Queen Amid Ashes (The Sun Eater, #2.5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

That what is right and just is often difficult to see and more difficult to know does not mean there is nothing just or right in creation, only that we are ourselves inadequate in its pursuit.

For has it not been the case in every age that the greatest ally of the common man has ever been the emperor? The king and his laws against the nobility who ever believes itself above

There are things stronger than our words for them. Have I not said so? Or perhaps I will have said so when all is done. In some other place. But it is so, regardless. Time and space. Death. Stone. Sea. Things that are and would be even without us. Things that are in nature and belong to it. But there are things weaker than our words. Many things. Civilization is one. Civilization is a story we tell, a story in which we are only players, characters on a stage. There are others: history, for example—the field if not the string of incidents itself—would not exist but for our making of it, for history is another story we tell. So too is virtue weaker than we, as are goodness, and beauty, and truth itself. And justice. Justice perhaps most of all. Please understand: I do not say that we have invented these things. On the contrary, I believe these things make us, shape us as a narrative shapes its characters. Indeed, I believe these weaker things are higher, deeper than we, and are so made mutable by their hiddenness, their remoteness from us. But we may bend them, or deny them, or negate them, as we may not negate the baser realities of time and space.

But justice is a virtue also, and if a man is to rule, it must be with the rod in one hand and the white glove on the other.

Oft I think the ancients were wiser than we. They did not put the guilty to the sword out of simple retribution, but to commend their spirits into the hands of whatever power there is or they believed might be higher and deeper than mortal wisdom. By removing the guilty from the world, they blocked whatever future harm such men might cause, yes . . . but more than that, they did so acknowledging the limitations of their own human power to make right whatever wrong the guilty had done in life.

The old systems of democracy and parliament only allowed the cowards to hide.