The Poppy War

She lay on the road for three days. Her mortal guise was of a woman of uncommon beauty. In those times, that was a dangerous thing to be.

How did you survive? By having the body of a woman.

If you hold the fate of the country in your hands, if you have accepted your obligation to your people, then your life ceases to be your own.

It wasn’t as if she could read his mind. She had simply spent so much time observing him that she knew exactly how he was going to attack. They were like a well-oiled machine. They were a spontaneously coordinated dance. They weren’t two parts of a whole, not quite, but they came close.

Fear was impossible to eradicate. But so was the will to survive.

Once an empire has become convinced of its worldview, anything that evidences the contrary must be erased.

Because if she could just erase her past, then she could write herself into whoever she wanted to be in the present. Student. Scholar. Soldier. Anything except who she used to be.

He was so convinced of his own rationality, of his encyclopedic knowledge of most things, that he had difficulty conceiving of gaps in his understanding.

Kitay’s Sinegard wasn’t terrifying, because Kitay had money.

But it was so clear why. Nezha was a Sinegardian noble, the son of a Warlord, and she was a country girl with no connections and no status. Expelling Nezha would have been troublesome and politically contentious. He mattered. She did not.