They told me that if I didn’t come back, they would force you to marry?’In the plain, sensible face, the brown eyes were derisive. ‘Is that why you came back?’ said Kate Somerville.‘No. I knew you cou...
There was a little silence. Then Danny Hislop heaved a sigh. ‘O beau sire Dieu, what a hell of an evening. Jerott, you either want to have another half-bottle, or vomit three ways what you have, like...
Then,’ Richard said, ‘I think we accept your scheme, with one important change in it. You, too, must be watched and followed.’‘And slept with?’ Lymond said.
Then I tell you,’ Sybilla said, ‘that you have no leave to die. Nor have you leave to desert the race you belong to. I want your word that from this moment, you live.
The more modest your expectations, the less often you will court disappointment.
The coast's a jungle of Moors, Turks, Jews, renegades from all over Europe, sitting in palaces built from the sale of Christian slaves. There are twenty thousand men, women and children in the bagnios...
Tant que je vive, mon cueur ne changeraPour nulle vivante, tant soit elle bonne ou sageForte et puissante, riche de hault lignaigeMon chois est fait, aultrene se fera***Long as I live, my heart will n...
Someone sobbed. Someone said,
She wouldn’t send anyone, nor would she take anyone with her. She organizes witches’ Sabbaths every full moon,’ explained Philippa tartly.
She gave up combing her hair, which the salt air had reduced to a kind of scrim of brown hessian, and, lying down, proceeded to keep her fingernails short in the way Kate admired least. Then she overs...
Richard doesn’t like me either, said the fair one sorrowfully. But that’s unmannerly rank for you. Do you like Richard?I’m married to him!That’s why I asked. You don’t believe in polyandry by any chan...
Quarrelling with the Prince of Barrow was like fighting a curtain. Robin Stewart gave up.
Piero Strozzi closed his mouth, which had fallen ajar. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You have a son, don’t …’He roared. ‘I beg your pardon. My foot slipped,’ said Philippa. ‘Have a date flan, and don’t talk...
Philippa Somerville slowed her horse to a trot, and, pulling off her right glove, held her hand high and flat, white palm outwards as she paced forward to Lymond and stopped. ‘Never again,’ Philippa s...
One knows, when all one’s life one has walked in dangerous places, when the silence is that of ambush and when the silence is that of emptiness.
Once, long ago, Francis Crawford had reduced her to terror and, the episode over, she had suffered to find that for Kate, apparently, no reason suggested itself against making that same Francis Crawfo...
Once before, Jerott had seen him like that, in Algiers. He had seen him as he was now, with every skill of mind and body tuned to the ultimate pitch in pursuit of one object. Francis Crawford like tha...
Of course. You have always tried to escape.’‘And I have always harmed the friends who have tried to stop me,’ Lymond said. His voice was uninflected. He added, ‘I have tried many times to warn you not...
Nobody ever, said the Dowager sorrowfully, credits me with normal thought processes. When a mysterious man creates a royal scandal on the banks of the Lake of Menteith with the keenest ears in Scotlan...
No ties; no duty; no relief. Three filaments gone in the life-thread, fragile as the thread of the silk-moth, which has no organs by which it can nourish itself, but instead is born, and loves once, a...