I need your skills, Inej. That's not the same thing. You may be the best spider crawling around the Barrel, but you're not the only one.

I had spared the stag's life. The power of that life belonged to me as surely as it belonged to the man who had taken it.

Maybe there were people who lived those lives. Maybe this girl was one of them. But what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.

When had she stopped being a child? The first time a guy whistled at her out of a car window when she was walking to school? The moment she started wondering how she looked when she ran, what jiggled or bounced, instead of the pace she was setting? The first time she'd kept from raising her hand because she didn't want to seem too smart or too eager? No one had sung? No one had told her how much she would lose until the time for grieving was long over.

But hope rises like water trapped by a dam, higher and higher, in increments that mean nothing until you face the flood.

This goes to show you that sometimes the unseen is not to be feared and that those meant to love us most are not always ones who do.