Mal’s Reviews > The Stolen Heir > Status Update

“ try to believe, whatever happens, whatever I say or do or have done, that my intention is for us to all survive this. For us to win.”

“Some people laugh in the face of death. He laughs in the face of despair”

““l. I couldn’t be the child that they had loved.
Not after everything that happened to me. Not after learning that I am made of sticks and snow.
Headlights swing into view. I am already moving by the time I hear the squeal of brakes.
“I never needed to be warm,” I tell my unmother, my voice hard, full of the anger that has been gnawing at my insides for years.”

““Do you know what I admire about you?”
Truly, I cannot imagine what he will say next.
“That you never stopped being angry,” he tells me. “It can be brave to hate. Sometimes it’s like hope
something would make me kick one more time. Maybe that thing was hate. Hating requires going on, even when you can no longer believe in any better future. But I am shocked that Oak, of all people, would know that.”

“That is the place I need to return to, that cold place where nothing can reach me. Where I can do anything.”

“I am a solitary creature, fated to be one and better as one. Forgetting that is what got me into trouble”

“He’d acted the fool, that his enemies might believe he was one.
How could I have forgotten that he’d been weaned on strategy and deception?”

“All my mistakes are coming home to me.”

“It would be better to disconnect from everything, to float free from my body, to be nothing in an endless night of nothing.”

“that fighting back would only bring me further pain. That’s the lesson they wanted me taught, but soon I realized I would be hurt anyway. Better to hurt someone else when I had a chance. Better to make them hesitate, to know it would cost them something.”