I woke with a terrible headache and wobbled around 'till I fell out the window." "You what?" "Fell out the window. That one over there." She [Edwina] gestured to the curtain behind her. "I broke my back. My spine is all wobbly now, but it doesn't hurt.

Discretion prevented me from saying that I thought she was a fiend from the underworld and that mountain lions couldn't force me to enter her service.

She's like a prisoner inside stone walls, and every day the walls get a little thicker, the doorways a little narrower.

As a ten-year-old boy, the Thief of Eddis could stop a grown man in his tracks with a single look. Where had that look gone?

He should have said something, why hadn't he? Costis wondered. In fact, the king had. He had complained at every step all the way across the palace, and they'd ignored it. If he'd been stoic and denied the pain, the entire palace would have been in a panic already, Eddisian soldiers on the move. He'd meant to deceive them, and he'd succeeded. It made Costis wonder for the first time just how much the stoic man really wants to hide when he unsuccessfully pretends not to be in pain.

I am very good at groveling.

[I had a]...Second bowl of oatmeal. It was a little bit gloppy.