102
" Kaz snorted. " So you don't think I'm a demon any more?"
"I know you're a demon, but your tricks are human."
"Some people see a magic trick and say "Impossible!" They clap their hands, turn over their money, and forget about it ten minutes later. Other people ask how it worked. They go home, get into bed, toss and turn, wondering how it was done. It takes them a good night's sleep to forget all about it.
And then there are the ones who stay awake, running through the trick again and again, looking for that skip in perception, the crack in the illusion that will explain how their eyes got duped; they're the kind who won't rest until they've mastered that little bit of mystery for themselves. I'm that kind."
"You love trickery."
"I love puzzles. Trickery is just my native language. "
― Leigh Bardugo , Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)
104
" Bright flashes of memory sparked through Kaz’s mind. A cup of hot chocolate in his mittened hands, Jordie warning him to let it cool before he took a sip. Ink drying on the page as he’d signed the deed to the Crow Club. The first time he’d seen Inej at the Menagerie, in purple silk, her eyes lined with kohl. The bone-handled knife he’d given her. The sobs that had come from behind the door of her room at the Slat the night she’d made her first kill. The sobs he’d ignored. Kaz remembered her perched on the sill of his attic window, sometime during that first year after he’d brought her into the Dregs. She’d been feeding the crows that congregated on the roof.
“You shouldn’t make friends with crows,” he’d told her.
“Why not?” she asked.
He’d looked up from his desk to answer, but whatever he’d been about to say had vanished on his tongue.
The sun was out for once, and Inej had turned her face to it. Her eyes were shut, her oil-black lashes fanned over her cheeks. The harbor wind had lifted her dark hair, and for a moment Kaz was a boy again, sure that there was magic in this world.
“Why not?” she’d repeated, eyes still closed.
He said the first thing that popped into his head. “They don’t have any manners.”
“Neither do you, Kaz.” She’d laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him. "
― Leigh Bardugo , Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)
114
" When I’m rich,” Jesper said behind him. “I’m going somewhere I never have to see snow again. What about you, Wylan?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“I think you should buy a golden piano-”
“Flute.”
“And play concerts on a pleasure barge. You can park it in the canal right outside your father’s house.”
“Nina can sing,” Inej put in,
“We’ll duet,” Nina amended. “Your father will have to move.”
She did have a terrible singing voice. He hated that he knew that, but he couldn’t resist glancing over his shoulder. Nina’s hood had fallen back, and the thick waves of her hair had escaped her collar.
Why do I keep doing that? He thought in a rush of frustration. It had happened aboard the ship, too.
He’d tell himself to ignore her, and the next thing he knew his eyes would be seeking her out. "
― Leigh Bardugo , Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)
115
" Inej looked at her strange crew, barefoot and shivering in their soot-stained prison uniforms, their features limned by the golden light of the dome, softened by the mist that hung in the air.
What bound them together? Greed? Desperation? Was it just the knowledge that if one or all of them disappeared tonight, no one would come looking? Inej’s mother and father might still shed tears for the daughter they’d lost, but if Inej died tonight, there would be no one to grieve for the girl she was now. She had no family, no parents or siblings, only people to fight beside. Maybe that was something to be grateful for, too.
It was Jesper who spoke first. “No mourners,” he said with a grin.
“No funerals,” they replied in unison. Even Matthias muttered the words softly.
“If any of you survive, make sure I have an open casket,” Jesper said as he hefted two slender coils of rope over his shoulder and signalled for Wylan to follow him across the roof. “The world deserves a few more moments with this face. "
― Leigh Bardugo , Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1)