Onderweg was het Woud van me weg geweken, alsof het bang was dat ik de spreuk anders weer zou opzeggen. Fulmia.
Oh dear, Laurence said; he felt rather awkward explaining that the main attraction was the abundance of harbor prostitutes and cheap liquor. Well, a city has a great many people in it, and thus variou...
Of course, I said. I was sure he'd even gone to Olshanka for the tribute first, just so he could pretend that was the truth for a little bit longer. But I couldn't really bring myself to pretend with...
No one had ever shouted at me in my life: my mother with her quiet voice, my gentle father. But I found something bitter inside myself, something of that winter blown into my heart: the sound of my mo...
My mother had enough magic to give me three blessings before she died, I said, and he instinctively bent in to hear it. The first was wit; the second beauty, and the third—that fools should recognize...
Laurence did not let anger go, but dismissed it to return later; the battle was not over.
Laurence could make no real quarrel with the aims, which were natural and just; but England was at war, after all, and he was conscious, as Temeraire was not, of the impudence in demanding concessions...
Laurence considered the matter and could not find an answer for this. I suppose, in all honesty, being aviators ourselves we cannot like the idea of putting a dragon to death, and so we have found an...
I’m not your dear girl, Kasia said, with a bite in her tone that silenced him.
It’s very easy to claim you’ve summoned something that’s invisible and incorporeal.
It was all right when I did it, I said, but when you did it, it was wrong. As though—you were following a trail, but a tree had fallen down in the meantime, or some hedge grew up, and you insisted on...
It seems very strange that the ocean is full of things that one can eat as one likes, and on land everything seems to be spoken for, Temeraire said, disappointed.
If I could have remembered, at least some of the words would have been wrong: like hearing again a half-remembered favorite tale from childhood and finding it unsatisfying, or at least not as I’d reme...
I was back in comfortable plain skirts again, but they looked at me anyway as they went away, not with hostility, but not the way any of them would ever have looked at a woodcutter’s girl from Dvernik...
I turned back and tried again, and once more I was sure that I was understanding, and all of it made perfect sense - better than perfect sense, even; it had the feeling of truth, of something that I'd...
I think we must only a few of us go, Laurence said, low. I will take a few volunteers - Oh, the devil you will! Granby exclaimed furiously. No, this time I damned well put my foot down, Laurence. Send...
I put my fingers up to brush the fine links. Even lying on my skin, it still felt cool to the touch, and when I looked at myself in the mirror, in the glass I was not standing in my father's study. I...
I know i'm making her sound like something out of a story. But it was the other way around. When my mother told me stories about the spinning princess or the brave goose-girl or the river-maiden, in m...
I knew it wasn’t going to help me. It was a warm kind presence in my hands, but with the kindness of a friend who sits with you in comfort by the fire and can’t change what’s wrong.
I don't think I can do it alone, I said. I had a feeling the wasn't really meant to be cast alone: as if truth didn't mean anything without someone to share it with.