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To charge into battle, with neither shield nor mount, against terrible odds... to know the odds and charge anyway" You shook your head.You settled the spectacled back on my face and your features came into sudden focus:the severe line between your brows, the faint flush over the bridge of your nose. "There is a word for that and it is not a coward."
"Traitor?"
"Madman."

she is so gentle with him I CANNOT DEAL WITH

You did not fight cleanly or prettily; it was nothing like a dance. It was an annihilation, brutal and inexorable. The only beauty was in the sheer fucking speed of it. You swung Valiance one handed, quick as cleaver, and if your enemies did not meet your blade they met the edge of your shield,and when the shield was ripped from your arm, they met your mailed fist. You were Una Everlasting, there was no surviving you

Why were you armored, the first time I saw you in the woods?"
"So they would know me when they found me. I suppose even there, at the end of reason, I did not want to be forgotten."
There was a metallic ringing in my ears, like bullet casings on stone. "Pardon?"
"I could see no other way out. I could not bear to serve her any longer, and I could not bear to let her die. I loved her too well even then,even still.

"You are leaving me here?"
Your brows crimped, bemused. "Yes."
"You can't slay a dragon alone!"
"Everything I have done, I have done alone" You said it without emotion, as a statement of fact. "I thought you had read all the stories."
"But what if.. Just let me come with you.Please."
Your expression moved from bafflement to some harsh, taut emotion that made the muscles of your jaw roll. "You make a poor coward, boy"

"They should fear me, boy. And so should you."
You began to draw your hand away from mine, but I caught and held it instead. You looked up sharply, eyes dark as silt.
"Well, I don't."
Your lips parted and I saw again the phantom smile, berries bursting between sharp white teeth. I had never heard you laugh, but I knew then it would be low and rough, and wild.
💘

And I am her drawn blade.It was I who beheaded the False Kings,one by one, though they cried mercy.I who set the crown on her brow,with blood still crusted around jewels.I who rode at the front,who struck first and last, who drew every border in red.Do you know what they call me, in the north?" Your lip curled,I could not tell if the contempt was directed at them or yourself. "The Knight of Worms. Bc I feed them well

"Yvanne dresses me in fine gowns sometimes, for holy days and feasts.The first time I tripped over my own hem and whole court laughed and laughed.I am not sure which I prefer:to be taken for something I am not or to fail at being what I am."
A weird shock went through me,as if I'd caught the glimpse of myself in a mirror I hadnt known was there. "I would not laugh at you"

(i would prefer you however you chose to be)

"All my life men like you have followed me. Hounding me, lapping up the blood and begging for more. You have turned all my graves into glory, all my carnage into pretty songs they sing at court."

I looked at your hands instead.Broad and veined, scarred so thickly in some places the skin tugged the fingers at odd angles. I watched the play of firelight over the knots of your knuckles, and all the questions I'd been trying not to ask myself - where was I, when was I, had I gone finally fantastically mad et cetera - fell away. I have always liked your hands.

instant flashback to medved's "i did love your hands"

...A thick welt of a scar fell through your left brow and into the eye beneath it, so that the pupil was misshapen, elongated into a black tear.
You did not look look any kind of angel. Yet still, I knew you.

They had shied from the sheer scale of you, narrowing the great sweep of your shoulders, tapering your wrists and waist. They had made your face smooth and poreless, forever youthful, when in truth it was pocked and wind burnt, with heavy lines carved between the brows. Your hair was not the sulfric yellow of a Saint of Dominion, but the stark white of a snapped bone. A thick welt of a scar fell through your left bro

... that I had left home and could never return to it, and that there would never be a time that I did not miss it 💔

There were a few thickets left, but of my favourite tree, that great and ancient yew in the heart of the woods, there was nothing at all. Even the roots had been dug out so that all that remained was an indenation in the earth surrounded by tiny white flowers, like a plundered grave.
For once I did not weep.
I only knelt for awhile in that place until I understood what every person understands eventually;

"I thought you had gone."
"You'd hardly miss me. You dont need a housekeeper at all - your House takes care of itself and the rare times it doesnt.. Well, you can just snap your fingers.
"It cant make a meatloaf"
"I stared at him for a moment then continued sweeping. "Yes, it can.It can make anything."
"It is not the same."

the way he kept saying "i thought you had gone" every time the quiet settled 🥺

"Well, I suppose I should let y-"
"Wait" He reached out to hold me by my wrist. "It is hard for me to sleep again... after. We need little sleep but even magic workers must rest now amd then so... Stay."
"What?" I said stupidly.
I couldnt concentrate on his words for the touch of his hand on my wrist, heavy and encircling as a bracelet.
"Stay until I fall asleep" he said. "I would not be alone tonight."
💘

I felt that no one had ever looked at me, not properly.I imagined it was because they could see the whole story of my life stretched out before me like a cart track full of holes.No marriage, no sprouts. No chance of a sweetheart rucking up my skirts.
But the sorcere looked at me. Really looked so that there needed to be a new word for looking that didnt just mean eyes pointing in a direction.

Well, I didnt have him but I wanted him, and it never occurred to me that women like me - plain, forgettable, sensible women - arent allowed to want things.Although that seemed clear as water to everyone else.
I thought I was allowed to moon over a boy and to have fantasies. That was when I was younger, before I realised I was not really a woman but more like a mule; for use but not for adoration.

I clipped two strands of Rhys’s silky black hair, and he clipped two strands of my brown locks. We twisted the strands together, while Meryl sang.
 
Twist and twine
Your days with mine,
Your years with mine.
Cling close and never part.
Twist and twine
Your hairs with mine.

I reached into my sack for the magic boots.
“You don’t need those. I can fly you out.”
Fly me? The real me? In the sky?
“I won’t drop you. Flying is... the nicest. I can show you how the wind feels, and you can touch more clouds.”
He looked so eager. I fought back a hysterical laugh. If he dropped me, at least I wouldn’t have to go to a dragon.
“Don’t fly me over the moon or around the sun.”
“I won’t. "

"I thought so too, Addie . . . Princess Addie.” He stopped walking, and I stopped as well, or he would have lost his hold on my arm. “In my thoughts you are always Addie, simply Addie.”
In his thoughts! He thought of me when I wasn’t there?
I stammered, “You may c-call me Addie, simply Addie."

they are so cute together 🥺

"Im gratified you think I could've stopped you. And of course I worried! But my daughter is strong and clever, and a damn sight better at figthing than most of those puffed up nobles in shiny armour. She can take care of herself... After all, she's been taking care of me for years."
i love this kind of dads 💘

"Run where? Live where? On what funds?No one would welcome a woman blacksmith into their village... We could not stay at mine because your people would find us. We's have nothing, Isobelle. No money and no titles. Do you even know what's it's like to live that way?
"If I were with you I wouldnt care."
"You would" Gwen's eyes prickled with tears "You think you wouldnt, but you would."

A KNIGHT'S TALE REP 💔

"Run? Where?"
"Anywhere!I dont care where it is as long as we are both there"
But Gwen was shaking her head and icy rain was starting to patter down on Isobelle's flame of hope. "Isobelle, I cant... I cant just... run away."
"Yes you can!" She took hold of Gwen's hands, squeezing them "Why would you stay here?"
"To fight! To win! To earn your freedom and prove myself"

a knight's tale callback 😭

But she cannot see further than this instant and she drags herself back to the path she knows. The next joust, next strategy.She stops herself from stepping beyond the map she can se because... well. There will be dragons
She knows, as Isobelle knows, as everyone in on the secret knows, that this run cant last forever.
This is, after all, a story.. and what good is a story where the heroes cant seem to stop winning?

"But I still carry that shame they gave me... Because once you accept something as yours, it is difficult to cast off again. It is hard, once you have opened the door, to close it once more."

"If I lose,Im consigning her to a fate I cant prevent.Im the one who lets her down, who feeds her to a dragon. And even if I win, I'm only postponing her fate. Maybe she should just run...Maybe by offering her this hope Im only putting her in harm's way. Even if I win, I cant save her."
"You can save her from this marriage, this moment... It's not for you to save her from all things that may come."

(But i want to)

Somehow though, it wasnt the thoight of being a arrested or roasted that felt maddest of all. The part that kept her awake at night with wanting was the idea that she thoight she could be, even for a moment, good enough to be a knight.

Again the soldier thought of the King’s musicians playing gallantly to hide the silence of their master and his daughters. Yet there one listened to the music because one could hear the sorrow behind it that it sought to conceal, even to soften. Here, to listen carefully to what lay behind the music was to court madness,for what lay behind it was empitness of the void.

But the stiffness was not so much that of the muscles as of the mind: the reluctance to rise and look upon yesterday’s battlefield; to look upon the faces of those who had been your friends and had been killed, and upon those belonging to the other side, whom you and your friends had killed. And upon those of that other army who returned in the morning to bury their dead,their living faces as stiff as your own.

The pain of living and drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Issues from the hand of time the simple soul
Irreaolite and selfish, misshapen, lame,
Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,
Denying the importunity of the blood,
Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,
Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;
Living first in silence after viaticum.