Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.
She’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.
People of the hundred,” he said, using an ancient Herrani phrase Arin was surprised he knew, “who leads you?”So many cried Arin’s name that it no longer sounded like his name.
I want to know everything about you.” So he told her. The stars, too, seemed to listen.
It was wrong to want to touch a scar and call it beautiful.
Arin. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.”Her words silenced him, steadied him.Antecipation lifted within her like the fragance of a garden under the rain. She sat at the piano, touching the keys. “Ready?”He smiled. “Play.
She said, I’m going to miss you when you when I wake up.Don’t wake up, he answered.But he did.Kestrel, beside him on the grass, said. “Did I wake you? I didn’t mean to.
The sky was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.
She looked at the boy. He knew her weakness for storytelling. And it was, after all, only a story. Still, she wished he had chosen a happier one.
He’d believed it. She couldn’t believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.
Yet he understood that there are some things you feel and others that you choose to feel, and that the choice doesn’t make the feeling less valid.
It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice.
Come closer, and I will tell you.”But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a want, a promise. A story, in its own way.
A dagger wants flesh, her father would say. Find it.
A singer who refused to sing, a friend who wasn’t her friend, someone who was hers and yet would never be hers. Kestrel looked away from Arin. She swore to herself that she would never look back
Ultimately, when he held your treasonous letter in his hand and saw how you had lied to him, the choice between me and you was the choice between someone who loves him and someone who didn’t.
When I look at you as if you’re crazy it’s not that I judge you for your insanity.
You can’t see both sides of one coin at once, can you, child? The god of money always keeps a secret.The god of money was also the god of spies.
But we don’t think too well when we want too much.
Will you come with me?””Ah, Kestrel, that’s something you never need to ask.
She focused on that nothingness, imagined it as ink spilling over everything she could possibly think or feel.
Whether we think of Disney’s blonde beauty and her pumpkin carriage or Marissa Meyer’s recent recasting of ‘Cinderella’ as a cyborg in the young adult novel ‘Cinder,’ we know that there are countless modern retellings of the tale.