Ash

“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

“I am a king," I said. "What could possibly be more important than that?"
She laughed, and she picked up her fork once more. "Anything Philip," she said. "Almost anything else.”
― Natasha Siegel, Solomon's Crown

“I recalled how I had once thought myself a dragon slayer; how I had once gone to war convinced that I would tear my father's serpentine heart from his chest, and in doing so free myself and my mother from his clutches. But now, years later, that day had failed to come. Instead, the walls of his tower had grown taller and taller, and the insult of it had driven deeper and deeper, until it pained me as much as the imprisonment of my mother did.
Perhaps it was selfish of me, to resent my wounded pride as much as her suffering. But resent it I did. And as I stood there that night in England, I could feel that resentment staining my very soul, like the weathered stone before me, going black in the wind and the rain.”
― Natasha Siegel, Solomon's Crown

“I had been naive to ever assume I could keep us at peace. Kisses do not a kingdom make, nor love a conquest end.
I loved him, but that was not enough.
Perhaps it never would be.”
― Natasha Siegel, Solomon's Crown