Quotes from Mary E. Pearson

You have to make your peace with Kaden, and he with you. You are not on opposite sides anymore. Do you understand?

I finally understood that history wasn't just written on walls and in books but made in a thousand daily decisions, and some of them went wrong, some went right, and some decisions just had to be made because time was running out. Waiting for someone else to write your history was no way to live. Sometimes it was only a certain way to die.

Sometimes the smallest animal inflicts the greatest pain.

Hear the language that isn't spoken, Kazi, the breaths, the pauses, the fisted hands, the vacant stares, the twitches and tears, for everyone can hear spoken words, but only a few can hear the heart that beats behind them. " - Pg 207

Somewhere beyond all that, on an unseeable horizon, was Morrighan and all the people who lived there, going about their lives, unaware. My brothers. Pauline. Berdi. Gwyneth. And more patrols like Walther's who would meet their deaths, as unaware as I had once been. I want to go with you. Where I was going was no place for Natiya. It was hardly a place for me.

It is hard to find reason when you're being torn in two.

I hated things being for the best. They never really were. It was a phrase that sugarcoated the leftover crumbs of our options.

I looked at her face, gently illuminated by the distant light of the tavern. Even with her brows pulled low and an anguished crease between them, she was beautiful. It was a strange thing to think at the moment. I had deliberately avoided the thought each time I had looked at her before. I couldn't afford such thoughts, but now the word came, unbidden, unrelenting. I

And as high as the trees stretched, the roots reached to the foundations of the earth.

Not that either he or Kaden was lazy. They were both always eager to pitch in, Kaden fixing the wheel on Berdi's wagon without any prompting, and Rafe proving himself as an experienced farmhand, clearing the trenches in Berdi's vegetable garden and repairing its sticky sluice gate. Gwyneth and I both watched with more than a little interest as he swung the hoe and lifted heavy rocks to reinforce the channel. Perhaps,

For everyone can hear spoken words, but only a few can hear the heart that beats behind them.

Doubt was a poison I couldn't afford to sip.

Fear was the blood scent for wolves. The curious inched closer, peering at me with half-open mouths that revealed rotten teeth. Were they amused or sneering?

Do not sacrifice one kind of strength for another.

Because I knew the guilt would destroy her, and I couldn't bear for her to suffer any more than she already had. Orrin

I am not a tomato

Their voices meld into a cloudy rumble of their own, and I ponder Mira's and Aidan's secrets and imagine the injustice that threads through other lives, injustice that has no face because it is hidden away in a dark, shameful place, hidden for years in hopes of making it untrue.

Stop cutting me off!" he yelled. The steel of his eyes sparkled with warning. "The least you can do is give me a chance to speak! We're gonna talk!

But everything about us didn't just feel right, it felt like something rare, something delicate that I was afraid of breaking. Something that only comes along once in a lifetime.

My anger spiked. I should have stabbed the Komizar again. Carved him up like a holiday goose, then brought his head back skewered on a sword and showed it to the crowds as proof that I had no love for the tyrant.

We'd had no outside influences to come between us.

I hated how easily innocence could be robbed—how quickly a child could go from plucking wish stalks at a pond's edge to clutching stolen bread beneath a coat.

Where's Priya?" I asked. "She's coming. Unsaddling the horses. She lost the bet." "Bet?" I said. "Who would take down the first soldier." "You had time for bets?" my mother snapped.

We. Everything was we now.