The Summer Tree (The Fionavar Tapestry, #1)

by Guy Gavriel Kay

most creatures are pleased to do what their nature dictates.

“You are too quick to renounce friendship, Dave Martyniuk,”

In the stone silence that followed this, Kevin Laine, who had chased an elusive image down all the nights of his life, felt an astonishing turbulence rising in his heart. There was a power woven into the old man’s voice, and that, as much as the words, reached through to him. “Almighty God,” he whispered. “Paul, how did you know?”

I think I’m becoming a pain in the ass to him. I hate it.” “Sometimes,”

“a friend has to be that.”

He looked now at his handsome, fair son with a twisting in his own heart. “Kevin,” he said, “you will have to learn—and for you it will be hard—that sometimes you can’t do anything. Sometimes you simply can’t.”

We are the total of our longings,

He regarded the absence of sunglasses as a source of profound and comprehensive grief.

There was no nuance of gentleness in her, no shading of care, but fair she was, as is the flight of an arrow before it kills.

“It is power that teaches patience; holding power, I mean. And you learn the price it exacts—which is something I never knew when I was your age and thought a sword and quick wits could deal with anything. I never knew the price you pay for power.”

The mage can do no more than his source can sustain, and this bond is for life. Whatever a mage does, someone else pays the price.”

Paul cleared his throat awkwardly. “I don’t think that wanting to live can be a failing.”

“If you fall,” Diarmuid had said, unsmiling, “try not to scream. You may give the others away.”

😂😂

the Seer watched as the one beside her who was no longer a girl learned what it was to dream true. To be a dreamer of the dream.

After seeing this, the watching figure turned, still unseen, and walked away from them, and there was no trace of a limp in his stride.

Ah! Tyrth!!

Bright One,

courage was not lacking in her heart, though it might be foolhardy and unwise.

And if you speak to me as you do to them, you cheapen both of us unbearably.”

The Princess in her role bores me, hurts me. Demeans tonight.” “And what is tonight?” she asked, and bit her lip as soon as she spoke. “Ours,” he said.

Diarmuid . . . arouses strong feelings in most people.”

Our gift as Seers is to walk the twists that lie in the weave of time and bring their secrets back.

Colan the Beloved

We salvage what we can, what truly matters to us, even at the gates of despair. And so Jennifer Lowell, whose father had taught her, even as a child, to confront the world with pride, eventually rose up, cleaning herself as best she could, and began to wait in the brightening cottage. Daylight was coming outside, but it was not only that: courage casts its own light.

She would have been sad, but it seemed so destined that sadness didn’t fit,

However strong a woman might be, she still needed a man by her side and in her bed.

“Oh, brave,” he said, finding that he could speak. “There can never have been a thing so brave. Go now, for it is my turn, and I will keep faith. I’ll hold now, until tomorrow night, for you as much as anything.”

There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.

How can you tell the dancer from the dance? she had read somewhere. Or the dreamer from the dream, she amended, feeling a little lost. Because the answer to that was easiest of all. You can’t.

she went up the stairs again towards the world that needed her, all the worlds that needed what it seemed she was.

Let him die for you, if he can’t live for himself.

“Never stopped him,” he said fiercely, feeling it so hard. “The stubborn, brave, son of a bitch!”

There will be people I must trust, and if you are a Seer, then you must be one of them, and I’m afraid you will have to deal with me as I am.”

“God, Aileron, I’ve never met anyone who had so much trouble saying thank-you.

for the dead are still in time, they are travelling, they are not lost.

“I told you to go,” he said. “I know. I don’t always do what I’m told. I thought I warned you.”

You’re a harper, Paul. You have harper’s hands.” “Where’s my harp, then?” Straight man. And Rachel said, “Me, of course. My heart’s your harpstring.”

“You’re always so controlled, thinking, figuring out.

So much logic:

So she had left him and he had killed her, and you weren’t allowed to weep when you have done that. You pay the price, so. So he had come to Fionavar. To the Summer Tree. Class dismissed. Time to die.

You failed because humans fail. It is a gift as much as anything else.

Go easy, and in peace. It is well.

There will come a tomorrow when you weep for me.

So Paul cried on the Summer Tree.

One did not sleep when war began, or one slept forever when it ended.

The Children of Peace, the Dalrei were named, but sometimes peace had been hard won.

Is a horse arrogant or superior? He didn’t think so. Proud, yes; there was great pride in the bay stallion that had stood so still with Levon that morning, but it wasn’t a pride that diminished anything or anyone else. It was simply part of what the stallion was. Levon was like that, Dave decided.

Dave was seldom drunk; he didn’t like surrendering the edge of control,

When you didn’t say a lot, he thought, you said the important things.

Mothers and daughters; there was less indulgence there.

“I am her child, too. Do not begrudge the gift she offered me.”