Megan Whalen Turner Quotes

If you are feeling more yourself, there is a problem best addressed immediately," said the queen. "In my nightshirt?" The king wriggled, as ever, out of straightforward obedience. "Your attendants. I have spoken to them. You will speak to them as well." "Ah. They have seen me in my nightshirt." He looked down at his sleeve, embroidered with white flowers. "Not in your nightshirt, though.

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.

If I am the pawn of the gods, it is because they know me so well, not because they make my mind up for me.

The pain was as unexpected as a thunderclap in a clear sky. Eddis's chest tightened, as something closed around her heart. A deep breath might have calmed her, but she couldn't draw one. She wondered if she was ill, and she even thought briefly that she might have been poisoned. She felt Attolia reach out and take her hand. To the court it was unexceptional, hardly noticed, but to Eddis it was an anchor, and she held on to it as if to a lifeline. Sounis was looking at her with concern. Her responding smile was artificial.

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.

I am an ambassador," Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. "You cannot shoot." "I don't mean to," I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. "Indeed, you are the only man I won't shoot. But if I aimed at anyone else, it might give others a dangerously mistaken sense of their own safety." I raised my voice a trifle, though it wasn't really necessary. "We will have another vote, Xorcheus." They elected me Sounis. It was unanimous.

Then come out," said the king, helping him, "knowing you'll never die of a fall unless the god himself drops you.

You are treasure beyond any price.

Ornon said, "I have seen him jump across atriums four stories above the ground, a distance that would make your blood freeze, and I heard him once confess that he sometimes thinks the distance is beyond him. He always jumps, Your Majesty. The Thieves are not trained in self-preservation. I beg you would take my advice.

The queen had passed him, so close he'd felt the stir of air, and he guessed that if she had turned her head, only a little, and met his eyes, he might have died right there.

I was not so comfortable with my new authority that I could say 'We eat the chicken now!' but the magus had seen that I was considering it.

Ridiculous to think what indignities I would suffer in silence, if I knew that I was to be rewarded with an oversize bucket of hot water," the magus said as he settled into the bath the servants had filled for him.

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

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?

The queen!" someone shouted in alarm, and the King erupted like a wild animal caught in a snare.

I have a whole guard room full of brawny veterans who'd enjoy a chance to drag two Eddisians out of here, particularly if you kicked a lot and they could kick you back.

All I wanted to do was lie in the dry grass with my feet in a ditch forever. I could be a convenient sort of milemarker, I thought. Get to the thief and you know you're halfway to Methana.

You didn't know I could do that, did you?" he asked, conversationally. "I did not, Your Majesty," Teleus gasped. "My grandfather killed a man that way once, using the edge of the wooden sword." "I hadn't realized the Thieves of Eddis were so warlike." "They aren't, mostly. But like all men, Teleus, I have two grandfathers." Teleus rolled his eyes to look up at him, and the king said, "One of mine was Eddis." "Ah," said Teleus. "Ah, indeed," said the king.

I hate horses. I know people who think that they are noble, graceful animals, but regardless of what a horse looks like from a distance, never forget that it's as likely to step on your foot as look at you.

Because you do not believe?" "Oh, no," said Attolia bitterly. "Because I believe and do not choose to worship.

We are taught to treat a practice sword with all the respect of a real weapon, so no thoughtless mistakes are made" "Oh... In Eddis, we learn to keep tack of the weapon we have in our hand.

From shadow queen to puppet queen in one rule. That's very impressive. When he rules your country and he tells you he loves you, I hope you believe him. At least that's one lie I didn't tell you.

The room was quiet, the others flicking glances at me. I ignored them. After years in Sounis's palaces being eyed with disgust by my uncle and my own father and courtier after courtier, I assure you I am unrivaled at pretending not to notice other people's glances.

Irene-" "Don't call me that." "You were the princess Irene the first time we met." "It means 'peace'," Attolia said. "What name could be more inappropriate?" "That I be named Helen?" Eddis suggested. The hard lines in Attolia's face eased, and she smiled. Eddis was a far cry from the woman whose beauty had started a war.

I stayed only two days in the capital. I was welcomed by a cheering citizenry, who threw flowers at my head. It was disconcerting to think I could have put almost any young man in my retinue on a white horse and they would have thrown flowers at him instead. It was not me they cared about, only what I meant to them: a cessation of hostilities, a chance for prosperity, food on the table.

I grieved, but a part of me felt a lightening of a burden that I had carried all my life: that I could never be worthy of them, that I would always disappoint or fail them. As an unknown slave in the fields of the baron, I knew the worst was over. I had failed them. At least I could not do so again

Sophos turned red, and I wondered about the circulation of his blood; maybe his body kept an extra supply of it in his head, ready for blushing.

Thanks to His Majesty," the magus said, and my father seemed startled at the correction but not displeased. He looked thoroughly satisfied and very much like Ina when she has all her embroidery threads arranged to her satisfaction. He looked so pleased that I checked over my shoulder to see if there might be someone else behind me who had drawn his attention.

Costis followed, telling himself that it wasn't true that he and the king and even the stone under their feet were nothing but tissue, transparently thin, and that for a moment, the only real thing in the universe had been there on the parapet with the king.

No man can choose to serve only himself when he has something to offer his state. No one can put his own wishes above the needs of so many.

The prison keeper choose an inopportune time to look around the doorway into the cell. He and the king locked gazes, and the king's eyes narrowed while the prison keeper's widened.

Your Majesty, you just-" Costis stopped. "Just what?" the king prompted wickedly. Nothing would induce Costis to say out loud that the king had almost fallen from the palace wall and that Costis had seen him manifestly saved by the God of Thieves. The king smiled. "Cat got your tongue?" "Your Majesty, you are drunk," Costis pleaded. "I am. What's your excuse?

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.

She reached out and touched the king’s face, cupping his cheek in her hand. “Just a nightmare,” he said, his voice still rough. The queen’s voice was cool. “How embarrassing,” she said, looking at his maimed arm. The king looked up then, and followed her gaze. If it was embarrassing to wake like a child screaming from a nightmare, how much more embarrassing to be the reason your husband woke screaming. A quick smile visited the king’s face. “Ouch,” he said, referring to more than the pain in his side. “Ouch,” he said again as the queen gathered him into her arms.

No," he said. "Relius was right and I was wrong. You are My Queen. Even though you cut my head from my shoulders, with my last breath as a noose tightens, to the last beat of my heart if I hang from the walls of the palace, you are My Queen. That I have failed you does not change my love for you or my loyalty.

So Sophos thinks you're going to marry me." "While I think you'll marry Sophos." "I might. We'll see what he's like when he grows up.

I was listening," the king said, aggrieved. "I closed my eyes to listen better." "What did you hear?" "I'm not sure," he said." That's why I was listening so closely. I may have to ask the baron to repeat some parts of his report on his grain tax." "I am sure you can arrange an appointment." "I am sure I can too.

What a strange world it is, where prisoners are left their weapons and the written word is a mortal danger.

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.

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

I sometimes believe his lies are the truth, but I have never mistaken his truth for a lie.

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

Costis bowed stiffly. “I am here to make sure that you stay in bed, Your Majesty, because if this offends you and you order me summarily executed, it is no loss. Politically speaking.

One cannot toss ambassadors back like bad fish," said Eugenides. "You treat them with care, or you'll find you've committed an act of war.

A thief never makes a noise by accident.

If we truly trust no one, we cannot survive.

I know that if you don't look for an alternative, Sophos, you certainly won't find one.

The queen was settling on the edge of the bed, ungainly with hesitation and at the same time exquisite in her grace, like a heron landing in a treetop.