Her innocence was maddening. She should know. She should know what her steward had done. She should know it to be her fault whether she’d given the order or not–and whether she knew or not. Innocent?...
Will you come with me?""Ah, Kestrel, that's something you never need to ask.
The guard hit Kestrel across the face. “I said, what did you give him?”You had a warrior’s heart, even then.Kestrel spat blood. “Nothing,” she told the guard. She thought of her father, she thought of...
Little Fists, what's wrong?
She'd betrayed her country because she'd believed it was the right thing to do. Yet would she have done this, if not for Arin?He knew none of it. Had never asked for it. Kestrel had made her own choic...
Arin, you’re not listening. You’re not thinking clearly.”“You’re right. I haven’t been thinking clearly, not for a long time. But I understand now.” Arin pushed his tiles away. His winning hand scatte...
It dropped ice to the bottom of his stomach. He thought of the ruined bodies he'd seen, including the ones he himself had ruined. He realized that he had somehow expected that he'd never have to think...
Come closer, and I will tell you."But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a wa...
It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice.
Yet he understood that there are some things you feel and others that you choose to feel, and that the choice doesn't make the feeling less valid.
He'd believed it. She couldn't believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.
She said, I'm going to miss you when you when I wake up.Don't wake up, he answered.But he did.Kestrel, beside him on the grass, said. "Did I wake you? I didn't mean to.
She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin's voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?The powder was so fine that sh...
Something tugged inside him. A flutter of unease.Do you sing? Those had been her first words to him, the day she had bought him. A band of nausea circled Arin’s throat, just as it had when she had ask...
Arin. I've wanted to do this for a long time."Her words silenced him, steadied him.Antecipation lifted within her like the fragance of a garden under the rain. She sat at the piano, touching the keys....
Arin, are you all right?""How?" He managed. "How did her arm break?""She fell of a ladder."He must have visibly relaxed, because his cousin raised her brows and looked ready to scold. "I imagined some...
She said, I'm going to miss you when you when I wake up.Don't wake up, he answered.But he did.Kestrel, beside him on the grass, said. "Did I wake you? I didn't mean to."It took him a velvety moment to...
A strange feeling: as if filaments trailed from Arin's body. A thousand fishing lines snagging attention. Here and there. Little tugs. People caught on the lines. The way sometimes people couldn't loo...
People of the hundred," he said, using an ancient Herrani phrase Arin was surprised he knew, "who leads you?"So many cried Arin's name that it no longer sounded like his name.
As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin though that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of sup...
