An Age of Winters

But truth is not always what the people want.

Here, we could be whoever we wanted to be, unshackled to our fates.

But it be the other hand I was unsure of. The hand that usually holds the secrets that people don’t show about themselves.

And though I liked the wandering eye of certain men, his was not the eye I sought.

With her chin raised she had a look of someone older, someone knowing. I felt the force of her, a woman with confidence, a woman unrattled. Women knew women. We knew that our power was sometimes silence, sometimes distance, that we were careful, that we were shrewd. And if we were to reveal such secrets, we might become weaker, easy prey.

I recoiled from him then and felt conspicuous for it, too, for belonging to the crowd that worshipped death.

In hindsight, Stern, though odious to live with, sometimes attacked dogma and leadership, and more often spoke truth. But truth is not always what the people want.