“She tamped down the awful urge to cry with a fierceness that her mother had always deplored, especially in the wake of her father’s death, when her other daughters, and the aunts and cousins, were all wailing and beating their breasts. ‘And you were his favourite too!’ But Parminder kept her unwept tears locked tightly inside where they seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation, returning to the outer world as lava slides of rage, disgorged periodically at her children and the receptionists at work.”

“Parminder kept her unwept tears locked tightly inside where they seemed to undergo an alchemical transformation, returning to the outer world as lava slides of rage.”

“She wasn’t crying at all. This was what scared him the most. Where had she locked up the things he’d seen her feeling that day when she heard? She wasn’t that big a girl to hold all of it—to hold her brother’s life and his death inside of her. To hold all his long-limbed raging tidal motion and all the loss of that.”

“And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.”

“Alyssa Arryn had seen her husband, her brothers, and all her children slain, and yet in life she had never shed a tear. So in death, the gods had decreed that she would know no rest until her weeping watered the black earth of the Vale, where the men she had loved were buried. Catelyn wondered how large a waterfall her own tears would make when she died.”

“She lets out the deep, horrible wails waiting just below the surface. These tears are always accumulating, intensifying inside her. She pushes them down over and over, a hundred times a day—every time she hears a child’s voice, or examines a patient’s small body—until that moment comes. It always happens when she least expects it, a moment when she’s doing nothing at all: rinsing her coffee mug, unlacing her shoes, combing her hair. And in that moment when she is unsuspecting, the tears finally rage uncontrollably, from someplace deep, deep inside her she barely recognizes.”