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Holly Black

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“Mother Marrow gestures to the soup, and I, who can afford no more enemies, bring it to my lips. It tastes of a memory I cannot quite place, warm afternoons and splashing in pools and kicking plastic toys across the brown grass of summer lawns. Tears spring to my eyes. I want to spill it out in to the dirt. I want to drink it down to the dregs.”

“You put a curse on that girl over there,' I tell him. 'Fix her immediately.' 'She admired my ears,' the boy says. 'I was only giving her what she desired. A party favour.' 'That's what I'm going to say after I gut you and use your entrails as streamers,' I tell him. 'I was only giving him what he wanted. After all, if he didn't want to be eviscerated, he would have honoured my very reasonable request.”

“I guess I don't know my daughter very well. Because the Jude I knew would cut out that boy's heart for what he did to you tonight.' At the shame of having the revel thrown in my face, I snap. 'You let me be humiliated in Faerie from the time I was a child. You've let Folk hurt me and laugh at me and mutilate me.' I hold up the hand with the missing fingertip, where one of his own guards bit it clean off. Another scar is at its centre, from where Dain forced me to stick a dagger through my hand. 'I've been glamoured and carried in to a revel, weeping and alone. As far as I can tell, the only difference between tonight and all the other nights when I endured indignities without complaint is that those benefited you, and when I endure this, it benefits me.' Madoc looks shaken. 'I didn't know.' 'You didn't want to know,' I return.”

“A drop of the bloodred liquid of the blusher mushroom , which causes potentially lethal paralysis. A petal of deathsweet, which can cause a sleep that lasts a hundred years. A sliver of wraithberry, which makes the blood race and induces a kind of wildness before stopping the heart. And a seed of everapple- faerie fruit- which muddles the minds of mortals.”

“Orlagh waits for us in a choppy ocean, accompanied by her daughter and a pod of knights mounted on seals and sharks and all manner of sharp-toothed sea creatures. She herself sit on an orca and is dressed as though ready for battle. Her skin is covered in shiny silvery scales that seem both to be metallic and to have grown from her skin. A helmet of bone and teeth hides her hair. Nicasia is beside her, on a shark. She has no tail today, her long legs covered in armour of shell.”

“I start back, only to find the maze has changed itself around. The paths are not where they were before. Of course. It can't just be a normal maze. No, it's got to be out to get me. ... 'I will slice my way clean through you,' I say to the leafy walls. 'Let's start playing fair.' Branches rustle behind me. When I turn, there's a new path. 'This better be the way to the party,' I grumble, starting on it. I hope this doesn't lead to the secret oubliette reserved for people who threaten the maze.”

“I pass trays of spun-sugar animals, little acorn cups filled with wine, enormous sculptures of horn, and a stall where a bent-backed woman takes a brush and draws charms on the soles of shoes. It takes some wandering, but I finally find a collection of sculpted leather masks. They are pinned to a wall and cunningly shaped like the faces of strange animals or laughing goblins or boorish mortals, painted gold and green and every other colour imaginable.”

“Perhaps a necklace of tears to weep so that she won't have to? A pin of teeth to bite annoying husbands? No.' He continues to walk through the small space. He lifts a ring. 'To bring on a child?' And then, seeing my face, lifts a pair of earrings, one in the shape of a crescent moon and the other in the shape of a star. 'Ah, yes. Here. This is what you want.' 'What do they do?' I ask. He laughs. 'They are beautiful- isn't that enough?' I give him a skeptical look. 'It would be enough, considering how exquisite they are, but I bet it isn't all.' He enjoys that. 'Clever girl. They are not only beautiful, but they add to beauty. They make someone more lovely than they were, painfully lovely. Her husband will not leave her side for quite some time.' The look on his face is a challenge. He believes I am too vain to give such a gift to my sister. How well he knows the selfish human heart. Taryn will be a beautiful bride. How much more do I, her twin, want to put myself in her shadow? How lovely can I bear her to be? And yet, what better gift for a human girl wedded to the beauty of the Folk? 'What would you take for them?' I ask. 'Oh, any number of little things. A year of your life. The luster of your hair. The sound of your laugh.' 'My laugh is not such a sweet sound as all that.' 'Not sweet, but I bet it's rare,' he says, and I wonder at his knowing that. 'What about my tears?' I ask. 'You could make another necklace.' He looks at me, as though evaluating how often I weep. 'I will take a single tear,' he says finally. 'And you will take an offer to the High King for me.”