01c. 1977 ADHappiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
02c. 1977 ADShe turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. “I’m going to miss you when I wake up,” she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin was too real for her imagination. He was a dream.“Don’t wake up,” he said.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
03c. 1977 ADShe’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
04c. 1977 ADAn emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a question. Or perhaps that it wasn’t how he had said it, and she was wrong, and she’d heard a question simply because the sound of him speaking her name made her wish that she were his answer.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
05c. 1977 ADHe told himself a story. Not at first. At first, there wasn’t time for thoughts that came in the shape of words. His head was blessedly empty of stories then. War was coming. It was upon him. Arin had been born in the year of the god of death, and he was finally glad of it. He surrendered himself to his god, who smiled and came close. Stories will get you killed, he murmured in Arin’s ear. Now, you just listen. Listen to me.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
06c. 1977 ADSomeone was coming through the velvet.He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s balcony—close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held the sweep of it high, at the level of his gray eyes, which were silver in the shadows.He was here. He had come.Arin.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
07c. 1977 ADAs 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 superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valorians also went to war because of love.Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon's curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder.He felt so vibrant. As if his life was fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart and he wouldn't care. Nothing felt like this.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
08c. 1977 ADMusic made her feel as if she were holding a lamp that cast a halo of light around her, and while she knew there were people and responsibilities in the darkness beyond it, she couldn't see them. The flame of what she felt when she played made her deliciously blind.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
09c. 1977 ADPeople 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.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
10c. 1977 ADA 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 look him in the eye, and when they did they become fish trying to breath air. He wished it weren't like that.He knew it would be necessary.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
11c. 1977 ADShe 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 understand that this was real. The air was quiet. An insect beat it's clear wings. She brushed hair from his brow. Now he was very awake."You were sleeping so sweetly," she said."Dreaming" He touched her tender mouth."About what?""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 want, a promise. A story, in its own way.She curled her fingers into the green earthMarie Rutkoski / quote ↗
12c. 1977 ADArin, 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 something worse," he tried to explain.She appeared to understand his relief that pain, if it had to come, came this time without malice. Just and accident. Done by no one. The luck, sometimes of life. A bad slip that ends with bread, and someone to bind you.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
13c. 1977 ADI want to know everything about you." So he told her. The stars, too, seemed to listen.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
15c. 1977 ADArin. 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. "Ready?"He smiled. "Play.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
16c. 1977 ADThe beauty of the flute was in its simplicity, in its resemblance to the human voice. It always sounded clear. It sounded alone. The piano, on the other hand, was a network of parts—a ship, with its strings like rigging, its case a hull, its lifted lid a sail. Kestrel always thought that the piano didn't sound like a single instrument but a twinned one, with its low and high halves merging together or pulling apart.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
17c. 1977 ADSomething 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 asked him that question, in part for the same reason. She’d had no trace of an accent. She had spoken in perfect, natural, mother-taught Herrani.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
18c. 1977 ADShe remembered how her heart, so tight, like a scroll, had opened when Arin kissed her. It had unfurled. If her heart were truly a scroll, she could burn it. It would become a tunnel of flame, a handful of ash. The secrets she had written inside herself would be gone. No one would knowMarie Rutkoski / quote ↗
20c. 1977 ADShe 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 she inhaled its sweetness, but always woke before she could taste.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
21c. 1977 ADShe 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.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
22c. 1977 ADThe sky was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
23c. 1977 ADShe looked at the boy. He knew her weakness for storytelling. And it was, after all, only a story. Still, she wished he had chosen a happier one.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
24c. 1977 ADHe'd believed it. She couldn't believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.Marie Rutkoski / quote ↗
