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Easy when you didn’t care, when people came onto the page and walked away again, back to their own stories, and you could imagine whatever you wanted for them, if you cared enough to write it in your head.
“On vis och,” he told himself. Dawn to dusk. A phrase that meant two things in his native tongue. A fresh start. A good end.
“His name was Vik. I loved him the way the moon loves the stars—that is what we say, when a person fills the world with light.”
if you stood still, and closed your eyes, you could smell the echoes of summer.
“Love and loss,” he said, “are like a ship and the sea. They rise together. The more we love, the more we have to lose. But the only way to avoid loss is to avoid love. And what a sad world that would be.”
Of all the ways to die, only a fool chooses pride.”
“I’m beginning to think that thrones make tyrants of us all.”
memory casts its own spell, that it writes itself on an object just like magic, waiting to be picked over—or picked apart—by clever fingers. Another city. Another home. Another life. All bound up in something as simple as a cup, a coat, a
silver watch. The past is a powerful thing, don’t you think?”
“The past is the past. It doesn’t live in any one thing. It certainly doesn’t live in something that can be given away. If it did, I would have just handed you everything I was, everything I am. But you can’t have that, not even for a look around your market.”
He’d never been much of a drinker. Never thought the during was much worth the after.
Magic was a river carving its course, picking who to flow through and who to bend around, and for those it bent around, well, there was a reason for that, too. For one thing, they tended to have a better view of the water from the bank.
“Life,” he said, since he didn’t believe in luck—it was the absence of design, and if Lenos believed one thing, it was that everything had an order, a reason. Sometimes you were too close to see it, sometimes too far away, but it was there.
“Life is chaos. Time is order.”
Myths do not happen all at once. They do not spring forth whole into the world. They form slowly, rolled between the hands of time until their edges smooth, until the saying of the story gives enough weight to the words—to the memories—to keep them rolling on their own. But all stories
A kinship of hot and cold, of strong forces equally opposed, of those who did not know how to soften, how to soothe, and found the answer in each other.
A myth without a voice is like a dandelion without a breath of wind. No way to spread the seeds.
Magic made everything feel so impermanent, it was easy to forget that some things, once changed, could never be undone. That not everything was either changeable or infinite. Some roads kept going, and others had an end.
Anoshe was a word for strangers in the street, and lovers between meetings, for parents and children, friends and family.
