Ana

“You would have been well content if it were not for the dreams. Bloody dreams, killing dreams. Enemies you’d already buried and enemies you hadn’t yet faced. Enemies who didn’t look like enemies, but like men and women, or like children, dying beneath your blade for no reason you could name. You could not decide if they were prophecies or memories, or whether there was any difference between the two.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint

“You were staring up at the rotten thatch of the roof, wondering if anyone would remember your name long enough to mark your grave, and then you were looking at a woman’s face. She didn’t seem much like the saints in the songs. Her lips were sunken where teeth were missing, and her skin was puckered with old scars. There was a fresh wound above her jaw, livid and weeping, and the armor that lapped her shoulders was dented and scored with battle. Her eyes were rather fine, you thought—the lavish blue of the Virgin’s own robe, just like yours—but she carried no cross and wore a rusted mail hood instead of a halo.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint

“The Saint came to you again and again, always with that terrible fury on her face. You wondered if perhaps she did not want to be the Saint of War any longer, and you sympathized; you often didn’t want to be what you were. You were a shrike, a leopard, a plague, a thing that lived only to kill.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint

“You buried your face in your treacherous hands. “Gwynne,” you said. “Gwynne. I could have killed you.”
He took your hands away from your face and held them, his fingers so slim and fine around the knotted scars of your knuckles. He kissed the center of each of your palms, precisely where the priest said the Savior suffered the nails to be driven.
“Why do you stay with me? I am a devil. A butcher. Not even a butcher—his knife, falling over and over.”
Gwynne said, softly, “Before all this, before the Saint and the Prince, you were the girl who still shared her meat with the begging dogs, no matter how hungry she was. Who took a beating for a boy who deserved it, for no reason except that she could bear it better than him. Who shone, even in the shadows.” He said your name, even more softly. “You are not a knife.”
And you said, wretchedly, “But I am his.”
Gwynne did not answer. He pulled you down beside him in the tall grass and touched you in that heady, secret way that transformed the brutal weapon of your body into mere flesh. It was like shucking plate armor after a long campaign and walking naked into a river, letting the current take you. It was like surrendering on the field and finding mercy.
Gwynne touched you until you shuddered and went still in his arms.Then he whispered, so gently you barely heard it—but I did, oh, I did—“You are not his.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint