“The rook is my favourite piece,’ she said. ‘It’s the one that you think you don’t have to watch out for. It is straightforward. You keep your eye on the queen, and the knights, and the bishop, because they are the sneaky ones. But it’s the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.”
To the High Queen of Elfhame,
...
And yet my heart is buried with you in the strange soil of the mortal world, as it was drowned with you in the cold waters of the undersea.
It was yours before I could admit it, and yours it shall ever remain.
-Cardan
"Now look around you."
I turn to one side and see what he means. Because where I stepped, small white flowers are growing in my footsteps. "It's magic...but I'm not magic. I'm mortal. I'm a mortal girl."
"You're the Queen of Elfhame," he says.
I look around me and drink in the air of Faerieland, a place that is still menacing, but all mine. My land. My home. Mine.
Adrian gathered the crown that sat atop between his hands. It was black and iron, and though it sat heavily upon my head, I knew it belonged there.
“Rise, Isolde, queen of Revekka, future queen of the Nine Houses.”
"It's you I love," he says. "I spent much time of my life guarding my heart. I guarded it so well that I could behave as though I didn't have one at all. Even now, it is a shabby, worm-eaten and scabrous thing. But it is yours."