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“I shall marry this king. Be he a monster, a madman, or a brother-killer. I shall go to Easima. I’ll go to prevent further war and sit on war councils. I’ll go to stabilize treaties and to bring a semblance of honor to our world. You and all cock-bearing men will see us recede into ashes.” She looked around the room and then back at him. “I’ve no illusion of anything else and you would be a fool to discard your daughter for a simpleton when it was your words that carved these notions into her thoughts.”
“Men will never be ready for women like us, and it is not our job to ready them.”
“You are the High Lady of Suid, cousin. You answer to no man,” Hira said.
“Men make vows with their mouths; women make vows with their hearts.”
“A ruler that doesn’t have people to question them quickly becomes a tyrant. That is not your path,”
“A dragon cannot be a dragon if it is not thrown into the sea to learn how to swim.
Men like to threaten with violence because they believe it is the only way things are solved
“Death is not a pretty thing,” Almira said. M nodded. “No, it’s not, but neither is life.”
If life taught Sanaa anything, it was that drunk men tended to start fights they had no capability of winning.
He wanted to say he recalled all her words. Even the ones she threw on the ground like discarded petals. How he’d collected them and stuffed them in his pockets like a lunatic. How he replayed them as he fruitlessly sought sleep. How they haunted him as he drank heavily to tune out the noise of the world.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t attribute certain characteristics to men and women. We should allow each person to decide how they’d like to speak. Then we wouldn’t analyze what is proper.”
What good is life if we’re constantly taking it away from each other?”
“There’s days I must hold myself in a tight fist to not fall to my knees and beg you to care for me in the manner that I have desperately and uncontrollably grown to care for you. Everything I do is to get a reaction from you, to watch you smile or anger, I want to see the spectrum of your emotions, even the bad ones. I want to bask in them.”
Those who learn are never fools.
“Be careful of cunning queens, my lord. For a man needs sleep after a good fuck and a woman is left to her own devices in the darkness of the bedchamber.”
Small are the minds of men who salivate at the thought of violence.
But why was it that she was the one who must keep herself in constant check for the benefit and comfort of men?
It made her finally see that people behaved as they wished, regardless of their origin. An heir could be a monster, a scalla smoker could save a queen and her guards.
“Break. Break if you must. Break here, let it out, and I’ll break with you.” She cried and kissed his temple. “You think on your horrors here in my arms, my love, and I’ll carry them with you.”
