You can't escape an assasin," He leaned forward, shadows swallowing his eyes. "Hangings, bumbling bureaucrats, dishonest crewman, jail - those you can talk your way out of, you try hard enough. But this kind of death is the is the only kind of death.

She moved like water, graceful and soft and lovely. Every part of me wanted to stick out my foot and trip her, just to see her stumble.

She had thought about that moment so often during the past few years it had dried out. It was stale, like old, odourless potpourri. But she still want back to it, because it was the only one.

Beautiful people, things are to easy for them. They don't know how to survive in this world. Somebody's ugly, or even plain, normal-looking, that means they got to work twice as hard for things. For anything. Just to get peple to listen to 'em, or take 'em serious. So yeah. I don't trust beautiful people.

I thought the assassin was moving kind of slow for an assassin. Maybe the magic had done something after all. Or maybe he felt sorry for me. That sort of thing happens among cutthroats more often than you'd expect.

They thought they were so different, Flame and Ice. Enemies always do. The Soviets and the West, they were the same. They looked at each other and saw monsters; they looked at themselves and saw men. But Jordan stood on the outside and knew them each for both monsters and men, the good and the bad bleeding together. They were only villains and heroes in their own stories.

This was why I hated beautiful people. They build you up and then they destroy you. And we let 'em.

Love is a wound," the assassin said. " Neither life nor death.

But if a girl don't have her intuition, she don't got anything.

Tell any grizzled old cutthroat a sob story about a double-cross and a broken heart and he'll eat right out of your hand.