It would be my honour to
The tattoos on his knees were nearly obscured by the rumpled sheets, the
design stretched with the position. But I traced my fingers over the tops of those mountains, the three stars inked atop them, as he remained kneeling between my legs, gazing down at me.
“I thought about you every moment I was on that battlefield,” he said softly.
“It focused me, centered me—let me get through it.”
I stroked those tattoos on his knees again. “I’m glad. I think … I think some
part of me was down there on that battlefield with you, too.” I glanced to his suit of armor, cleaned and displayed on a dummy near the small dressing area. His winged helmet shone like a dark star in the dimness. “Seeing that battle today … It felt different from the one in Adriata.” Rhys only listened, those star-flecked eyes patient. “In Adriata, I didn’t …” I struggled for the words. “The chaos of the battle in Adriata was easier, somehow. Not easy, I mean—”
“I know what you meant.”
I sighed, sitting up so that we were knee-to-knee and face-to-face. “What I’m
trying and failing miserably to explain is that attacks like the one in Adriata, in
Velaris … I can fight in those. There are people to defend, and the disorder of it
… I can—I’ll gladly fight in those battles. But what I saw today, that sort of
warfare …” I swallowed. “Will you be ashamed of me if I admit that I’m not
sure if I’m ready for that sort of battling?” Line against line, swinging and
stabbing until I didn’t know up from down, until mud and gore blurred the line
between enemy and foe, relying as much upon the warriors beside me as my
own skill set. And the closeness of it, the sounds and sheer scale of the
bloodbath … He took my face in his hands, kissing me once. “Never. I can never be ashamed of you. Certainly not over this.” He kept his
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Sully is the real Ford, she says with her hands, as though that’s obvious. Sparrow is the dummy. Scout is the maid.
“You are the best, slightly overbearing alien boyfriend a recently abducted girl could have.” She raises an eyebrow and smirks as I frown in her direction. “I didn’t say I didn’t like it, you big dummy.”
“I’ll take overbearing as long as you keep calling me your boyfriend.”
The spread of printing in Britain in the 1500s removed the legibility issue and had a standardizing effect that gradually returned many word spellings to I. Today the old Y versus I rivalry can still be glimpsed in such alternative spellings as flyer/flier, cyper/cipher, and tyre/tire.
Yet the medieval Y fad did leave one large legacy: Y’s plum job representing any final “i” sound in English. Today we use a “-y” suffix that encompasses four diverse categories: (1) adjectival forms of Old English words (stony, mighty, my); (2) nouns from Greek, Latin, or Old French that originally had endings like -ia, -ium, or -ie (empathy, remedy, tally); (3) other anglicizations (Henry, from French Henri); and (4) certain diminutives (Jimmy, kitty, dummy).
As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx.
The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.
Winston, bu gözsüz yüzdeki çenenin hızlı bir şekilde açılıp kapandığını izledikçe, onun aslında gerçek bir insan değil de bir çeşit kukla olduğu hissine kapıldı. Bu konuşan, bir insanın beyni değil, yalnızca gırtlağıydı. Ağzından çıkan şeyler kelimelerdi ancak bu, gerçek anlamda bir konuşmadan ziyade, şuursuzca söylenmiş bir gürültüydü; tıpkı bir ördeğin vaklaması gibi.
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