Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.
Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.
A librarian had found the baby sitting abandoned on the sheer edge of the world; the librarians kept her. That proved shrewd. Nepenthe had drooled on words, talked at them, and tried to eat them until she learned to take them into her eyes instead of her mouth.
I thought of you with your hair silver as snow all through that cold, slow journey from Sirle. I felt you troubled deep within me, and there was no other place in the world I would rather have been than in the cold night riding to you. When you opened your gates to me, I was home.
The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.
Epics are never written about libraries. They exist on whim; it depends on if the conquering army likes to read.
...that once were urgent and necessary for an orderly world and now were buried away, gathering dust and of no use to anyone.
Sorry, he said penitently. It’s a book. I have no common sense around them.
Faey lived, for those who knew how to find her, within Ombria's past. Parts of the city's past lay within time's reach, beneath the streets in great old limestone tunnels: the hovels and mansions and sunken river that Ombria shrugged off like a forgotten skin, and buried beneath itself through the centuries.
But dear, you hate to sew.
I will be married soon. Lady Thiel says a woman with needlework in her hands is generally assumed to have no other thoughts in her head and can safely harbor any number of improprieties. That will come in handy, especially when I'm married to a wizard.
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