661 Quotes by Storm Constantine

How could someone be so familar, yet a complete stranger?

He looked up at her, his face that of total vulnerability. He was a boy again, confused because the world had acted against him.

It was the cry of someone who’d looked in the abyss, someone who had previously not even known the abyss existed. It was the sound of a soul tearing.

Girls sprawled on the floor and across the couches. A sickly scent of plundered fruit flesh filled the humid air. Wine had been drink and spilled; goblets stood upon the table and lay upon the floor. Young faces were flushed with pleasure and a vicarious excitement. Gowns were rumpled and stained, slippers cast off. The fire burned loudly and fiercely. Wood cracked in the flames. There was little other light, for the candles had burned nearly all away.

The women spoke together quietly, content in their position as companions of the empress: a robust and handsome woman with thick dark gold hair. It seemed inconceivable that her firm, powerful body had born fourteen children for the emperor. Twelve of them had lived and Varencienne, at eighteen, was the only girl.

Keep the fiercest of beasts close to the hearth. No beast ravages its own hearth. No sane beast.

Bayard’s worry, the things he could not say, hung as a tension in the air.

I do not feel quite real today. How quickly things can change.

The empress was a dark flower herself, dressed not in red, as all the other women, but resplendent in a gold so muted, it seemed almost black. Varencienne wondered if any emotion surged through Tatrini’s closed heart. Was she thinking of her own wedding day, all those years before, when her husband had been only a prince and the empire a smaller collection of lands? Had she been happy then, dizzy with girlish anticipation, or had she felt as Varencienne did now: resigned and cold?