I have never believed in fate or destiny or any other concept that invests the courses of our lives with portentous meaning. Most people in our godless world believe we are born into random circumstance, and it is solely our own deeds and choices that determine whether we find ourselves in a palace or prison when we die. I’d not disagree.
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 assume that every person at my table, friend or stranger, carries a knife ready to let my blood or wears a pocket ring primed to drop poison into my wine. It is a not-so-nice consequence of Lady Fortune’s abundant blessings. Certain, the habit has saved my life more than once.”
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.
Reason crushed that idiocy instantly.
“That was a brave thing.”“Bravery results from desperation more often than we’d like to think.”
“This means war. And who suffers most if powerful families go to war?”“Everyone else but them.”
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.
The grand duc is lost in a cloud of delusion that masquerades as mysticism.
My determination to make my own way in the world must not make me stupid.