Noah Costa

“Words deserted Wintrow. He stared at his father and floundered through thoughts, trying to find some common ground where he could begin reasoning with him. He could not. Despite the blood bond between them, this man was a stranger, and his beliefs were so utterly different from all Wintrow had embraced that he felt no hope of reaching him.”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic

“You speak like a Chalcedean,” Wintrow observed. “There, I am told, to be a woman I’d little better than to be a slave. I think it is born of their long acceptance of slavery there. If you can believe that another human can be your possession, it is but a step to saying your wife and daughter are also possessions, and relegate them to lives convenient to one’s own. But in Jamaillia and in Bingtown, we used to take pride in what our women could do. I have studied the histories. Consider Satrap Malowda, who reigned consortless for a score of years, and was responsible for the setting down of the Rights of Self and Property, the foundation of all our laws. For that matter, consider our religion. Sa, who we men worship as father of all, is still Sa when women call on her as mother of all. Only in Union is there Continuity. The very first precept of Sa says it all. It is only in the last few generations thaf wr have begun to separate the halves of our whole, and divide the—”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic

“I’m not a coward.” He didn’t speak loud, but his voice carried. His father turned slowly to the challenging words. “I’m not a coward,” Wintrow repeated more slowly. “I’m not big. I don’t claim to be strong. But I’m neither a weakling nor a coward. I can accept pain. When it’s necessary.”
A strange odd light had come into Kyle’s eyes. The beginnings of a smile hovered at the corners of his mouth. “You are a Haven,” he pointed out with a quiet pride.
Wintrow met his gaze. There was neither defiance nor the will to injure but the words were clear. “I’m a Vestrit.” He looked down to the bloody handprint on Vivacia’s deck, to the severed forefinger that still rested there. “You’ve made me a Vestrit.” He smiled without joy or mirth. “What did my grandmother say to me? ‘Blood will tell.’ Yes.” He stooped to the deck and picked up his own severed finger. He considered it carefully for a moment, then held it out to his father. “This finger will never wear a priest’s signet,” he said. To some he might have sounded drunken, but to Vivacia his voice was broken with sorrow. “Will you take it, sir? As a token of your victory?”
Captain Kyle’s fair face darkened with the blood of anger. Vivacia suspected he was close to hating his own flesh and blood at that moment. Wintrow stepped lightly toward him, a very strange light in his eyes. Vivacia tried to understand what was happening to the boy. Something was changing inside him, an uncoiling of strength was filling him. He met his father’s gaze squarely, yet his own voice was nothing of anger, nor even pain as he stepped forward boldly, to a place close enough to invite his father to strike him. Or embrace him.
But Kyle Haven moved not at all. His stillness was a denial, of all the boy was, of all he did. Wintrow knew in that instant that he would never please his father, that his father had never even desired to be pleased by him. He had only wanted to master him. And now he would not.”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic

“Then the bitterness came to darken his soul. So, too, had Cress seemed fair and bright, but it had still been a city of greedy, grasping, men. He turned his back on it and slid down to sit flat on the deck. “It’s all a trick,” he observed. “All a rotten trick men play on themselves. They get together and they create this beautiful thing and then they stand back and say, ‘See, we have souls and insight and holiness and joy. We put it all in this building so we don’t have to bother with it in our everyday lives. We can live as stupidly and brutally as we wish, and to stamp down any inclination to spirituality or mysticism that we see in our neighbors or ourselves. Having set it in stone, we don’t have to bother with it anymore.’ It’s a trick men play on themselves. Just one more way we cheat ourselves.”
Vivacia spoke softly. If he had been standing, he might not have heard the words. But he was sitting, his palms flat against her deck, and so they rang through his soul. “Perhaps men are a trick Sa played on this world. ‘All other things I shall make vast and beautiful and true to themselves,’ perhaps he said. ‘Men alone shall be capable of being petty and vicious and self-destructive. And for my cruelest trick of all, I shall put among them men capable of seeing these things in themselves.’ Do you suppose that is what Sa did?”
“That is blasphemy,” Wintrow said fervently.
“Is it? Then how do you explain it? All the ugliness and viciousness that is the province of humanity, whence comes it?”
“Not from Sa. From ignorance of Sa. From separation from Sa. Time and again I have seen children brought to the monastery, boys and girls with no hint as to why they are there. Angry and afraid, many of them, at being sent forth from their homes at such a tender age. Within weeks, they blossom, they open to Ada’s light and glory. In every single child, there is at least a spark of it. Not all stay; some are sent home, not all are suited to a life of service. But all of them are suited to being creations of light and thought and love. All of them.”
― Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic