A dagger wants flesh, her father would say. Find it.

— Marie Rutkoski

Akin, are you all right?"" How?" He managed. "How did her arm break?"" She fell of a ladder." He must have visibly relaxed, because his cousin raised her brows and looked ready to scold. "I imagined something worse," he tried to explain. She appeared to understand his relief that pain, if it had to come, came this time without malice. Just and accident. Done by no one. The luck, sometimes of life. A bad slip that ends with bread, and someone to bind you.

— Marie Rutkoski

Akin. I've wanted to do this for a long time." Her words silenced him, steadied him. Antecipation lifted within her like the fragrance of a garden under the rain. She sat at the piano, touching the keys. "Ready?" He smiled. "Play.

— Marie Rutkoski

Akin, you’re not listening. You’re not thinking clearly.”“You’re right. I haven’t been thinking clearly, not for a long time. But I understand now.” Akin pushed his tiles away. His winning hand scattered out of line. “You have changed, Kestrel. I don’t know who you are anymore. And I don’t want to.

— Marie Rutkoski

An emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a question. Or perhaps that it wasn’t how he had said it, and she was wrong, and she’d heard a question simply because the sound of him speaking her name made her wish that she were his answer.

— Marie Rutkoski

As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Akin though that he might have misunderstood the Valerian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of superiority. It had never occurred to him that Valerians also went to war because of love. Arin loved those hours of waiting. The silent, brilliant tension, like scribbles of heat lightning. His city far below and behind him, his hand on a cannon's curve, ears open to the acoustics of the pass. He stared into it, and even though he smelled the reek of fear from men and women around him, he was caught in a kind of wonder. He felt so vibrant. As if his life was fresh, translucent, thin-skinned fruit. It could be sliced apart, and he wouldn't care. Nothing felt like this.

— Marie Rutkoski

A singer who refused to sing, a friend who wasn't her friend, someone who was hers and yet would never be hers. Kestrel looked away from Akin. She swore to herself that she would never look back

— Marie Rutkoski

A strange feeling: as if filaments trailed from Akin's body. A thousand fishing lines snagging attention. Here and there. Little tugs. People caught on the lines. The way sometimes people couldn't look him in the eye, and when they did, they become fish trying to breathe air. He wished it weren't like that. He knew it would be necessary.

— Marie Rutkoski

But we don’t think too well when we want too much.

— Marie Rutkoski

Come closer, and I will tell you." But he forgot. He kissed her, and became lost in the exquisite sensation of his skin becoming too tight for his body. He murmured other things instead. A secret, a want, a promise. A story, in its own way.

— Marie Rutkoski