I cut off your hand. I have been living with your grief and your rage and your pain ever since. I don’t think-I don’t think I had felt anything for a long time before that, but those emotions at least were familiar to me. Love I am not familiar with. I didn’t recognize that feeling until I thought I had lost you in Ephrata. And when I thought I was losing you a second time, I realized I would give up anything to keep you-my lip service to other gods, but my pride, too, and my rage at all gods, everything for you.

He couldn’t know that I’d overstayed my welcome one night while creeping through his megaron and had crawled up through the space where the pipes of the hypocaust ran to hide in his treasure room. I had slept for a day in stuffy darkness on the ridged tops of his treasure trunks.

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.

And where do I find a notary public?′ the enchantress asked. ‘Where? They don’t grow on trees where I come from, and while I might be able to arrange that one did, it would take time I don’t have to waste.

Cowardice has its own rewards.

I would very much like to strangle someone. Why don’t you go away until I decide it isn’t you?

Finally I went and found my hat and skewered it on my head with a four-inch hat pin. I wore the hat because I knew my mother never visited without one. The pin I thought would be a comfort in case of emergency.

If the king could make a throne seem like a stool fit for a printer’s apprentice, the queen could make a rumpled bedspread into a throne.

If only wars could be won on the strength of the cheering when they begin, instead of the blood and the pain and the horror that feed the gods of discord.

He whines, he complains, he ducks out of the most obvious responsibility. He is vain, petty and maddening, but he doesn’t ever quit.