Magic won't save us. The power it would take to conjure on such a scale, the tithe would destroy us. The only hope...is hope. You don't need tokens for it - it's in your heart or nowhere. And in your heart, child, it had been stronger than I have ever seen.

If it's not chocolate, it's not breakfast.

They were tower stairs, a tight corkscrew down. The spiraling descent made Karou dizzy: down, around, down, around, hypnotic, until it seemed as if she were caught in a purgatory of stairs and would go down like this forever.

It seemed she was in a cathedral—if, that is, the earth itself were to dream a cathedral into being over thousands of years of water weeping through stone.

Cesky Krumlov, the little jewel box of a city in southern Bohemia.

Alas. I am not an option.

Yeah? Okay," she said, staring up into the stars. "Let's see. You know how, at the end of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet wakes up in the crypt and Romeo's already dead? He thought she was dead so he killed himself right next to her?" "Yeah. That was awesome." A pause, followed by "Ow," suggested elbow punctuation on the part of Mik. Karou ignored it. "Well, imagine if she woke up and he was still alive, but..." She swallowed, waiting out a tremor in her voice. "But he had killed her whole family. And burned her city. And killed and enslaved her people.