Alwyn Hamilton Quotes

She moved like a storm someone had given steel to.

For you I would flood the desert. For my sister... I would set the sea on fire

Sir-Commander!" I called out, keeping my eyes down, like a good respectful girl in the presence of an officer. With my head down, I was staring straight into the foreigner's eyes. Something darted across his face, and for a moment I wondered if he recognized me from last night after all. "This mercenary. What's he wanted for, anyhow?"
The commander paused on the porch. "Treason."
I raised my eyebrows at the foreigner, a question. Below the counter, he winked at me and I couldn't stop myself from smiling back. "Well, then, I'll keep an eye out for him, sir.

It was a bad idea to play chicken with someone who'd known you your whole life. Nobody came out a winner.

Family and blood aren't the same thing.

How could you go home again after all that? After slaying monsters and saving princesses and dining in the homes of immortal beings . . .

I called the desert into a storm.

Nobody had seen a Djinni in decades. Now all it took to burn down a den of sin was a girl, a foreigner and a whole mess of drunks.

What else was I meant to do? Leave you to die?"
"You might've."
"I wouldn't have.

In the stories, it was always the monster who lost. But I knew better than anyone that stories and truth weren't the same thing.

Seemed like the only way into the city these days was by being dragged through the gates as a prisoner with a hand around your neck. Lucky me.

Ahmed would tell me that an eye for an eye would make the whole world blind. Shazad would tell me that was why you had to stab people through both eyes the first time around.

But even if the desert forgot a thousand and one of our stories, it was enough that they would tell of us at all. That long after our deaths, men and women sitting around a fire would hear that once, long ago, before we were all just stories, we lived.

I didn't make you come here." Jin's eyes bored into mine, but I wasn't backing down. He said I had traitor eyes. Let him see the betrayal there. Let him drown in it. "I didn't trick you and I didn't ask you to.

We were going to get Ahmed back. And Rahim back. And Shazad. And Delila. And all the others who had been captured. And we were going to end this.

The Rebel Prince will rise again.
He will bring a new dawn. A new desert.

But there, standing at the entrance to the garden, wearing a khalat the colour of a breaking dawn and that faint smile that meant she knew she was outsmarting someone, was Shazad.

Like I was about to say before getting interrupted, it's a modern age. I don't need a lot of muscle to pull a trigger.'
...
'Did you just shoot someone?'
'I got us hired, if that's what you're asking.

You're right." He cut me off. "I never understood this country. I never understood why he chose to leave everything else behind and stay for this. Not until I met you."
I felt like he'd pushed me, like I was falling and I needed him to reel those words back in to keep me standing straight.
"You /are/ this country, Amani." He spoke more quietly now. "More alive than anything ought to be in this place. All fire and gunpowder, with one finger always on the trigger.

So that's what Ayet wanted scissors for. - Shira

The First Beings might be all-powerful, but they had made us for the one thing that they could not do: to lay down our lives for what we believed in.

Jin always smiled at me like we were both about to be in big trouble and he loved it. The prince smiled like he was forgiving you for it.

You know, I never believed in fate until I met you... then I started thinking coincidence didn't have near so cruel a sense of humor

Here's a tip for you." He was close to me now, close as he had been when he kissed me, or when I kissed him. "Don't try to hit a man in the face when he's looking straight into your eyes. You've got traitor eyes, Bandit."

I drove my other fist into his gut hard enough that my knuckles popped. Jin doubled over, coughing. "Thanks for the tip.

He dared to fight because his destiny was to die.

The ceasefire had started. Next would come the negotations. Then the peace between the sultan and the invaders. And without the need to mind his shores, the desert ruler's eyes would turn inward again. The Foreign prince understood it was time to return to his brother. Their rebellion was about to turn into a war.

For a second it looked like a mortal horse. The next it was pure sand. Shifting from bright gold to violent red, fire and sun in a windswept desert.

I wouldn't point fingers if I were you. You know what they say: those who point fingers wind up with them broken so badly they point straight back at them. - Shazad

Is there a reason you keep coming back injured when I leave you for five seconds, or is it---" His voice carried too loud, and I clapped a hand over his mouth, shutting him up.
"Don't flatter yourself," I said quietly. "I'm always getting injured when you're around, too.

Stories and belief meant more than the truth.

They both die tragically at the end. That's what happens in all great love stories.

She was all fire and gunpowder, and her finger was always on a trigger

We contained our own stories. A thousand tiny parts of the story would die with us.

I was a desert girl. I thought I knew heat. I was wrong.

I put a knife in your hand and your first instinct was to stab me."
"You tried to stab me first," I objected without thinking.

And suddenly, the once-nameless boy knew he didn't want a stolen name, tarnished with use. What he wanted desperately was a name good enough to give to this girl.

Arms around my waist caught me before I could hit the ground. "I've got you," Jin said in my ear. "Let go; I've got you.

But the sun didn't stop. Time didn't stop. The world didn't show any sympathy for my grief.

I think they burn us and we become dust and ash." He ran a finger across the edge of my lips. "And I think that the dust that was me will spend until the end of time trying to get as close as possible to the dust that was you out in that vast desert.

But then, this was what the desert did to us. It made us dreamers with weapons.

But the storytellers would never know that. Even if people had known the truth, they wouldn't have been interested in telling it. Flowers pouring from Windows like falling stars made a better tale.

And this time, the Sultan had given us an advantage - the only thing that was truly invincible. Not an immortal creature. But an idea. A legend. A story.

The guns weren't of Mirajin make. Amonpourian. Stupid-looking things. Ornate and carved, made by hand instead of machine, and charged at twice what they were worth because someone had gone to the trouble of making them pretty. It didn't matter how pretty something was, it'd kill you just as dead. That, I'd learned from Shazad.

We were sailing on a sea of sand.

Her wish was simple: that you should live. - Bahadur, to Amani, about her mother.

I had just interrupted one of the Sultan's councils to decide the outcome of the ceasefire and the fate of our whole country, with a dead duck.
I wondered if this was what would cost me my head.

I'd near forgotten what it felt like to be a girl in Miraji. I was inconspicuous, but not the same way I'd been as a boy. Not because I was the same as everyone else. Because I didn't matter. Nobody in Miraji had ever thought enough of a girl to imagine I might be a spy.

You almost died," Mahdi said again, like we might be too stupid to understand. "You say that like it's the first time I've ever had a gun pointed at me," I retorted as Shazad rolled her eyes. "It's not even the first time this month.

So are you planning on stealing all our guns, or do you think maybe you only need one per hand? - Ahmed

Being born doesn't make a single soul important. But you were important when I met you, that girl who dressed as a boy, who taught herself to shoot true, who dreamed and saved and wanted so badly. That girl was someone who had made herself matter. She was someone I liked. What the hell has happened since you came here that she is so worthless to you? What's happened that only my brother's approval and some power you never needed before can make you important? That's why I didn't want to bring you into this revolution, Amani. Because I didn't want to watch the Blue-Eyed Bandit get unmade by a prince without a kingdom.

She turned to Jin now, sprawled by the fire, his hat pulled over his eyes. "I can tell you're awake. Are you coming with us?" He sighed, tipping his hat backward. "Yeah, yeah. Just trying to get some sleep before going to near certain death.

I might know better than anyone the distance between legends and the truth, that stories were not always told whole. The monsters in them were less fierce in reality, the heroes less pure, the Djinn more complicated. But there were some things you didn't prod at to find out if their teeth were really as big as the stories said. Because on the off-chance that the stories were really true, you were about to lose a finger.

You're wrong, you know. I'm not with you because of who you became. I fell in love with you when I was bleeding under a counter at the dead end of the desert and you saved my life. Back when we were both who we used to be.

And so here i was, my hands tied so tight behind my back i was losing feeling in them and a fresh wound on my collarbone where a knife had just barely missed my neck. Funny how being successful felt exactly the same as getting captured.

He held out a foreign-looking sword to Shazad. "Are you as good as Amani says you are?"
"No, I'm even better." Shazad grabbed the blade out of his hand.

Haven't you ever wanted something so bad that it becomes more than a want? I need to get out of this town. I need it like I need to breathe.

If she couldn't carve out a place for herself in Izman, what hope was I going to have?

Stories were written by the winners.

I thought of Shazad. My sister in arms. We had recognised something in each other the first time we met and we were tied. By more than blood.

The world makes things for each place. Fish for the sea, Rocs for the mountain skies, and girls with sun in their skin and perfect aim for a desert that doesn't let weakness live.

Hundreds of prayer cloths were tied around rocks and stakes all the way up the mountain, but God had failed here.

tomorrow the sun would rise on the first day of a new desert.

I had a plan. Well, plan might be a strong word. Shazad was the plan maker between the two of us. This was more like the beginnings of an idea that I was hoping wouldn't get me killed. Which was more my style.

These ideas could make men shout for rebellion even when it meant they would hang for it.

She had done it. Delila had saved us. And she'd done it without a single weapon. I'd forgotten how powerful a story could be.

If folk think they know what you are up to, they don't dig much deeper and risk finding the truth.

The truth is I had no idea what I was doing when it came to you, Amani. I tried to leave you in Dustwalk because I didn't want to drag you into my brother's war. I came back for you because I didn't want to see you die at the hands of my other brother. But either way, I was bound to wind up doing one or the other. Just depended on which one." His hand came up like he was going to reach for me but dropped to his side instead. "I was glad in Sazi when I saw you'd gone because it meant you'd escaped on your own path, and I was glad when you took the compass because it gave me a reason to go after you. And yes, I lied to keep you out of Izman because I was afraid someone would know what you were and you'd get snapped up and sold to the Sultan. And I steered you toward Dassama figuring there was a chance I might be able to deliver you to the sea and get you out of this country before it killed you.