You have heard the queen's advice. My gift is below. Would you wait to see it until you have decided what you will do with hers? - Megan Whalen Turner

"Who knows but that you will get up to find that the world has inverted itself yet again?" He looked around the room at the other attendants as if in warning, but spoke to Philologos. "Remember, the love of kings and queens is beyond the compass of us lesser mortals."
If anyone noticed, no one commented that he had called the Thief of Eddis a king.

Staring at me over the barrel of my gun, Akretenesh said, "Did you not just days ago lecture me about the sacred truce?"
With my finger still through the trigger guard of the spent pistol, I lifted my left palm upward to the sky to see if lightning struck me down.
When none did, I smiled again. "We will have to assume the gods are on my side."
"I am an ambassador," Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. "You cannot shoot."
"I don't mean to," I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. "Indeed, you are the only man I won't shoot. But if I aimed at anyone else, it might give others a dangerously mistaken sense of their own safety." I raised my voice a trifle, thought it wasn't really necessary. "We will have another vote, Xorcheus."
They elected me Sounis. It was unanimous.

"I can steal anything."
"So you claimed. It was a wager to that effect that landed you in prison." He picked a pen nib off the desk behind him and turned it in his hands for a moment. "It is too bad for you that intelligence does not always attend gifts such as yours, and fortunate for me that it is not your intelligence I am interested in, but your skill. If you are as good as you say you are."
I repeated myself. "I can steal anything."
"Except yourself out of the king's prison?" the magus asked, lifting one eyebrow this time.
I shrugged. I could do that, too, but it would take time.