“I can't leave her there all alone, surrounded by stone walls... She's too precious to give up.”

“She's like a prisoner inside stone walls, and every day the walls get a little thicker, the doorways a little narrower.""And?" Eddis prompted."Well," said Eugenides, "it's a challenge.”

“She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.”

“As soon as the guards where gone, I lay down on my stone bench and dumped the king and his threats out of my head without ceremony. They were too unpleasant to worry over anyway.”

“If she pardons people because she loves them, someday someone that she loves will betray her and all of Attolia with her. A queen must make sacrifices for the common good.”

“You'll have to pardon me," the magus said. "But with your country at war I can't see how any of it really matters."Standing up, Eugenides pulled the papers from the magus's hands. "It matters, because I can't do anything, anymore, for this country, and it matters," he yelled as he threw the papers back to his desk, "because I only have one hand and it isn't even the right one!" Turning, he picked an inkpot off the desk and threw it to shatter on the door of his wardrobe, spraying black ink across the pale wood and onto the wall. Black drops like rain stained the sheets of his bed....Eddis sighed. "Will you sit down and stop shouting?" she asked."I'll stop shouting. I won't sit down. I might need to throw more inkpots.”

“Today, she had yielded the sovereignty of her country to Eugenides, who had given up everything he had ever hoped for, to be her King.”