#herebedragonsedit

"That was all I asked of God, that I need not see him each time I looked into your face. Little enough to ask, I should think." She laughed suddenly, unsteadily. "But we do pay and pay for our sins, it seems, and you grow more like him with each day that passes." Joanna shrank back. She knew who "he" was, the father who had not wanted her, who had made Mama so unhappy. "Mama..." "Oh, God, how like him you are!" Clemence's eyes were not blind now; they were riveted on Joanna's face with an emotional intensity that terrified the child; she thought she could read revulsion in them, and she sobbed, "No, Mama, I'm not! Please, Mama, I'm not!"

THIS BROKEN JAW OF OUR LOST KINGDOMS

A playlist for Sharon Kay Penman's Welsh Princes Trilogy {Here Be Dragons, Falls The Shadow, The Reckoning}

"She must not laugh. If she did, she'd not be able to stop. Like her mother. So many years ago, but Joanna could still hear her, hear peal after peal of that shrill, hysterical laughter as her mother looked at her, at her bastard child, her 'mistake.' We pay and pay for our sins, she'd gasped. We pay and pay."