The Prisoner of Limnos (Penric and Desdemona, #6)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

As they gained more information, they would find a route through. Somehow. Step by step. She couldn’t work miracles, but she knew she could work work.

“I’m not sure how such wild feats are supposed to impress the gods,” mused Pen, squinting upward, “who are present everywhere the same. Though my subtler seminary teachers advised me that any useful effect is upon the supplicant, not some holy audience. It’s all in whether the given action fills a person or empties them, leaving room for a god to enter. You could sit by yourself in a quiet room and have as good a chance at it. A man could walk up those two thousand steps on his hands singing hymns the whole way and have none.”

Joy is a mark of Them, you see. It will likely keep leaking out of you for some while.”

A man with a grappling hook and a death wish might make something of that, but he had brought neither.

much less than the maze of docks and warehouses and forests of masts that crowded great Thasalon’s entrepot.

“We cannot protect anyone from being alive, Master Bosha. No matter how much we might wish to.”

“Marry the sorcerer, dear,” Des urged, “and put me out of his misery. He’ll be glad you did. If he is happy, I can be happy. And so can you.” And that was just how it worked, wasn’t it? Happiness handed around and around, never stopping. It wasn’t something one could hoard tight like a miser. That would be like trying to hold one’s breath for later.