What Moves the Dead (Sworn Soldier, #1)

by T. Kingfisher

(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.)

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

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.

I broke out a bottle of livrit. Livrit is a Gallacian specialty, which means it’s uniquely terrible. It strongly resembles vodka, although vodka would be ashamed to acknowledge the connection, sweetened, as livrit is, with the cloudberries that grow in the mountains. That might actually be palatable, though, and we can’t have that, so lichen is also included. The resulting drink starts syrupy, ends bitter, and burns all the way down. No one actually likes it, but it is traditionally made by widows as a means of supporting themselves, so everyone drinks it because you can’t let little old ladies starve to death when they could be climbing mountains and scraping lichen off rocks instead.

(mostly because Germans always instantly switch to another language, which they inevitably speak better than you do, and politely ask you to practice it with them).

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 was terrible, but a hangover seemed like a great idea. Headache is always preferable to heartache, and if you’re focusing on not throwing up, you aren’t thinking about how the friends of your youth are dying around you.