“I will never let myself be caught like that—any marriage I make will be my own. A choice. A free one.”

“Let Piers and Owen make the wedding arrangements, just don’t expect the bride to be there like a dog called to heel. I’ll choose my own Gris-damned husband, thank you. If I even want one, and I’m not exactly certain of that. I want life on my own terms, not on the dictates of tradition and of haggling over power and land.”

“None of them will believe me. I drop any attempt to explain myself and just gracefully accept that people are going to make assumptions and that the more I argue, the more it’ll look like I’m trying to hide something.”

“Maybe I could have saved you once. Twice, even.” I want to reach up and brush back a lock of pale hair that has fallen over her face, but I hold my arms still. “In the end, we make our choices on our own. And no matter how stupid they are, we have to live—or die—with what we’ve done. Sometimes choosing our moment of death is the only freedom we have left.”

“No matter what the results, it is my choices that define me. And I will fight for them, even when it seems that failure is inevitable. Perhaps most especially then.”

“In the end, we make our choices on our own. And no matter how stupid they are, we have to live—or die—with what we’ve done. Sometimes choosing our moment of death is the only freedom we have left.”

“I think I want to sleep,” I say. And I do, really, I do. The last thing I want is to be awake and to think about how Ilven escaped from the life she didn’t want. And why she never spoke to me, told me, warned me. Perhaps I could have changed her mind. It occurs to me that she never meant to meet me under the trees—that she knew me well enough to predict that I would wait only so long before I left—because then she could take the Leap without any chance of me witnessing her from my tower. My heart goes small, and every limb feels too heavy to lift.”