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“It’s an oshoc,” said Kell, using Holland’s word. Only Tieren seemed to understand. “A kind of incarnation,” explained the priest. “Magic in its natural form has no self, no consciousness. It simply is. The Isle river, for instance, is a source of immense power, but it has no identity. When magic gains a self, it gains motive, desire, will.”
Because caring was a thing with claws. It sank them in, and didn’t let go. Caring hurt more than a knife to the leg, more than a few broken ribs, more than anything that bled or broke and healed again. Caring didn’t break you clean. It was a bone that didn’t set, a cut that wouldn’t close.
She was trouble—even the crew knew it, and they couldn’t see the word written in knotted silver above her head. But for all of that, he liked her. Alucard had taken a dangerous girl and made her positively lethal, and he knew that combination was likely to be the end of him, one way or another.
“You should know, I don’t often take things without power, but then few people realize that 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?”
Standing there on the prow of the Ghost, he realized with startling clarity that death and glory didn’t interest him nearly as much as living long enough to go home.
