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“An amateur only, I fear, as supposedly befits my sex.”
“You know how bad news grows in villages. Sneeze at noon and by sundown the gravedigger will be taking your measurements.”
(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.)
(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.)
And then, of course, there are the other sort. They ask questions, but what they really want to know is what’s in your pants and, by extension, who’s in your bed. I shall assume, gentle reader, that you are of the former sort and explain, in the event that you have not encountered Gallacia’s sworn soldiers, or have only read of us in the more lurid periodicals.
The system still has a lot of blind spots and translating anything into another language gets complicated, but it works about as well as anything in the army, which is to say, despite everything.
Sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is insulting or just an American.
The war had been hard on my feet and my knees and my faith in humanity.
“I’m sorry. I know how tired you are of that.” I snorted. I’d been tired of it a decade ago. Now I’d moved to some other state entirely. Transcendent exhaustion, perhaps.
“None of us are what we were,”
“the Good Lord may look out for fools, but it won’t hurt to have another set of eyes helping.”
Was there enough disinfectant in the world to cleanse the house of Usher?
“The Good Lord looks out for fools. In your case, apparently He sends the occasional Englishwoman.” “I thought He’d sent you.” “You’re a two-person job, youngster.”
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.
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. It’s like telling stories at the bar about the worst pain you’ve ever been in. You laugh and you brag about it, and it turns the pain into something that will buy you a drink.
It is very unpleasant to sit down to a meal when you are trying to determine which one of your breakfast companions is a murderer.
(We did not run. If we ran then we would have to admit there was something to run from. If we ran, then the small child that lives in every soldier’s heart knew that the monsters could get us. So we did not run, but it was a near thing.)
“It’s impossible,” he said, almost casually. “But that hasn’t stopped anything so far, has it?”
