My life is an apology for the life of my father.

She didn't want to go far, just out of the trees so she could see the stars. They always eased her loneliness. She thought of them as beautiful creatures, burning and cold; each solitary, and bleak, and silent like her.

Normal. She wasn't normal. A girl Graced with killing, a royal thug? A girl who didn't want the husbands Randa pushed on her, perfectly handsome and thoughtful men, a girl who panicked at the thought of a baby at her breast, or clinging to her ankles.

There isn't a simple person anywhere in this world.

There are no medicines to bring a dead thing back to life.

Part a of scene from 'Bitterblue' between Madlen (Bitterblue's medicine woman) and Bitterblue: Madlen came to sit beside her [Bitterblue] on the bed. "Lady Queen," she said with her own particular brand of rough gentleness. "It is not the job of the child to protect her mother. It's the mother's job to protect the child. By allowing your mother to protect you, you gave her a gift. Do you understand me?

How unjust then to meet that person you love, and be kept away from them only because ones bed is made of hay , and the other, feathers.