Quotes from work

The King of Attolia

“Is that what the wine is for? To help you think?"
"Oh, the wine. The wine, Costis, is to help hide the truth. It doesn't work. It never has, but I try it every once in a while just in case something in the nature of the wine might have changed.”

“These people make my family look easy to get along with.”

“In the afternoon, the king and queen sat to hear the business of their kingdom. At least, the queen sat to hear the business; Costis was still not sure what the king was doing.”

“We are taught to treat a practice sword with all the respect of a real weapon, so no thoughtless mistakes are made"
"Oh… In Eddis, we learn to keep tack of the weapon we have in our hand.”

“Today, she had yielded the sovereignty of her country to Eugenides, who had given up everything he had ever hoped for, to be her King.”

“Were you lying?"
"I never lie," he said piously. "About what?"
"The sand, the snake."
For a young man who never lied, he seemed surprisingly unoffended by the question.”

“I thought that being king meant I didn't have to kill people myself. I see know that was another misconception.”

“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.”

“Costis bowed stiffly. “I am here to make sure that you stay in bed, Your Majesty, because if this offends you and you order me summarily executed, it is no loss. Politically speaking.”

“No 'Glory shall be your reward' for me. Oh, no, for me, it is, 'Stop whining' and 'Go to bed'.”

“That is ridiculous," she said.
The king agreed. "Like falling in love with a landslide. Only you could fail to notice.”

“Tell me a story then… keep me occupied."
"A story?… What makes you think I can tell a story?"
"Insight," said the king, "Go on.”

“… her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth…”

“Who knows but that you will get up to find that the world has inverted itself yet again?”

“Then come out," said the king, helping him, "knowing you'll never die of a fall unless the god himself drops you.”

“As a ten-year-old boy, the Thief of Eddis could stop a grown man in his tracks with a single look. Where had that look gone?”

“Wrong arm, dear.”

“It isn't an easy thing to give your loyalty to someone you don't know, especially when that person chooses to reveal nothing of himself.”

“He didn't marry you to become king. He became king because he wanted to marry you.”