More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Politics is a dance until the moment it becomes a war. And we control the music.”
“Strength and weakness are tangled things,” the Aven Essen had said. “They look so much alike, we often confuse them, the way we confuse magic and power.”
There used to be all kinds of aven. Ones who could master all the elements. Ones who could only master one, but were so powerful, they could change the tides, or the wind, or the seasons. Ones who could hear what magic had to say. Aven isn’t just one thing, because magic isn’t just one thing. It’s everything, old and new and always changing. The Castans think that when someone aven appears, it’s for a reason. It’s because the magic is trying to tell us something.…”
“Don’t you see?” said Calla. “He wasn’t coming to pay your debt. He was coming to see if you’d returned to pay it yourself.” Lila felt her face go hot. “I do not know why you two are circling each other like stars. It is not my cosmic dance. But I do know that you come asking after one another, when only a few strides and a handful of stairs divide you.”
She hadn’t been this close to him in months. Her skin hummed where he touched her. Was that normal? If magic coursed through everyone and everything, was this what it felt like when it found itself again?
“Everyone thinks I have a death wish, you know? But I don’t want to die—dying is easy. No, I want to live, but getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. And once you do, it makes you realize that everything you were doing before wasn’t actually living. It was just making do. Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.”
They crashed into each other as if propelled by gravity, and he didn’t know which of them was the object and which the earth, only that they were colliding.
