Цитаты из книги Beneath the Citadel

"I don`t know what happened back there, but I vote we take credit for it when the time comes for the bards to sing of our wondrous deeds. Agreed?" Alys smiled, and the boys both huffed a little in laughter. A nervous release more than anything. She knew that`s what Cassa was aiming for. Cassa could be devastatingly clever, but she wasn`t always reckless with it. Sometimes she was extremely calculating. Alys had learned to see that over the past couple of years, to respect it. "I`m not sure we get a say in what the bards sing about us," Alys said, keeping her tone dry. She wasn`t in the mood to be contrary, but Cassa needed the challenge to keep her jest going. Alys could be calculating too, although she was fairly certain Cassa had never learned to appreciate that. "We`ll get a whole tavern drunk one night and spread the rumor," Cassa said, turning in her seat to face them. "The legendary tale of the firebrands who felled three citadel guards without even touching them." "You have to start earlier than that for it to be a proper tale," Evander said. "With the seers foretelling our births." "Under auspicious stars," Newt added. "There are always auspicious stars in those old songs." "We don`t need seers in our song," Cassa insisted. "Only the four of us, making our own way. That`s what we`ll be remembered for."

"Is there any way we survive this?" she asked. her voice came out sounding hollow and all wrong. Evander studied her for a few seconds. His lips quirked slightly. "Truth or lie?" he asked. She might have smiled if she`d had the strength. The question was a familiar one, stretching back to their early childhood. For a long time it had been a guessing game. One of them would tell a story or state a fact and then ask, "Truth or lie?" Evander was a better liar than she was, but she`d always been better at seeing the truth. Then, after that harrowing night eight years ago, when their family had lost everything, the game had changed. The question meant something different now. What do you need to hear? "Truth," Alys said, even though the word caught in her throat. "We`ll find a way," he told her. "We`re going to make it."

His sister, only a year older but always decades wiser, had told him that nightmares were the mind`s way of exploring subconscious fears. He knew that a clinical explanation was Alys`s idea of comfort. As long as he could remember, she`d been collecting facts and assembling logic like armor and weaponry. She told him that the reason she never used her skill at divining was that the future was shifting and unreliable. Logic never was. Evander knew that wasn`t the real reason, but he`d never told her that.

Her brows arched when the chancellor asked her if she had anything to say in her defense. "Just pass your judgement and be done with it," she said, a touch of irritation in her tone. "I`ve got better things to do than stand around watching old people hem and haw over my choices." The chancellor`s first urge was to ask her what better things she had to do, considering the rest of her short life would be spent in a cell. But she was staring at him with such unblinking, uncompromising displeasure that the words died in his throat. "This council will now pronounce its judgement," he said. She eyed each council member in turn as they spoke, and then her gaze swiveled back to the chancellor expectantly. He cleared his throat. Why did he feel like a schoolboy again? For seers` sake, she was only seventeen. "In accordance with the judgement of this council, you are found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death in the customary manner." Alys sighed, and it sounded absurdly like relief. "Finally," she said. "Maybe in the future you should consider a more efficient means of sentencing people to death. Surely there are better uses of the council`s time than all this pomp and circumstance." Before the chancellor could say another word, she had turned on her heel to go. The guards rushed to her side in a vain attempt to make it seem that they were escorting her and not the other way around.

"Do you know why you`re here?" the chancellor asked. "I`d be pretty dim if I didn`t," she said, finally casting her gaze in his direction. "I mean, even more than I was in getting caught." "So you don`t deny your crimes?" The chancellor looked at the other council members, at a loss. They seemed just as perplexed as he was. He`d been expecting terror and pleading or hatred and vitriol. It had never occurred to him to expect this. "Why would I deny successfully infiltrating the Central Keep with nothing but some barrels and a pry bar? I`m really quite proud of myself."