Leigh Bardugo

There’s no time to constantly be apologizing for existing. But when someone does wrong, when we make mistakes, we don’t say we’re sorry. We promise to make amends.

She would fight for him, but she could not heal him. She would not waste her life trying.

She was easily the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. Her wavy hair was deepest auburn, her irises large and golden; her skin was so smooth and flawless that she looked as if her perfect cheekbones had been carved from marble. She wore a cream-colored kefta embroidered in gold and lined in reddish fox fur

Last night I’d been too tired to notice the room, but now, even shivering and scared witless at the prospect of having to meet a king, I marveled at the tiny bronze tiles that rippled over every surface and the sunken oval tub of beaten copper that the servants were filling with steaming water. Beside the tub, the wall was covered in a mosaic of shells and shimmering abalone

The library was two stories high, its walls lined from floor to ceiling with books. A balcony ran around the second story, and its dome was made entirely of glass so that the whole room glowed with morning light. A few reading chairs and small tables were set by the walls. At the room’s center, directly beneath the sparkling glass dome, was a round table ringed by a circular bench.

Every night, as I climbed the stairs to my room after another pointless, painful day, I would imagine the letter that might be waiting for me on my dressing table, and my steps would quicken. But the days passed, and no letter came.
Today was no different. I ran my hand over the empty surface of the table.
“Where are you, Mal?” I whispered. But there was no one there to answer.

” He looked down at me. The cold air had put a flush in his cheeks, and the lamplight shone in his gray eyes. “Alina, if I tell you that I still believe we can find the stag, would you think I’m mad?”
“Why would you care what I think?”
He looked genuinely baffled. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I do.”

I sat in the steam for as long as I could bear the heat and then plunged, squealing, into the snow with the others, before running back inside to do it all over again. I stayed until long past midnight, laughing and gasping, trying to clear my head

How was it that Genya had fallen so hard for someone so serious and so quiet and so seemingly oblivious to her gorgeousness? Or was that exactly why she had fallen for David?

“What are you doing?” I asked dubiously.
“I thought it was important that you see yourself in a proper mirror, not that useless sliver of glass on your dressing table,” she said. “But mostly I wanted to see the look on that bitch’s face when she saw you in the Darkling’s color.”