Puck laughs, warm and pealing. ‘Your concern is touching, but deeply unnecessary. Did Ariel not tell you, child? I’m a trickster, and though my enemies try as they might, it’s tricky to trick a trickster with even the trickiest trickeries. And in any case, should anyone try to trick me’ – his smile turns vulpine, sharper even than his teeth – ’they must do so in the knowledge that I’ll trick back.

I never knew words could be so sharp, until the wrong ones cut me.

Feelings are feelings, no matter when they happen. Our bodies don’t stop being ours just because worse things happen to other people.

Sometimes the gravest things must, of necessity, become the most comic. It’s how we know they haven’t destroyed us.

We can’t keep living with what other people want for us, or don’t want for us,” Yena said. “We have to live for what we want. But everything that’s in your head, the things you’ve been told to believe and do, you can’t just throw it all out like bathwater, even when you know it’s hurting you. So.

Sometimes the gravest things must, of necessity, become the most comic. It's how we know they haven't destroyed us.

Sometimes the gravest things must, of necessity, become the most comic.

My island was not wild, compared to this. There are such monsters in a palace.

Ariel's cure is a nostrum that tastes of moss and sunsets, scratching my throat like swallowed earth. It sits in the core of me like ice, a steady coolth radiating outwards, soothing my fever; soothing me. I stare up at the painted angels overhead and wonder how unlike them I must be, that I can leave my father and husband to think me dead.

You want to know what human sentience is? It’s the only thing in the universe capable of doubting its own existence.