"You would not hurt me," is what he says, careful, caged in. "You could never hurt me."

This, they have argued to a stalemate of irreconcilable disagreement; could so continue to press in unwinnability until the Heavens broke open overhead and the mountains crashed down astride them. But Sui Zhou serves to live as much as a man as he does a blade, and in that he is long intimated with the lay of blame for a tool in the wield of a hand.

If Lan Wangji has learned anything from his atonement for Wei Wuxian’s death, it is that patience is neither simple nor shallow.

January 15: Lucca and Matteo observe the hours of night.

Hockstetter knows all the best places to hide. What else are friends for?

Violet starts to see India the way India sees, and everything else falls out of focus.

Jonathan was much the happier, being mourned by one king and loved by two, and do not the loves and griefs of kings exceed those of other men?

Or, capture and death.

Sometimes Tang Fan does indeed forget that he is not, in fact, the only learned man under their shared roof.

Tang Fan is stuck on a scene for one of his spring books. He enlists Sui Zhou to help him with some of the logistics.

Ding Rong has walked himself through five vivid calculations of Wang Zhi’s death at his hands in the carriage before Wang Zhi speaks.

“I’m in need of a second,” he says.