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think of all the uses cabbages have. You can let them rot, then throw them at enemies in the street, or if you’re courting a wench, you can give her a bouquet of fresh ones, and that’s something she’ll have never seen before, or—”
If you write in the sand with a stick, soon the waves and wind will wash away the words. Such are the mistakes of ordinary men. If you cut words into stone, they remain forever. A man who claims the dweomer becomes a chisel. All his misdeeds are graved into the very flank of time itself.
There is only one key to unlock the secrets of the dweomer: I want to know in order to help the world. Anyone wanting power for its own sake gets only dribs and drabs, hard-won, harder to keep, and not worth having.
That the human mind is the gate between the planes is a safe secret to tell, because it takes years of study and work before the gate will open, years that impatient fools won’t spend to learn secrets they shouldn’t have.
One of these planes, the etheric, is the root of the elementals (what men call the Wildfolk), the source of natural forces and the web that holds every living creature’s soul. Within or beyond that plane is a locus of force that the dweomer terms the Wildlands, and more of the human mind is rooted there than people would like to admit.
Old Aderyn tells me that our gods fashioned us from the Wildfolk, just like your gods fashioned you from animals, and so here we are, together on the earth for good or ill.” “Here, our priests say the gods made us from earth and water.” “The dweomer knows a fair bit more than priests; remember that well.
It was odd, Cullyn always thought, that while bards sang of warriors slicing each other into shreds, you generally killed a man by beating him to death with your sword.
“Indeed? His lordship might spend a moment or two thinking every now and then.”
“Would you not use that word?” Jennantar snapped. “It’s more than a little discourteous, especially in front of Jill.” “Now, Jill may have round ears.” Calonderiel pointed at one of them with his bow. “But she’s not a Round-ear. There’s a big difference.”
Unlike the evil magicians in the bard songs, who love to cause misery and suffering for its own sake, the men of the dark dweomer never act directly in the world without some very good reason.
Whenever Nevyn looked over his life, the memories were crowded and tangled, as if he were looking at the wrong side of a tapestry and trying to figure out the pattern on the front. Quite simply, he’d never had the chance to sort things out in the state called death, where the experiences of a lifetime are sifted and condensed to hard, clear seeds of experience.
God-touched—she supposed that was how they had to see her, a favorite of some god or other, rather than admitting that she was merely a woman who could fight as well as a man.
