Megan Whalen Turner

Quotes

1. In the shocked aftermath, I said, "We'll give them a second chance."

   With my right hand, I reached to the other pocket. I had known as soon as I lifted the false bottom of the gun case and looked underneath what it meant. I had tried without ceasing to find some alternative to Attolia's ruthless advice, and I had failed. Gen's fit reassured me that I had not failed for lack of trying. He had seen no other solution himself.

   I lifted out the matching gun and read the archaic inscription. Realisa onum. Not "The queen made me," but "I make the king."

2. 

   Inside the case was a dueling pistol, a king's weapon, wheel-locked, chased in gold. Eddis had seen it earlier that day. When Sounis lifted it out and tipped his head over the locking mechanism, she knew he was reading the letters inscribed there: Onea realia. "The queen made me."

3. 

   "I think he was delighted to see you safe," said the magus, "and grieved that the next time you meet, it must be as king and king and not as friends."

4. 

   As Attolia spun, she felt a tug at her hair and, turning back, felt another. Then she felt her carefully arranged hair slipping down her neck. Eugenides, minding the pattern with his feet and spinning the queen with one hand, had been pulling out her hairpins one by one when her back was turned. The rest of the pins loosened, and her hair dropped free. It swung out as she spun and the last of the pins bounced and slid across the marble floor.

   The queen was several inches taller than Eugenides, and he leaned back to counter her spin. To those watching, it didn't seem possible that he could succeed, but with one hand, and no visible effort, he defied the laws of the natural world. Phresine, the queen's senior attendant, watched them from behind the throne as her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth. Faster and faster they moved, never faltering, until the music shrilled at an impossible tempo and the pattern gave way to a long spin, each dancer reaching in with one hand and out with the other, holding tight lest they fall away from the other, until the music stopped abruptly and the dance ended.

5. 

   For a moment Costis could see, not so much what was hidden but that there were things hidden that the king did not choose to reveal. Things that were not for Costis to see. There was no understanding him, but Costis knew he would march into hell for this fathomless king, as he would for his queen. So long, he worried, as they didn't order him in opposite directions at the same time. What he would do when that happened, Costis couldn't guess.

6. 

   "When you stop fussing," Gen had said, slipping to his knees beside her couch, "I will sleep with two knives under my pillow."

   Attolia had looked down at him and said sharply, "Don't be ridiculous."

   Only when Eugenides laughed had Sounis realized her implication: If she ever turned against Eugenides, a second knife wouldn't save him.

7. 

   He looked up from the where he had been carefully smoothing the embroidered cover, and seeing his face, Costis felt the shock like a physical blow. If Attolia could look like a queen, Eugenides was like a god revealed, transformed into something wholly unfamiliar, surrounded by the cloth-of-gold bedcover like a deity on an altar, passionless and calculating.

8. 

   "I wouldn't destroy an entire house to destroy one man. But I would destroy a man to destroy a house."

9. 

   "Yet you prefer his mercy to my justice." She meant from the king. She knew where the message had come from.

10. 

    "I'll be your minister--"

    "Of the exchequer? You'd rob me blind."

    "I would never steal from you," he'd said hotly.

    "Oh? Where is my tourmaline necklace? Where are my missing earrings?"

    "That necklace was hideous. It was the only way to keep you from wearing it."

    "My earrings?"

    "What earrings?"

11. 

    Eddis looked at her minister, curious. "Your head?" she asked.

    Attolia explained. "He had to be forcibly dissuaded from strangling his son."

    "So have we all from time to time," Eddis said seriously.

12. 

    Ambiades, I realized, was the kind of person who liked to put people in a hierarchy, and he wanted me to understand that I was at the bottom of his. He was supposed to treat me politely in spite of my subservient position, and I was supposed to be grateful.

    For my part, I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one. I might bow to the superior force of the magus and Pol, but wasn't going to bow to him. Neither of us moved.