Is she crazy?” “No,” he said simply. “But sometimes her sanity is terrifying.
In sixteen years since then, she had changed beyond recognition, and he had not changed by a moment, being the same dispassionate, thin-haired wraith who had picked her up with his bony hands and tucked her into a book bag to add to the acquisitions of the royal library.
Oh, yes.” He felt the pearls brush down his face again. Dory turned: he met her eyes and let her see the new pearls forming. “Anything that beautiful is terrible. Because it’s outside of you. It’s not you. You’ll do anything to make it part of you. You’d eat it, drown in it, kill it, let it kill you. Anything to stop it from not being you.
You – cannot ever be certain of those you love – that they will not hurt you, even loving you. But to make me certain to love you, will be to take away any love I might give you freely.
What a dull place the world would be if all the mysteries in it were solved.
Her eyes filled with light, like sea-polished amber, and his throat constricted suddenly, too full of words.
Morgon, I told you what I am; you could see what dark power I was waking in me – you knew its origins. You knew I am kin to those shape-changers who tried to kill you, you thought I was helping the man who had betrayed you – why in Hel’s name did you trust me?” His hands, circling the gold crown on the skull, closed on the worn metal with sudden strength. “I don’t know. Because I chose to. Then, and forever.
Experience teaches us restrictions,” the mage reminded him. “They are not dreamed up in some peaceful tower on a mountaintop.
She spread her hands. That morning they had been soft as feathers, jeweled, polished, and perfumed. Now they were crisscrossed with blood and dirt, wearing only bruises for jewels.
He went into a dark tower of truth for you. Do you have the courage to give him your own name?
He had made tiny pipes of feathers he had found along the streets; birds answered him here as they had in the hinterlands. A night-bird, singing back to his playing, showed him the loose bar in the iron fence, the furrowed earth along which the bar swung sideways, that told him, as the bird did, that others came here secretly. Around him, the sleeping city dreamed, tossed fretfully, muttered, dreamed again.
Oh... if you were older... It is not a bad thing, itself, but it is a bad thing to be used by men, to have them choose what you must be, and what you must not be, to have little choice in your life. If you were older, you could choose your own way.
As she moved swiftly and noiselessly through the vast palace cellar, odd noises weltered toward her. Voices and echoes of water rippled through the air as if, in some magic chamber, whales and dolphins cavorted among young maidens in great tanks of water. When she reached it, all the fish turned into laundry, stirred and beaten in steaming cauldrons by glum, limp-haired women as wet as mackerels.
Sybel, you went from me like a dream, so silently, so irrevocably – I could not bear it, I could not bear it –.
Kir stood close to his father, watching. He seemed, Peri realized, finally becalmed; already he looked more like his mother, as if he were relinquishing his human experience. He found her looking at him wistfully; he gave her a sea-smile. She swallowed a briny taste of sadness in her throat. Already he was leaving her.
Soon is such a long word.
Watching the day slowly bloom into night. That’s how it always seemed to me: not the fading of a withered flower, but the opening of some dark, rich blossom, with unexpected hues and heavy scents.
Sorrow was like sleeping on stones, he decided. You had to settle all its bumps and sharp edges, come to terms against them, shift them around until they became bearable, and then carry your bed wherever you went.
I heard you. Sometimes, in silence, at night, I hear the voices of things beyond eyesight, like echoes of ancient songs. I heard your voice, lonely in my dreams – it woke me, so I came. You see, I know how it is when you speak a name into an empty room with no one on earth to answer to it.
Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart.