2
" This is what we are for, Alin,” the older guardsman said, turning to his companion. Adare had never heard anyone use Birch’s first name. She hadn’t even known it herself. “Our lives for hers. If she refuses this, there’s no saying what the zealots will do to her.”
“There’s no saying what the zealots will do if she agrees,” Birch pointed out. “We can’t save her if we’re dead.”
“That is a risk that the princess will have to assess for herself. Our duty is to serve.”
“I thought service meant fighting,” Birch protested, but the anger had gone out of him. Resignation thinned his voice.
“Sometimes, Alin,” Fulton replied, nodding. “And sometimes it means dying. "
― Brian Staveley , The Providence of Fire (Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, #2)
3
" People kill to get power, they kill to keep power, and they kill if they think they might lose it, which is pretty much always. Even if you and I both stay out of it, even if we both die, whoever came after us will keep coming. They’ll find the next threat, the next worrisome voice, the next person with the wrong name or the wrong skin. Maybe they’ll go after the rich for their coin or the peasants for their rice, the Bascans because they’re too dark or the Breatans because they’re too pale—it doesn’t matter. "
― Brian Staveley , The Providence of Fire (Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, #2)
4
" There’s no shame, the Kettral said, in crying in your own rack. The rest of the equation remained unspoken, axiomatic: you could cry all you wanted in your rack, provided you got up again in a day or two, provided that when you got up, you went back out, and that when you went back out, you were the baddest, fastest, most brutal motherfucker "
― Brian Staveley , The Providence of Fire (Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, #2)
