Megan Whalen Turner Quotes

As Attolia spun, she felt a tug at her hair and, turning back, felt another. Then she felt her carefully arranged hair slipping down her neck. Eugenides, minding the pattern with his feet and spinning the queen with one hand, had been pulling out her hairpins one by one when her back was turned. The rest of the pins loosened, and her hair dropped free. It swung out as she spun and the last of the pins bounced and slid across the marble floor.
The queen was several inches taller than Eugenides, and he leaned back to counter her spin. To those watching, it didn't seem possible that he could succeed, but with one hand, and no visible effort, he defied the laws of the natural world. Phresine, the queen's senior attendant, watched them from behind the throne as her queen danced like a flame in the wind, and the mercurial king like the weight at the center of the earth. Faster and faster they moved, never faltering, until the music shrilled at an impossible tempo and the pattern gave way to a long spin, each dancer reaching in with one hand and out with the other, holding tight lest they fall away from the other, until the music stopped abruptly and the dance ended.

Everything, it seemed, depended on gold. The magus and I had fallen easily back into our old habits. He lectured constantly, and I asked questions to my heart's delight. Where he had once been my master and I his apprentice, I had become king and he my sole advisor. Where we had once focused on natural history and philosophy, we now concentrated on administration, taxation, and the prosecution of war.
He had begun his lessons by quoting the duke of Melfi: "To make war you need three things: one, money; two, money; and three, money." He went on to tell me the things I should have known already, that I would have known if I had been a more promising heir to the throne and not exclusively interested in poetry.

Neither the king's reward nor Pol could stop me, but I wanted to be a kingmaker myself. I wanted to be the first one to steal Hamiathes's Gift in hundreds and hundreds of years. I wanted to be famous. Only I couldn't steal the damned thing if I didn't know where if was, and only the magus could find it for me. I would stay with him until he led me to the stone, but I promised myself that someday I would stick a sharp knife into his arrogance and give it a good twist.

The factory doesn't like to hear too much talk about things it doesn't believe in. Contrary to what you may have heard, the factory has never found a single problem caused by ghosts. So if you meet any ectoplasmic spirits up there in the high crane, I suggest you be polite and they'll probably be polite right back. You're up there alone for fourteen hours a day, and you might find it's nice to have someone to talk to.

"I know exactly when. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen's Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn't funny anymore." He rubbed his chest, as if a remembered pain. "I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite."
Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy.

Nahuseresh, if there is one thing a woman understands, it is the nature of gifts. They are bribes when threats do not avail." The queen shook her head. "The problem with bribes, Nahuseresh, is that after your money is gone, threats still do not avail.

The second night you repeated the same words over and over. I think the fever had set in by then. Do you remember what you said?
"No."
She knew every one of them. His voice, broken and stumbling, had filled her dreams until she had wept in her sleep, crying tears for him that she'd never been able to cry for her father or for herself. "Oxe Harbrea Sacrus Vax Dragga..." she began.
Eugenides's chin lifted as he recognized the opening words.
"It's the invocation of the Great Goddess at her spring festival," he said calmly, "calling her to the aid of those that need her. Those words are archaic.

"When you stop fussing," Gen had said, slipping to his knees beside her couch, "I will sleep with two knives under my pillow."
Attolia had looked down at him and said sharply, "Don't be ridiculous."
Only when Eugenides laughed had Sounis realized her implication: If she ever turned against Eugenides, a second knife wouldn't save him.

If it is an affliction, it is as you said: The gods know me so well they can predict my behavior. They don't control it. They could know I would love her, but they don't make me. I've watched her for years, you know. All those times when you didn't know where I went, mostly it was to Attolia.

And now we wait," she said, not bothering to hide her smile of delighted anticipation as her guards conveyed the messenger out of the door.
"Wait for what?" the Mede asked.
"Hmm?" Attolia focused herself on the present. "Good heavens, I don't know," she said. "Eddis produces such lovely threats when her Thief is concerned.

You must choose now. Between the two of us we can reach a treaty without a wedding. You don't have to marry him, but if you choose to marry him, you have to believe him."
Attolia turned, and Eddis thought that behind her mask the queen might be afraid, and so she finished lightly. "You have to believe him, because he's going to have you entire palace up in arms and your court in chaos and every member of it from the barons to the boot cleaners coming to you for his blood, and you are going to have to deal with it."
Attolia smiled. "You make him sound like more trouble than he's worth."
"No," said Eddis thoughtfully. "Never more than he is worth.

The minister of war snorted. "Not if he had to follow you on a horse," he said.

Do you warn him not to offend the gods?"
"There was no need," said Attolis, smiling, "He couldn't offend the gods with a pointed stick.

The Thief leaned close to the queen to speak almost in her ear. "From shadow queen to puppet queen in one rule," he whispered. "That's very impressive. When he rules your country, and tells you he loves you, I hope you believe him."
He anticipated her blow and leaned back. Her hand only brushed his cheek in an entirely unsatisfying manner. "At least that's one lie I didn't tell you," Eugenides said.

The king, the master of the fates of men, before their eyes was reduced to a man, very young himself, and in love.