Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope, #1)

by Claire North

it is perhaps the strangeness of this, the unfamiliarity of kindness, that makes Telemachus lower his weapons, and at last set them down.

for whom the word is familiar as the taste of water, the kiss of sun. Mercy, say his eyes, and mercy, beats his heart, and mercy is written in every part of him,

her capacity to live neither in tomorrow nor yesterday, but simply here, in this moonlit grove.