" Jyo offered Isae a fried feathergrass stalk with a big smile, but Akos snatched it before she could take it.
“You don’t want to eat that,” he said. “Unless you want to spend the next six hours hallucinating.”
“Last time Jyo slipped someone one of those, they wandered around this house talking about giant dancing babies,” Jorek said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Teka said. “Laugh all you want, but you would be scared too if you hallucinated giant babies.”
“It was worth it, whether I will ever be forgiven or not,” Jyo said, winking. He had a soft, slippery way of talking.
“Do they work on you?” Cisi asked Akos, nodding to the stalk in his hand.
In answer, Akos bit into the stalk, which tasted like earth and salt and sour.
“Your gift is odd,” Cisi said. “I’m sure Mom would have some kind of vague, wise thing to say about that.”
“Ooh. What was he like as a child?” Jorek said, folding his hands and learning close to Akos’s sister. “Was he actually a child, or did he just sort of appear one day as a fully grown adult, full of angst?”
Akos glared at him.
“He was short and chubby,” Cisi said. “Irritable. Very particular about his socks.”
“My socks?” Akos said.
“Yeah!” she said. “Eijeh told me you always arranged them in order of preference from left to right. Your favorite ones were yellow. "
― Veronica Roth , Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark, #1)