She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin’s voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?The powder...

How very surprising. Didn’t you just make a promise and ask me to trust your word? Really, Arin. You must sort out your lies and your truths or even you won’t know which is which”Silence....

The sky was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.

Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

She looked at the boy. He knew her weakness for storytelling. And it was, after all, only a story. Still, she wished he had chosen a happier one.

An emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a question. Or...

The beauty of the flute was in its simplicity, in its resemblance to the human voice. It always sounded clear. It sounded alone. The piano, on the other hand, was a network of parts—a ship,...

Don’t wake up,” he said.

A singer who refused to sing, a friend who wasn’t her friend, someone who was hers and yet would never be hers. Kestrel looked away from Arin. She swore to herself that she would never...

She’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.

Kestrel’s eyes slipped shut. She faded in and out of sleep. When Arin spoke again, she wasn’t sure whether he expected her to to hear him.’I remember sitting with my mother in a carriage.’ There...

Someone was coming through the velvet.He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s balcony—close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held...

His dear face, dear to her, dearer still. how could she love his face more for its damage? What kind of person saw someone’s suffering and felt her heart crack open even wider, even more...

As his people positioned themselves in and around the pass, Arin though that he might have misunderstood the Valorian addiction to war. He had assumed it was spurred by greed. By a savage sense of...

Sometimes, Arin almost understood what Kestrel had done. Even now, as he felt the drift of the boat and didn’t fight its pull, Arin remembered the yearning in Kestrel’s face whatever she’d mentioned her father....

He told himself a story. Not at first. At first, there wasn’t time for thoughts that came in the shape of words. His head was blessedly empty of stories then. War was coming. It was...

Kestrel’s cruel calculation appalled her. This was part of what had made her resist the military: the fact that she could make decisions like this, that she did have a mind for strategy, that people...

Music made her feel as if she were holding a lamp that cast a halo of light around her, and while she knew there were people and responsibilities in the darkness beyond it, she couldn’t...

You can’t see both sides of one coin at once, can you, child? The god of money always keeps a secret.The god of money was also the god of spies.

She remembered how her heart, so tight, like a scroll, had opened when Arin kissed her. It had unfurled. If her heart were truly a scroll, she could burn it. It would become a tunnel...