Whenever you are ready, or if you never are, my heart is yours, until Death do us part. Whatever that may mean when consorting with one of Death’s handmaidens.

It is a good thing I no longer have a heart, because if I did, it would surely break.

You come to us well tempered, my child, and it is not in my nature to be sorry for it. It is a well tempered blade that is the strongest.

When one consorts with assassins, one must expect to dance along the edge of a knife once or twice.

He does not start guiltily, as he should, but frowns in annoyance. "Who are you?" I slip my hand through the slit of my overskirt, and my fingers close around the hard wood of the crossbow tiller. "Vengeance," I say softly.

I bear a deep red stain that runs from my left shoulder down to my right hip, a trail left by the herbwitch's poison that my mother used to try to expel me from her womb.

If you are not careful, soon you will have men locking themselves in dungeons so that you can rescue them.