Kristin Cashore

She wanted to cause him pain for taking a place in her heart she wouldn't have given him if she'd known the truth.

Katsa and Po were trying to drown each other and, judging from their hoots of laughter, enjoying it immensely.

Every configuration of people is an entirely new universe unto itself.

But that's how memory works, Bitterblue said quietly. Things disappear without your permission, then come back again without your permission." And sometimes they came back incomplete and warped.

If her enemies were Brigan's friends and her friends were Brigan's enemies, then the two of them could walk through the world arm in arm and never be hit by arrows again.

You're the queen, and it's the queen's house, and whatever Brigan may accomplish, he's highly unlikely ever to be queen.

There will be no yelling at people who are bleeding themselves to unconsciousness.

In the end, Leck should have stuck to his lies. For it was the truth he almost told that killed him.

Find something useful to do with your morning,' she thought to him as she neared her chambers. 'Do something heroic in front of an audience. Knock a child into a river while no one's looking and then rescue him.

I have no doubt that you are more than capable of bringing the Monsean queen and my son and the rest of my sons and a hundred Nanderan kittens through an onslaught of howling raiders if you chose to.