Are you by any chance …' said Lymond....

You've got one hero too many already. Stand on your own feet, Brother. It's good for the soul.

Mariotta listened to it all, sitting judicially in a whirl of velvet with all the Culter jewels and the emerald necklace for moral support.

I have said the intellect is all that can matter. I haven't said it is easy-or painless … to rid oneself of all that is left.

You called me Alec just now,' Guthrie said. 'If I have dispensation to do the same, let me say it. Francis Crawford, I wish you away from this country; and if I had the hearing of a friend, and not...

Meanwhile, until the snow comes, we had better keep Master Chancellor and his party entertained.'...

Unwanted, unasked, unwelcome as ever, here I am.''Again,' said Lymond.

Age can mellow, they say.''They say wrong,' said Diccon Chancellor. 'I have known Mistress Philippa these two months, and I have aged while she has grown daily less mellow. Why else am I fleeing the...

You've changed the metre,' said Philippa.'I reserve the right,' said Lymond, 'to change the metre. Don't interrupt.

I don't change from minute to minute. I don't change at all.

Some day, I must take my own prolific advice and contrive to drop dead.

And a capable feminine voice, directed past Austin Grey's ear to his opponent, said baldly, 'Hit him.'Lymond, already balanced on the upswing to hurl himself forward, dropped his arm and said, with...

A smile, bracketing his still mouth, spread like bane over Lymond's pale face.

If you will excuse us?''Go to Sir Henry's room,' Lady Mary called after her. 'And if you use weapons, be sure to call witnesses.

My name is Francis Crawford, and my brother and I studied at St Barbe.'...

Don't be so sensitive,' he said, faintly chiding. 'It makes everyday commerce most trying.

My God, he must be a good man with his fists.''Lymond?' said Danny sweetly.'Lord Culter. I assume,' Ludovic said. 'At least, he was the last person up the stairs before Yeroffia. What did they quarrel...

Kiaya Khátún is of the happy family circle.'...

We are here. We will work together for what purpose seems to us right. We will work with calm, and with tolerance and, please God, with saving laughter.'We know something of men. We know of evil, and...

And that was when she realized that laughter, which they had lost, had come back to them, and they were whole again.

There have been so many misunderstandings in the past. What you did, often, was done for good reason. I know I am simple. I know you are devious. But, oh God, if there is any good reason for what you...

There is a saying of my adoptive ancestors. Though he performs a miracle, or two miracles, if he refuses the third miracle, it is not as profit to him. I shall dine at the Court of France tonight, and...

One knows, when all one's life one has walked in dangerous places, when the silence is that of ambush and when the silence is that of emptiness.

Since I doubt, at the moment, whether I can stomach any hysterical verbiage, suppose we simply say what we mean.

What to do when attacked at sea, lessons one to ten. They had spent their first morning at sea being trained, remorselessly, by Francis Crawford for this precise event. 'I know what to do,' said...

Well, get the coffer out," said Tobie roundly. "You find his clean clothes and I'll cut his hair round his cap and wash his ears out. Then, when we get to the Palazzo Medici, you imitate his voice and...

Tobie. Unless I'm giving off steam, behave normally. I remember what to do. One foot in front of the other, but not both at the same time unless I'm a robin.

Francis Crawford's face in this fleeting moment of privacy was filled with ungovernable feeling: of shock and of pain and of a desire beyond bearing: the desire of the hart which longs for the...

How many years hast thou, Hâkim?'...

She gave up combing her hair, which the salt air had reduced to a kind of scrim of brown hessian, and, lying down, proceeded to keep her fingernails short in the way Kate admired least. Then she...