#mirnatius

Mirnatius from the Spinning Silver The devil himbo of the story. ~

Mirnatius, le beau gosse inquiétant de l'histoire.

Most memorable character?

Tricky-Woo from All Creatures Great and Small

I'm going to go with Mirnatius from Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. Not really because I liked him, necessarily, but he was the one I rotated in my brain the most. At first he seems like just a selfish, cruel ruler who needs to be taken down. But then you find out what's really going on with him and why he is the way he is...and suddenly, almost despite yourself, you find sympathy welling up inside you. And instead of hoping the characters will find some way to kill him, you end up hoping they'll find some way to save him instead. Add to that how the ending ties every other storyline up in a bow instead of his...and yeah, I'm still thinking about him.

Most annoying character?

Spinning Silver, Irina/Mirnatius, M, 2.6k. On the warming of hearts and the easing of hurts.

Irina had meant to kill me. I was not so much a fool as to think that she might have tried to save me, if it had come to a choice between Lithvas and me. I couldn’t blame her for it; no one in their right mind would have chosen me, wretched and possessed as I had been.

I would have submitted to it. There were a great number of things I would submit to under her hand.

I might even have welcomed it. Oh, burning is a painful way to die—one of the worst, to have heard the footmen and soldiers talk when they thought I could not hear them. But I had burned alive every day since I had been delivered from my mother’s womb like a hot coal.

I wrapped my arms around Irina’s waist and pressed my face into her stomach as tears spilled down my cheeks. She put her hand on my head, curled her fingers in my hair, and stroked gently. It was a kindness I did not deserve, and it only served to coax more tears from me.

Karolis would have laughed to see me now, a grown man, a tsar, weeping into his wife’s skirts as her doddering nurse looked on as if I had grown two heads. It must have been a shock to her, the poor old bat: One moment I was a man possessed by a demon of ash and hellfire, more monster than man, and the next a weeping fool dissolved into crying into his wife’s skirts.

I was colder inside than out.

“That's not nothing, to be able to hold your head up."

I wanted to ease the moment past. The temptation was familiar: to go along, to make myself small enough to slip past a looming danger.

But it was all the same choice, every time. The choice between the one death and all the little ones.

I couldn’t buy my life in the last moment, with hands around my throat. I could only buy it by giving in sooner, giving in all the time, like Scheherazade, humbling asking my murderous husband to go on sparing me night after night.