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...
Everybody is always willing to throw someone else's country to the dogs.
Darker thoughts crowded in during the deepest hours of the night when he woke listening to the secret mystifying sounds of the sleeping palace. Many nights, the king was there. Pleasant, irrelevant, a...
As soon as the guards where gone, I lay down on my stone bench and dumped the king and his threats out of my head without ceremony. They were too unpleasant to worry over anyway.
All of my own impulses to balance and move seemed to conflict with those of the guards, and I was jerked and jostled down the portico, just as graceful as a sick cat.
A liar thinks everyone else lies? ... A thief thinks everyone else is stealing from him? ... A philanderer thinks everyone else is philandering.
Her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth...
I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one.
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.
Why did you come if not to murder my king?I came to steal his magus.You can't, said the magus in question.I can steal anything, Eugenides corrected him, even with one hand.
Who am I, that you should love me?You are My Queen, said Eugenides. She sat perfectly still, looking at him without moving as his words dropped like water into dry earth.Do you believe me? he asked. Y...
The king’s attendants remained, digesting the fact that their helpless, inept king had promised his wife to destroy the house of Erondites in six months and had done it in ninety-eight days.
She thought of the hardness and the coldness she had cultivated over those years and wondered if they were the mask she wore or if the mask had become her self. If the longing inside her for kindness,...
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...
My beautiful queen. Your entire court is staring at you, and I can't blame them.They were, too. The queen turned to look. Her glance swept through the crowd like a reaping sickle through grain. Mouths...
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.
He looked at her and tilted his head very slightly in wonder. He had forgotten, as he always forgot, how beautiful she was. Her hair was held away from her face by the ruby and gold headband that cros...
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...
Attolia had brushed Eugenides’s cheek almost shyly before sending him with a wave back to his own couch.