I can't leave her there all alone, surrounded by stone walls... She's too precious to give up.

Who was the Thief that she would love him? A youth, just a boy with hardly a beard and no sense at all... A liar, she thought, an enemy, a threat. He was brave, a voice inside her said, he was loyal... A fool, she answered back. A fool and a dead one. She ached with emptiness.

I am not sure I trust you." "You can trust me with your life, My King." "But not with my wine, obviously. Give it back.

Her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth.

She thought of the hardness and the coldness she had cultivated over those years and wondered if they were the mask she wore or if the mask had become her self. If the longing inside her for kindness, for warmth, for compassion, was the last seed of hope for her, she didn't know how to nurture it or if it could live.

I wanted Ambiades to understand that I considered myself a hierarchy of one.

It isn't an easy thing to give your loyalty to someone you don't know, especially when that person chooses to reveal nothing of himself.