I remarked that it must be difficult to anticipate betrayal from lifetime friends. “It is as it has always been,” he said. “From boyhood, I’ve had to… - Carol Berg

Few people in the Costa Drago prayed. Those who did so were hopeless optimists who believed the Unseeable Gods were yet capable of influencing human affairs if you just spoke to them often enough with rituals of fire or water, pain or lovemaking—anything that might breach the boundaries of the Night Eternal. But no matter how they tried, we yet suffered plagues and wars and the earth yet shook and the mountains yet fumed.

Everything I have accomplished in this city, everything I have yet to accomplish, takes its root in the rule of law. If I am complicit in lawbreaking—if I interfere and exonerate a confessed felon because of my personal preferences—then I am no better than my uncle you once named monster.

This means war. And who suffers most if powerful families go to war?
"Everyone else but them."