41
" Each tower sports a circular walk at the apex, but there are no guards manning them. The castle is enormous, a fair chunk of the White Mansion, but the bulk of it is concealed behind forty-foot-high walls of silvery, metal-laced ice. With the exception of the slopes of snow-drifted roofs, flying buttresses, and the currently empty promenade that crowns the main hall, I can see none of the enormous courtyard I’ve read about in my files which is capable of comfortably accommodating tens of thousands of Fae. Last time I was here, the walls had collapsed and the castle was a dripping, icicle-drenched ruin, abandoned for millennia; all of it little more than a misshapen sloe of ice. "
― Karen Marie Moning , Kingdom of Shadow and Light (Fever, #11)
43
" Frosted, low-hanging clouds gust across the arctic terrain, driven by a metallic-scented breeze, hovering a few feet from the ground, and, as one of them passes, I glimpse razor-sharp edges on the minuscule snowflakes of which the cloud is comprised. Getting caught in one would tear me up far worse than being stuck in a southern burr-bush patch and leave me bloody and tainted by some delicate (short-lasting) poison. It wouldn’t kill me, but would certainly be a painful, irritating distraction. "
― Karen Marie Moning , Kingdom of Shadow and Light (Fever, #11)
47
" I frown, glancing at the ice-coated forest to the south. Though the wind is blowing and knife-edged boughs scrape against one another, there isn’t a hint of the tortured groaning/chiming sound they were making the last time I was here. To the west, the frozen river that gurgles and leaps beneath two feet of ice and shrieks with the voices of countless tortured humans who were abducted over millennia and sealed beneath the surface, their all-too-aware frozen souls permanently entombed, is as silent as the dead should be. It’s almost as if all sound has been forbidden, Barrons muses. I glance at him sharply. Yes, I say and abruptly realize what I was too distracted to notice before. Since we’ve arrived, Barrons hasn’t spoken a single word aloud. "
― Karen Marie Moning , Kingdom of Shadow and Light (Fever, #11)
48
" I close my eyes and grit my teeth. My gut is screaming, no, no, no, yet my Highlander heart is bleeding for this woman. I read her as without guile, highly intelligent, self-possessed, socially inept, book-worldly yet life-innocent. If she’s telling me the truth, and I’m ninety-nine point nine percent certain of my truth-telling skills, everything she knows about life she learned from books. She certainly behaves as if that’s the case. Still, I need to know what her true form is. That’s nonnegotiable. If she wants trust from me, she’s going to have to fully reveal herself. “Please don’t put me back in a bottle. Not just yet. Let me live a little. Please,” she pleads softly. “I’m begging you. I’d settle for just a tiny slice of life. I can’t even imagine it. I’ve dreamed of it for so long.” I open my eyes and think, I am so fucked because now I can’t possibly make her go back into a bottle. If I force her in and cork her off, returning her to her miserable existence without even the solace of her Library, I’ll feel like the biggest shit in my kingdom, and I rather enjoy Sean owning that role. “Will you obey me if I let you stay out of it? "
― Karen Marie Moning , Kingdom of Shadow and Light (Fever, #11)
49
" Pure mutiny flashes across her features, and I nearly order her back into a bottle right then and there. I don’t need any more problems on my hands, and, regardless of how downtrodden by fate she seems, she’s a willful woman who’s never had the right to exercise that will, a Cat-5 hurricane forming off my coast. The question isn’t whether the storm will come hammer my kingdom, but when, and how catastrophic it will be. Knowing my luck, as catastrophic as is possible. I no longer even spend much time brooding about catastrophe. I plan for it. It’s my life. She says tartly, “If I must always obey a man, and never have any choice about my life, then yes, I’d rather obey one while outside the bottle than inside it. And perhaps if I’m an obedient little pet, I’ll get a treat,” she adds, eyes flashing. I say defensively, “We don’t know each other. I don’t trust you. If the day comes that I trust you—” “You’d listen to me? Like I’m a real person and everything?” she cuts me off excitedly. “You’re going to have to figure out how to show me your true form, to have a snowball’s chance in hell of that.” She sighs forlornly. Och, Christ. This woman. She gets to me. “Impress me with how well you obey the limits I give you. I’ll endeavor to give you only the necessary ones.” My gut is screaming again. This isn’t going to go well, I just know it. "
― Karen Marie Moning , Kingdom of Shadow and Light (Fever, #11)
54
" As I stalk down the damp stone corridor in a perfectly foul mood, still unlaid and raging with testosterone, fully aware that I probably just made a deal with some kind of devil or someone controlled by some kind of devil, Ryodan appears around the corner, stalking toward me, and I’m beyond offended because my perimeter alarms didn’t go off, and I specifically warded against the Nine. He looks furious, which for him means a muscle twitches beneath his eye. He’s the bloody reason I have another of my problems: Thanks to him, Uncle Dageus is immortal and a beast while his wife is mortal and not a beast, which really crapped in all the Keltar Wheaties. We Keltar druids bond for life and beyond. Which means, for both my aunt and uncle, the “beyond” part is going to be—figuratively, at least—a long and lonely hell. "
― Karen Marie Moning , Kingdom of Shadow and Light (Fever, #11)
55
" her naked today, sort of? Is he reading my mind? Mentally, I mutter blah, blah, blah, over and over. “Shut the hell up and listen to me. We were in bed and she vanished. There one instant, then gone. Taken from inside Chester’s, which is impossible. I’ve got the club so heavily warded, even I have a difficult time getting past them, in beast form. "
― Karen Marie Moning , Kingdom of Shadow and Light (Fever, #11)
57
" This is all-out war. They’ve already hideously disfigured one another yet they continue to attack and maim, as if driven by some inexplicable external force to self-genocide. Watch out! Barrons growls, as a heap of limbs with no discernible face breaks from battle, lurches within inches of me, and collapses to the ground where it lays, shuddering. I bend and study the misshapen heap of parts—its melody is lower royalty, not a prince or princess but a courtier—and spy a yellow eye peering blearily from beneath a toenail, an upper lip with no gash for a mouth embedded in a shoulder that now resides where a knee might have been. The eye no longer shimmers with iridescent fire but is bleary, flat, and regarding me blankly. Unlike the statues in the labyrinth, it evidences no recognition of who I am. Understandably, for its brain is in quarters, embedded pulsating and bloody on the outside of its body. "
― Karen Marie Moning , Kingdom of Shadow and Light (Fever, #11)