Carol Berg

"I have never believed in fate or destiny or any other concept that invests the courses of our lives with portentous meaning. Most people in our godless world believe we are born into random circumstance, and it is solely our own deeds and choices that determine whether we find ourselves in a palace or prison when we die. I’d not disagree."

"I remarked that it must be difficult to anticipate betrayal from lifetime friends. “It is as it has always been,” he said. “From boyhood, I’ve had to assume that every person at my table, friend or stranger, carries a knife ready to let my blood or wears a pocket ring primed to drop poison into my wine. It is a not-so-nice consequence of Lady Fortune’s abundant blessings. Certain, the habit has saved my life more than once.”"

"Everything I have accomplished in this city, everything I have yet to accomplish, takes its root in the rule of law. If I am complicit in lawbreaking—if I interfere and exonerate a confessed felon because of my personal preferences—then I am no better than my uncle you once named monster."

"Reason crushed that idiocy instantly."

"“In those peaceful days, some came to believe that the Unseeable Gods had returned at last and merely awaited our notice. The hopeful built temples like this one all over the Costa Drago, tall spare structures that shaped the light. They filled them with artworks that rejected the forms of common life in favor of the ethereal and sublime.” I pointed up to the astonishing dome, its soaring windows bereft of glass. Peeling frescoes revealed only bits of once-brilliant color. “They added fountains and channels to carry Father Atladu’s waters, and orchards and gardens to honor Mother Gione and her bounteous earth. They designed labyrinths to prevent demons from infesting the space. But just as the temples were completed, the plague struck. Wave after wave of disease scoured the world over a span of seventy years. By the time the last body was burnt, the Costa Drago had lost half of our people, and no one believed in benevolent gods anymore, seeable or unseeable.” Indeed, in the recovering world, merchants and bankers like Sandro’s family had found more profitable concerns than myths and superstitions and gods who could not bother to make themselves known. The temples of the Unseeable Gods fell to ruin."

"“That was a brave thing.” “Didn’t feel at all brave. Just desperate.” “Bravery results from desperation more often than we’d like to think.”"

"“This means war. And who suffers most if powerful families go to war?” “Everyone else but them.”"

"Few people in the Costa Drago prayed. Those who did so were hopeless optimists who believed the Unseeable Gods were yet capable of influencing human affairs if you just spoke to them often enough with rituals of fire or water, pain or lovemaking—anything that might breach the boundaries of the Night Eternal. But no matter how they tried, we yet suffered plagues and wars and the earth yet shook and the mountains yet fumed."

"The grand duc is lost in a cloud of delusion that masquerades as mysticism."

"My determination to make my own way in the world must not make me stupid."