Shadowfire (Birthgrave #2)

by Tanith Lee

It is good to dream, though you feel the anchor hold you back, root-deep in the seabed of your life.

The Moi have it that the summer sun is a golden girl, who blows on a pipe to summon everything living out onto the earth.

There are two clever tricks men know. One is to make much of nothing. The second is to make nothing of much.

Yet I felt at once the sort of dreary urgent concupiscence that sometimes comes with fever.

Seeing me aroused—I had no means to conceal it—they glided at once to the couch.

Still, it rankled, and for the thousandth time I must recite to myself the old spell: Act his dog, for you are not his dog; it is worth the play for the bone. I had not yet learned the lesson that when you are forever telling yourself that such and such is worth the price, then the price is too high and has been paid too often.

I suppose I had turned crazy, having endured the cage when I should have refused it, now refusing when I should have endured. Like many a man before me, I acted at the wrong moment and in the wrong way, because I ought to have acted sooner and had not.

I thought of the nights and noons when we had coupled, when my world had been only Demizdor, and that she had said to me, “One day you will regret me.” Now there was only this beautiful, unknown, unloved stranger, murderess and savior in a single day.

To lose love and find how you have lost it, neither to blame, like sightless children groping in shadow; there is an edge to that like the knife itself.

“Your son, Ettook’s warrior! Do you like what you have made of me? I have killed forty men, and I have four wives and thirteen sons, and three days from now I will die with an out-tribe spear between my ribs. I might have been a prince in Eshkorek Arnor, or in Ezlann. I might have been a king with a great army at my back, beautiful women to please me, and Power to make all men do as I wished. Do you like what you have made?” It was crystal clear to me, what he had meant for me, my father, Vazkor, what she had robbed me of. I drew from my belt my hunting knife and threw it at her heart. She hung in the air, and said to me, cold as silver ice, “This has no ability to kill me.”

The black folk had no rigid moral laws, being too moral, and too lawful, to construct them.

For I had been pompous, and an oaf, for all I imagined myself so forbearing with her. Ride a girl, then tell her who else she might or must not ride with. Fine morality.