“He stares at the two girls. Two broken bodies that moments before had been whole.He did this. He helped to break the world.”

“Before him he saw two roads, both equally straight; but he did see two; and that terrified him--he who had never in his life known anything but one straight line. And, bitter anguish, these two roads were contradictory.”

“It was as if the blinders to his vision had been lifted and he wanted to make up for every moment the two of them had missed.”

“He had suffered, and he had learnt to think, two advantages that he had never known before…”

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. He had the two wards of the fucking Marshal of the fucking Southern Provinces in a stolen car. An entire continent away from where the two of them were supposed to be. In the Broken. Where they had beat up some Broken children. Well, if those children weren’t broken before, they were surely broken now. Fate, that broody, vicious, fickle bitch.”

“Duty is heavier than a mountain, Dai Shan.'That time, Lan did flinch. How long had it been since someone had been able to do that to him with mere words? He remembered teaching that same concept to a youth out of the Two Rivers. A sheepherder, innocent of the world, fearful of the fate laid out before him by the Pattern.”