"He did not entirely believe himself, but he knew he had best pretend he did."

““It is not foolish,” Dachensol Polchina agreed. “It is new, which is not the same thing.”

“The oaths were no more than a formal deterrent to troublemaking, but they were better than no deterrent at all.”

“His mother had been the world to him, and although she had done her best to prepare him, he had been too young to fully understand what death meant—until she was gone, and the great, raw, gaping hole in his heart could not be filled or patched or mended. He looked for her everywhere, even after he had been shown her body—looked and looked and she could not be found.”

“He could tell by the quality of her silence that she did not believe him, but if there was an advantage to being emperor, it was that she could not call him a liar to his face.”

““It is the nature of all persons to hold on to power when they have it,” Shulivar said. “Thus it stagnates and becomes clouded, poisonous. Radical action is necessary to free it.”

“They took silence for assent, as the zealous often do.”