A Skinful of Shadows

If someone throws aside their pride and begs with all their heart, and if they do so in vain, then they are never quite the same person afterwards. Something in them dies, and something else comes to life.

Everybody betrayed her, so why expect otherwise? But it turned out that distrust could fool you and endanger you, just as trust could.

Mother was like this sometimes. Conversations became riddles with traps in them, and your answers had consequences.

Looking at the rich and powerful was dangerous, like peering into the sun.

Habits, places and faces grew into you over time, like tree roots burrowing into stone work.

Lord Fellmotte was not a man. He was an ancient committee. A parliament of deathly rooks in a dying tree.

Even when she slept, her anxieties did not.

Before her escort could react, she sprinted out from their little pool of lantern-light into the darkness, her feet pounding the soft, treacherous clods of the field. The guards called after her for a while, but did not pursue, In a lost city, how could they chase down every lost soul who became a little more lost?

The minister was kind when you met him in the street, but terrifying in the pulpit. From the rapt faces of the other listeners, Makepeace could tell that there must be great truths shining in him, and love like a cold white comet.

His gaze made her feel like a mouse in owl-country.

I trust you, she had often told him. But was that true? No, she realized, with a feeling like grief. All these years, even while she plotted with James, in her heart of hearts she had been waiting for him to betray her. When at last she had looked into his eyes and seen a host of dead enemies staring back, her mind had filled with a storm. But there had been an eye to that storm, a quiet core where a calm, relieved voice was saying: Ah, there it is at last. No more waiting for the sword to fall.

The Bible says we should know a tree by the fruit it bears," Makepeace replied, a little sharply. "If you burn my hand off, what should I think of you?