Yanik

“During the months of winter and spring King Casmir looked only twice at the infant princess, in each case, standing back in cool disinterest. She had thwarted his royal will by coming female into the world. He could not immediately punish her for the act, no more could he extend the full beneficence of his favor.
Sollace grew sulky because Casmir was displeased and, with a set petulant flourishes, banished the child from her sight.
Ehirme, a raw-boned peasant girl, and nice to under-gardener, had lost her own infant son to the yellow bloat. With an amplitude of both milk and solitude she be came Suldron's wet-nurse”
― Jack Vance, Suldrun's Garden

“Either way, I'd brought a pair of hands and enough general surgical experience to be useful. If you'd ever had be a saint to heal someone, medicine would have been doomed from the start.”
― Greg Egan, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology

“Poor kid. All of them, really. And the years stretch ahead, a march beneath a sun that never goes down.”
― Stephen King, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

“Now it sprang up again, that little bright flame that had driven her to apply to the Academy in the first place. Danger ignited it - ignited her - the way nothing else could do.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Trading in Danger