The Lions of Al-Rassan

The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert. Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last. Even the sun goes down.

Eyyia?" said her husband, and Eliane bet Danel heard the mangling of her name as music. "You sound like a marsh frog," she said, moving to stand before his chair. By the flickering light she saw him smile. "Where have you been," she asked. "My dear. I've needed you so much." "Eyyia," he tried again, and stood up. His eyes were black hollows. They would always be hollows. He opened his arms and she moved into the space they made in the world, and laying her head against his chest she permitted herself the almost unimaginable luxury of grief.

I know love," Says the littlest one. "Love is like a flower." "Why is love a flower? Little one tell me." "Love is a flower For the sweetness it gives Before it dies away.

And surely, surely, if we are not simply animals that live to fight, there must be a reason for bloodshed.

He opened his arms and she moved into the space they made in the world, and laying her head against his chest she permitted herself the almost unimaginable luxury of grief.

It's one thing to make war for your country, your family, even in pursuit of glory. It's another to believe that the people you fight are embodiments of evil and must be destroyed for that. I want this peninsula back. I want Esperana great again, but I will not pretend that if we smash Al- Rassan and all it has built we are doing the will of any god I know.

And in the dark of that room, notorious for the woven patterns of desire it had seen, Ammar ibn Khairan held the woman beloved of the man he’d killed, and offered what small comfort he could. He granted her the courtesy and space of his silence, as she finally permitted herself to weep, mourning the depth of her loss, the appalling disappearance, in an instant, of love in a bitter world.

Whichever way the wind blows, it will rain upon the Kindath.

It is an old truth that men and women sometimes miss what they hate as much as what they love.

You touched people's lives, glancingly, and those lives changed forever.