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Killian tilted his head. “You aren’t happy that you appeared to your friends to be unskilled.” “I guess so. But . . .” Tavi frowned in thought. “It’s hard to deceive them. I don’t like it.”
“You Alerans. Everything mates,” Doroga said. “Everything likes to. But only your people try to pretend they do neither.”
“I do not question your people’s experience or knowledge, Doroga,” Bernard said. “You are different. That does not make you less.” Doroga smiled. “Not all Alerans think as you.” “True.”
He seemed to be at that most dangerous of ages, where strength, skill, and confidence met naïveté and idealism; when young men skilled at the crafts of violence could be manipulated into employing those skills with brutal efficiency—and without questions.
“Obviously you aren’t seeing a girl.” “How do you know?” Tavi demanded. “Because even a virgin like you would try to look better than you do. Clean clothes, combed hair, freshly bathed, all that sort of thing. You look like you’ve been rolling around in the street.”
“Head got nothing to do with the heart. Your heart wants what it wants. Head got to learn that it can only kill the heart or else get out of the way.”
The One is all that is, all that was, all that will be. The worlds, the heavens—all a part of The One. Each of us, a part of The One. Each of us with a purpose and a responsibility.”
Ambitions are incompatible with consciences, you know. The two strangle one another straightaway and leave an awful mess behind them.”
“Because a woman of conscience would tell you that she is a person of conscience. A woman of ambition would tell you that she is a person of conscience—only much more convincingly.”
He had seen terrible things. He had faced them. He hated them, and they terrified him still, but he had faced the simple existence of such hideous destruction without letting it control his life. But this was different. Tavi had harmed no one during Second Calderon—but the pain Renzo and Varien now suffered had been dealt to them by his own hands, his own will, his own choice.
He had looked forward to this moment, in some ways—to a time when he could put his skills to use against those who had always made him feel so helpless and small. He had expected to feel satisfaction, triumph. But in its place, he felt only an emptiness that filled with a sudden and sickening nausea. He had never hurt anyone so badly before. He felt stained, somehow,
You will probably find, in life, that successes and victories tend to overshadow the risks you took, while failure will amplify how idiotic they were.”
“Saying something is not so does not cause it to be not so,” she said.
“Because, my lady,” he said quietly, “I turned against Gaius. Not Alera.”
