The night was full of shadows and every last one answered to me.

Do you know why we praise bravery, Leon? ... Because it surpasses our baser nature

there could be more heroism found in a terrified man sitting across a monster and refusing to answer a question than in an empire’s worth of royal lines, or a legion of heroes.

She’d never told my friend that she was exceptional, that not everybody could be like her. That sometimes people failed and gave up, and that didn’t make them unworthy in some way. Just tired and hurt

Certainty is a luxury I can rarely afford

to hesitate is death." "It was ever thus," it laughed, and raised its fist to the sky

Captain Elvera was old enough to have fought in the Sepulcher War, when the Barrow Lord rose from the depths of Brocelian Forest and struck out with his host of bespelled beasts, barrow-spirits and Blood traitors

an army without a leader was just a mob bearing arms

My eyes left the sky and fell to the charging Levantines. Thousands in mail and leather and scales, steel blades and hide shields. Their faces painted with vivid strokes of colour, as true a language as the spoken tongues of their faraway land

In the end, all my grief could be was screaming in the dark: a harsh cry, followed by silence ringing of absence

When you have enough hate, it becomes a kind of courage. Madness, too, but that line's always been thinner than people like to admit

Victory had a thousand fathers and mothers, but defeat did tend to be attributed to a single pair of hands

How strange it was that you could care so much for someone and yet find them to be such a stranger in the end

Tariq's sleep had long been light, so it was with messy robes with sharp mind that he ushered in Izil.

One cannot be just, one can only act justly: it is a struggle from cradle to grave, not a prize seized and kept

Audacity without patience, without watchfulness, was just another way of being frivolous with lives

There were hills to the west of us, split in the middle by the river our maps called the Odelle

sometimes you grieve more what could have happened than what did

"In boldness find salvation, for stillness is the herald of death"

The legendary gargantuan bulls whose stride had shaken the world and flattened hills into plains were perhaps more myth than history, but it was said a shadow of their thundering might remained in wonders crafted from their remains

one must not grow too fond of plans, lest they be followed even when they no longer suited

fear does not make someone trustworthy. Merely afraid

What a dangerous thing this sensation was, and how careful I must be to avoid falling in love with it

The deferral of consequence to higher power is the deepest form of moral cowardice conceivable

Once in a blue moon a blizzard will tumble down the slopes of the Titanomachy and the afterbirth will touch a shore of the Pond, but that is a much rarer occurrence

"When assault the stronghold of a villain," I said, "watch out for three things: a monster, a trial and a pivot"

One should not confuse striking at evil and doing good," I quoted. "Lest good become the act of striking," the Good King completed

They who cannot master themselves will never be anything but servants.

"Fear or faith, that's your choice. You can't cross a chasm without taking a leap."

It was not love - neither of us had been afflicted with that particular delusion regarding the other

You understand nothing. You shy away from taking a life now, from takin a risk, and you think that makes you virtuous? All it makes you is complicit. Your scruples will cost a hundred generations blood and fear simply because you flinched when time for the hard choices came.

He was the Adjutant, and Catherine Foundling was returning. If any stood between them they would be broken, sure as dawn and dusk and the death of men.

Apparently the heartlands of Procer used a great deal more salt in their meals than I was used to back home, since it could be brought in cheap from the great salt pans on the western coast of Neustria and Brus

There were many ways to love someone, and not all involved skin or pining sighs

his face a bold battlefield between ferocious eyebrows and an uncompromising beard

that was they way to get to someone with the upper hand talking: confusion and blithe refusal to acknowledge they had anything of the sort

a gentleman could get away with nearly anything, given sufficient audacity and an amicable bearing

She'd not needed him, not truly. The woman she'd been the moment she spurned everything she was raised to embrace was the true face of her, not the malice that came out when fear and exhaustion won.

only a fool kept both eyes on the stag when hunting with a wolf

that delightfully strange and nuanced horizon. The wonder of discovery, of the fresh and new, of doing things no one had done before.

elbow to elbow and fitting there like a shield wall of two

there was only so long one could keep treating someone as an enemy before they became one in truth