to step back from them, and an even stronger urge to poke them with a stick.

(Look, if you don’t make a fool of yourself over animals, at least in private, you aren’t to be trusted. That was one of my father’s maxims, and it’s never failed me yet.)

Very few ancient crypts have plump shepherdesses and gamboling sheep on the walls. I consider this an oversight.

(I am never sure what to think of Americans. Their brashness can be charming, but just when I decide that I rather like them, I meet one that I wish would go back to America, and then perhaps keep going off the far edge, into the sea.)

I offered Denton my hand, because Americans will shake hands with the table if you don’t stop them.

Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.

I’d been tired of it a decade ago. Now I’d moved to some other state entirely. Transcendent exhaustion, perhaps.

“They say mushrooms spring up where the Devil walks,” said Angus sourly. “And where fairies dance.”

I moved as stealthily as I could, which was not very. The black boards creaked and yawned underfoot. I might as well have hired a brass band to play a march.

The dead carry lanterns down in the deep.”

Roderick was a genius on the piano, though. When we had exhausted ourselves mangling popular tunes, he played dramatic compositions by great composers. (Mozart? Beethoven? Why are you asking me? It was music, it went dun-dun-dun-DUN, what more do you want me to say?)

😂

It was fun. People get hung up on happiness and joy, but fun will take you at least as far and it’s generally cheaper to obtain.

“What did you mean, this place breeds nightmares?” “Roderick,” said Denton, leaning against the stone railing. “He complains of nightmares. Says the walls breathe them out.”

(A Frenchwoman once told me that I had no poetry in my soul. I recited a dirty limerick to her, and she threw a lemon at my head. Paris is a marvelous city.)

“It’s only a building, Roderick.” “Is it?” He turned away.

His voice had that light veneer of humor that we all get, because if we don’t pretend we’re laughing, we might have to admit just how broken we are.

is very unpleasant to sit down to a meal when you are trying to determine which one of your breakfast companions is a murderer.

I’d only said it because I thought it was the sort of thing that might appeal to an Englishwoman, pip-pip, cheerio, God save the Queen, and so forth.

There were three veterans at that table, battle-scarred soldiers who had served their countries honorably in more than one war … and all three of us screamed like small children and recoiled in horror.

“You know what men are like when women try to tell them anything.”