Ash

“I wish I understood you," he said. "Sometimes you speak, and I feel like a sailor navigating my foreign stars."
"I am nothing like the stars."
"You are, he replied. "You are as lovely, and almost as distant.”
― Natasha Siegel, Solomon's Crown

“I was always asked to be happy, even as everything around me emphasized the virtues of suffering. Monks flagellated themselves into woodcuts, stripping themselves raw before God. The Tragedies instructed me to count no man happy before he was dead. I asked my confessor whether there was wisdom in these words. He said to me, "You are not yet a man Philip. You are young. Be joyous in your youth." Was I expected to be happy now, knowing that someday I was destined for sorrow? "Yes," he replied, as if that made perfect sense and I was simply too young to understand why.
But the more I understood of my position, the expectations upon me, the scarcer that hope became. It was the map that haunted me most, hung above the desk of my tutor's room. There was shown the hollowing of France, in great strokes of red ink: all the land once ours, snatched with hungry hands by England during my father's reign. It was the fruit of his folly, a pair of shackles waiting to descend. My lifetime would be spent redeeming his lifetime of surrender, and no amount of cinnamon could change that.”
― Natasha Siegel, Solomon's Crown

“But I had been a fool not to understand. Little wonder my father had wasted away, considering what had been taken from him. I understood that now. If I caught light as he once had, if I burnt and then faded; if I became ashes and soot, the dust in the air; then certainly, I would be as he was. I would be the dirt beneath another's boot. It was only natural to fear such a fate. But I was wrong to think I could ever avoid it, once Richard came.”
― Natasha Siegel, Solomon's Crown

“Was it worth the trouble?" I asked.
"Certainly. To think, I had feared you might be dull." His eyes trailed languidly over my face, from my hairline to my jaw; a cataloguing, exploratory sort of gaze, one that felt almost violating. "I thought you might be tedious, as your father was. But you are not."
"What am I then? If not dull?"
"I do not know, he replied. "A contradiction. An enemy, an ally. A question and an answer.”
― Natasha Siegel, Solomon's Crown