But when an onion goes bad, it can do it from either the inside, or the outside. So far, that’s no different from other vegetables. When I say that life is like an onion, I mean this: if you don’t do anything with it, it goes rotten.

I suppose there’s truth in that, but in the years when my father ran a restaurant, I never peeled an onion, I chopped them Kragar’s analogy doesn’t do much for me. He talks about peeling it, and how you can go deeper and deeper, until finally you get to the center and nothing is there. Kragar says that life is like an onion, but he doesn’t mean the same thing by it that I do. “Stay out of sight, in case they get rude.” When I was older, I learned that most of what I had been taught were lies. Later, I found a wild jhereg, and trained him, and set about to leave my mark on Dragaeran society.

I was taught that the only choices we had, if we wished to amount to anything, were to swear fealty to some lord and become part of the peasant clans in the House of the Teckla, or, as my father did, buy Orders of Nobility in the House of the Jhereg.

I was taught that humans, or “Easterners,” such as I, were worthless scum. When I was young, I was taught that every citizen of the Dragaeran Empire was born into one of the seventeen Great Houses, each named for an animal.

Yendi steven brust