Wrong arm, dear.
Will there be poppy juice in it?Phresine shook her head.Good. My wife and I agreed that only my wine was to be poisoned.
Who was the Thief that she would love him? A youth, just a boy with hardly a beard and no sense at all... A liar, she thought, an enemy, a threat. He was brave, a voice inside her said, he was loyal.....
What would you do if you were King’s Thief, Gen? Chew with your mouth open in the royal presence? Chat with the court ladies, dropping the h’s at the beginning of your words and garbling the ends of m...
The room was full of people. Ninety-eight days, said the queen, folding her hands in her lap. You said it would take six months. Eugenides picked at a nub in the coverlet. I like to give myself a marg...
The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and groom. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the...
The Attolian king obviously had a deep well of spite and I would've appreciated his low cunning more if I hadn't thought the Attolian was about to wring my neck.
That one,-he nodded toward the closed door- will rule more than just Attolia before he is done. He is an Annux, a king of kings.
She pulled the bedclothes up as far as they would go and suppressed a perverse wish to have her old nurse come to chase away the darkness, perverse because she didn't know if she wanted the shadows to...
If she pardons people because she loves them, someday someone that she loves will betray her and all of Attolia with her. A queen must make sacrifices for the common good.
I woke to find I had not been murdered in my sleep.
I can't leave her there all alone, surrounded by stone walls... She's too precious to give up.
I am an ambassador, Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. You cannot shoot.I don't mean to, I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. Indeed, you are the only m...
He would go east and fight the emperor’s wars, carrying out the bloody business of larger countries eating up the littler ones. It wasn’t a matter of theory in a tiny office in the emperor’s palace. I...
He shrugged. We all spend our time under the sign of the idiot, he said, and the matter seemed settled, at least as far as he was concerned.
He limped slowly over to his own wooden sword and stooped awkwardly to pick it up. Trailing it on the ground behind him, he limped toward the queen, and the courtyard quieted as he approached and was...
Even a steadfast enemy was better than a waffler.
Eschewing ceremony, Eugenides said, You the ambassador?You gave me the gun, protested Sounis.I didn't mean for you to shoot the ambassador with it! Eugenides told him.Oh, how our carefully laid plans...
Costis followed, telling himself that it wasn't true that he and the king and even the stone under their feet were nothing but tissue, transparently thin, and that for a moment, the only real thing in...
Before you make a decision, he said, I want you to know that I love you.