Son of the Shadows (Sevenwaters, #2)

by Juliet Marillier

“Don’t you long for something different to happen, something so exciting and new it carries you along with it like a great tide, something that lets your life blaze and burn so the whole world can see it? Something that touches you with joy or with terror, that lifts you out of your safe, little path and onto a great, wild road whose ending nobody knows?

Tales are not lies, nor are they truths, but something in between. They can be as true or as false as the listener chooses to make them, or the teller wants him to believe.

I wove into this story as much wonder and magic and enchantment as I could. But I did not forget the ordinary things, the things that are wonderful in themselves, without being in any way unusual.

What was I but one more powerless woman in a world of unthinking men? Nothing had changed. Nothing at all, save deep inside, where nobody could see.

It is no wonder women have a reputation for patience that is not shared by men. We spend so much of our time waiting. Waiting for a child to be born. Waiting for a man to come home, from the fields, from the sea, from battle. Waiting endlessly for news. That can be the worst, as fear bites deep at the vitals and seizes the heart with chill fingers. The mind can make strange and terrible pictures while you are waiting.

It was as if there were no man, no woman here on the shore beneath the willows, no Bran, no Liadan, simply two halves of something broken that must now, at last, inevitably be made whole again.

How many times does the heart beat, how fast does the blood run when at last we touch, and touch again, and breathe the same desperate, longing breath? Count those things, for they are the stuff of life and of hope.

I cannot make his path grow broad and straight. It will always twist and turn and offer new difficulties. But I can take his hand and walk by his side.”

Together we suffer and endure and change and walk forward again, hand in hand.