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

He waved at his attendants. "I dragged them like a ball and chain all the way across the palace and back." "If sterner measures are called for, we can find a larger ball and chain." The queen turned and disappeared into the partment. "Oh, dear," Eugenides muttered as he followed...The queen's sterner measures, dispensed by the Eddisian Ambassador, arrived before dawn.

...That he'd seen...two people, a young man and a woman, sitting on invisible furniture with their feet up, reading books and eating chocolates.

There are a lot of things a person with two hands couldn't steal," Eddis said. "So?" "If it's impossible to steal them with two hands, it's no more impossible to steal them with one. Steal peace, Eugenides. Steal me some time.

That is ridiculous," she said. The king agreed. "Like falling in love with a landslide. Only you could fail to notice.

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.

She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.