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To the wicked girls, The hard truth about shooting for the moon is, when you miss, you don’t always land among the stars. Sometimes all that slows the fall are the thorns. The good news is: The sun won’t see you coming.
Let me state one thing up front: I wasn’t trying to start a cult.
he still looks like a soothsayer stood over his crib and heralded the birth of an accounting ledger made flesh.
“You—” Emeric’s voice falters as his eyes rove over me, taking in the robes, the paint, the tinny chimes. A full opera of emotions plays out over his face, overture to curtains in record time. His next words come out strangled: “You started a cult?”
I wonder if Kirkling knows exactly what manner of pedantic, punctilious, annotated-within-an-inch-of-its-life beast she’s just unleashed.
You deserve so much more than the least terrible of your choices.
Kirkling looks like she’s bitten into a lemon, if that lemon were made of bees. (So a fig, I suppose.)
Emeric hides his face in his hands once more. I’m not optimistic about luring him back out with anything short of a subscription to an Abacus-of-the-Month Club.
Little thieves tell themselves they take what they need to survive, and sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s a lie. Great thieves don’t fool themselves about their motives; they take things because they want them, end of story. The only lie they tell themselves is that there’s no difference between wanting something and deserving it.
The friar pushes his hood back, revealing a lined pale face and a scraggly white beard. He offers a weary smile. “I must confess, I’ve not heard that name for a long, long time.”
Wait, is this a Star Wars joke?
“The prefects are an axe. Their justice falls absolute and irrevocable, and so they must take the time to be sure of every strike. But there is more to justice than an axe; sometimes it calls for leaving no trace but a mending. Sometimes justice must be a needle.”
Years of pain had smelted her down to a knife, and only now was she relearning to touch others without drawing blood.
I know bravery is real because I see you choose it every day.
“I want you to remember that, as long as you’ll have me, I will choose you every time.”
“I can be upset and still think you deserve nice things.”
‘When you want white people to stop arguing with you, make up a proverb.’
“Justice sees the entire story. There are no shadows to exploit. And that’s what I want, to bring the whole truth to light in every case, not just what’s convenient.”
A long cargo barge has somehow drifted askew, wedged diagonally across the entire width of the Trench. The words Grace Unending are painted in blocky white letters across the stern.
A cameo by Ever Given
his chin jutting like he’s got several grudges on layaway and an itch to take them off the shelf.
my version of redhead involves gaining fifty more freckles anytime I think the word sun.
I know this pain
“I’m tired,” I say quietly, “of watching the empire make a thousand more girls like me, every day.”
sometimes the sun hits your hair when I’m tying your ribbons, and it looks like it’s burning, and I feel like I’m going to catch fire too. And sometimes, when you smile, it feels like my heart is going to explode—
I think I understand, now, why they say you fall in love, because I don’t think I could climb out of this feeling even if I wanted to. What a beautiful trap I’ve built for myself. What a horror, what a delight, to find I’ve been caught.
with a patience usually reserved for small children and orange cats.
I like solving problems. Or rather, I like solving problems for good people by causing problems for bad people.
Someone has to close the distance between the letter of the law and its execution. Someone has to find where people are falling through the cracks and mend the gaps. And someone has a rucksack full of rubies, a knack for causing problems, and, at best, a mutual disdain for the law.
She provides... leverage.
My name is being called like a victory cry, and there are so many arms wrapped around me—around one another—I barely feel the rain. I can barely understand what they’re saying through their own tears and over each other, can hear only the joy, the joy, the joy. But Katrin’s voice I piece together word by word. She’s saying the same thing again and again, like a prayer that is finally answered: “I knew, I knew, I knew someday you would find us,” she’s weeping. “I knew if I lit the candle, you would find your way back home.”
His heart is in my hands, by his own design. And what a fearful, resplendent thing it is. What a horror, what a delight. What a terrible power to hold, even if I surrendered the same to him weeks ago. I gave him the power to ruin me with a word. Instead, he told me I’d make a beautiful bride. Is this what it’s like, to see a road before you and want it? To want the impossible and find—it’s actually within reach?
