Arushi > Recent Status Updates

‘Let your ears hear all the lovely songs and sounds
of the world,’ said the old dame, ‘and let them hear,
too, any calls for help, however faint. But close them
to all secrets that are not yours, and to all things
that are hateful or mean.’

“Something is gravely wrong here, for Suzanna Sun-Catcher perished yesterday.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Yes, she did.”  He insisted.  Gryphons took all warfare seriously, even if it was waged with fashion dolls.  “My people slayed her in the Cupcake Village Massacre and you know it.”
Avalon shrugged.  “She’s a zombie.  She came back.”
Trystan gasped in outrage.
“Wait, we can have zombies?”  Midas perked up at that news.

“You’re playing dolls, Trystan?”
The gryphon flashed him a deadly look.  “It was not ‘playing.’”  He intoned.  “I was instructing the girl.  She had much to learn if she plans to lead a kingdom.”
“They’re reenacting epic battles of old.”  Gwen put in.  “It’s part of the training.  Trystan made her a doll to represent Lyrssa Highstorm, vanquished empress of his people and tyrant of the skies.”

“Midas is brilliant!” Gwen interjected, apparently furious that Miss Muffet had just insulted him. “Yes, he needs to focus more on details. And granted, he threatens violence a bit too much in order to cover his gentle heart. And okay, he can be a little trusting…”
“‘Trusting and gentle?’” Dower interjected incredulously. “Midas?” He looked at Midas. “You?”
Midas endeavored to look trusting and gentle.

Midas paid Trystan a great deal of money to act as a bodyguard, but the man wasn’t exactly a traditional employee.  He only bothered to follow directions when he agreed with them and he basically considered Midas a teenager with poor impulse control.

"And now I have learned the truth. Husbands can fall out of love. friends can betray you. But when you're stuck in a hellhole far from hom, your family will move heaven and earth to get you back. We need to get them back, Dina. They would do it for us."

'Like I said, the Code don’t mean anything. I reached that conclusion long before the Shaman stuck me in a cage. Couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy no more. Course, I was stupid enough to tell him that to his face. Just goes to show that it don’t matter how well a man thinks he understands something. He never really does, not until he’s taught the lesson at first hand.’

The result - to foreign eyes, at any rate - was an inversion of just about every accepted norm. In Sparta, girls were fed at the expense of their brothers. To the bemusement of other Greeks, they were also taught to read, and to express themselves not modestly, as was becoming for women, but in an aggressively sententious manner, so that they might better instruct their own children in what it meant to be a Spartan.

“I resent that,” said Quentin.
“Many men have resented me in their days, young prince,” said Tybalt. “Be proud of the legacy you have joined.”
“Tybalt, don’t taunt my squire,” I said. “Quentin, don’t kill my boyfriend. Both of you, shut up and let me work.”

“I won’t claim never to have lied to you, but I have not lied to you since we decided to try taking this relationship seriously,” he said quietly. “I love you. Lying to you would be a mistreatment of what that love means.”

“We’ll have back for every last thing you broke. Every child you took. Every slaveman’s lash. All of it,” Karol said between clenched teeth. “And we’ll show your Geder Palliako what war looks like when he isn’t winning.”

"Ah, one of those letters. I understand. I have a collection of them your father wrote to me, once upon a time.”
“Mother!”
“Jorey, dear, one thing that you must be aware of by pure force of logic if nothing else? You were not the first generation to discover sex.”
“I’m not having this conversation,” Jorey said, but there was laughter in his voice.

It was a simpler thing, she thought, to tell a wife what she was allowed to be than to say the same to one’s mother. She had held Jorey as a babe, had comforted him when he wept the bitter boyhood tears that no one else could ever be permitted to see. She had thought those things only love when she’d done them. She saw now they had been an investment.

“You’ll recall there was some mad bastard organizing the pirates into a fleet?” Pyk said. “That appears to be him.”
“Does he know that he’s got three tiny little ships going against ten Antean roundships?” Cithrin asked. “Because it seems someone hasn’t mentioned the fact to him.”

“How long can you pretend to be something before you aren’t pretending anymore?”
The three men stood silent for a long moment, then Marcus sighed. “Stop saying things that sound wise, Sandr. It upsets my sense of the world.”

“I depend on you like Cal depends on me. Sometimes, like now, I am lost and you’re the only one I know who might have a map. And if you didn’t or couldn’t help, you’d still be my friend. Our friend. That will never depend on what you can do for us. It depends solely on you being you.”

“What did you say?”“That the thought hadn’t occurred to me,” she said.“And?” Vincen said.Clara raised an eyebrow.“And now it has.”

“Well sure,” Smit said, rubbing his chin, “but the important thing’s how it gets from here to there, isn’t it?”The apostate smiled.“Smit, my dear, I believe you’ve just committed metaphor.”The actor blinked a false innocence.“Did I? And here I thought we were talking about gutters."

“You forget yourself,” she said reprovingly.
“I do, my lady,” the huntsman said. “With you, I often do."

“What are you doing, Mother?” Barriath asked.
“Saving the kingdom, dear,” she said. “Eat your squash. Don’t just move it around on the plate and pretend you’ve done anything. That never worked when you were a boy, I can’t imagine why you still try it.”

"I choose not to believe in any gods as an act of charity,” Marcus said.
“Charity toward whom?”
“Toward the gods. Seems rude to think they couldn’t make a world better than this,” Marcus said.

“Then we have a problem.”
“One of us does,” said Degan. “The other just has to figure out what to do with the body.”

I’m told there are a lot of different ways to categorize magic, but, when it comes to the Kin, we have only three labels that matter: legal, illegal, and imperial

The little voice in the back of my head whispered damn the consequences, you know you can probably fly. If you can’t, imagine the thrill of the fall. Reason, on the other hand, screamed bloody murder at me.

At what point exactly could you decide you were going insane?

Amanda rolled her eyes at me. “You’re not bi. Babe, don’t encourage her.”
Jo grinned, totally unrepentant. “Last week she wanted to be gay. Before that she talked monasteries. I think this is a constructive step toward her forgiving every penis-possessing human and moving on with her life.”

Amanda rolled her eyes at me. “You’re not bi. Babe, don’t encourage her.”
Jo grinned, totally unrepentant. “Last week she wanted to be gay. Before that she talked monasteries. I think this is a constructive step toward her forgiving every penis-possessing human and moving on with her life.”

After all, getting everything you wish for is nearly as dire a curse as having all your dreams come true.

They didn’t love him, but he never doubted they would follow him, speech or not.