The Grace of Kings

ades into bright chrysanthemums of cold light that melded martial glory with lyrical grace; dozens of elegant, stately elephants from wild, sparsely settled

“When Mapidéré died, I felt a momentary panic. He was responsible for the deaths of my family, of my promising future, of Haan. I berated myself for losing forever the chance to exact vengeance.
“But then I saw how things only got worse as Emperor Erishi and the regent turned the empire into their playpen. Mapidéré was but one man—and indeed, judging by rumors of his decrepit state near death, a weak, sickly man—but his creation, the empire, had taken on a life of its own. Killing the emperor would not have been enough. We have to kill the empire.

The aspen wishes to stand still,” his friend Kyzen said as he saw the look in Luan Zya’s eyes. “But the wind does not stop.”

So much received wisdom was not wisdom at all, just like so much of what men imagined as signs from the gods were only wishes in their heads. It was best to attend to the world of what was, rather than what he had been told.

Could it be, he thought, that the gods always spoke so ambivalently and were so hard to understand because they experienced space and time at a different scale than mere mortals? For Rapa, rivers of ice that moved inches a year flowed as fast as torrential floods, and for Kana, lava thawed and froze as regularly as mountain streams. Lutho, the old turtle, had lived for a million millennia and would continue to live for millions more, and all the generations of men in the history of Dara would be gone in a few blinks of his leathery, salty-teared eyes.
The gods did not care who was sitting on the throne in Ginpen, he thought. The gods did not care who died and who lived. The gods did not have a stake in the affairs of men. It was foolish to think that one could divine their will. It was foolish to think that his vendetta against Emperor Mapidéré meant anything to them other than a balm for his aching, raging heart.

Authority is a delicate thing, and it must be carefully cultivated by proper ritual and action from the governing and the governed alike.”

Parents always want their children to run as far as they can on their chosen path. If you’ve chosen to be a bandit, be the best bandit you can be, and your mother will be proud of you.”

What is fate but coincidences in retrospect?

The best followers are those who think it was their own idea to follow you.

“Emperor, king, general, duke,” he whispered to himself. “These are just labels. Climb up the family tree of any of them high enough and you’ll find a commoner who dared to take a chance.”