88
" My son ... my son,' said Francis Crawford before the blurred, failing candles, their light searching over his disordered, bent head and closed eyes and the long, scarred lines of his hands, laid flat on the steel.
'So small a spirit, to lodge such sorrows as mankind has brought you. Live ... live ... Wait for me, new, frightened soul. And though the world should reel to a puny death, and the wolves are appointed our godfathers, I will not fail you, ever. "
― Dorothy Dunnett , The Disorderly Knights (The Lymond Chronicles, #3)
89
" And in Scotland, what was there? A divided leadership. The French Dowager fighting the Earl of Arran for the Governorship during Queen Mary’s childhood and wittingly or not, with every French coin she borrowed, ensuring Scotland’s future as a province of France. And since England dared not have another France over her border, England was ready to seduce any Scottish noble, from Arran downwards, who did not care for the Queen Dowager, or France, or the old Catholicism. A divided nation; a divided God; a land of ancient, self-seeking families who broke and mended alliances daily as suited their convenience, and for whom the concept of nationhood was sterile frivolity…what could weld them in time, and turn them from their self-seeking and their pitiable, perpetual feuds? A common danger might do such a thing, except that the nation was too weak to resist one. A great leader might achieve unity—but he must be followed by his equal or fail. A corporate religion might do it, but where did one exist which some foreign power had not seized and championed already? "
― Dorothy Dunnett , The Disorderly Knights (The Lymond Chronicles, #3)
92
" It was because these men, whatever their profession—philosopher, architect, lawyer, painter, doctor, artist and priest—were by force of the times they lived in soldiers also, and understood that speed and skill and toughness and above all self-confidence came from being pushed again and again and again past the edge of endurance until that limit became as elastic as an extra muscle, held in reserve. "
― Dorothy Dunnett , The Disorderly Knights (The Lymond Chronicles, #3)
96
" And there, while the great church emptied and his brother waited, his face grim, outside, Francis Crawford walked forward, and genuflected, and laid on the altar the shining ribbon of his sword, Graham Malett’s blood dark on the blade. Then he spoke, his voice clear and low, before the shrine he had chosen, to affirm to his brother, his mother, and all those in the dimming vaults of the church who dared not come close, that the altar prevailed, eternal, untarnished, over the memory of the enemy who carried its name. "
― Dorothy Dunnett , The Disorderly Knights (The Lymond Chronicles, #3)