In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children, #4)

by Seanan McGuire

Come buy, come buy: Our grapes fresh from the vine, Pomegranates full and fine, Dates and sharp bullaces, Rare pears and greengages, Damsons and bilberries, Taste them and try: Currants and gooseberries, Bright-fire-like barberries, Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye; Come buy, come buy. —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, GOBLIN MARKET

She had a brother, six years older and a little bit wild in the way of boys who could look over their shoulders and see the shadow of a war standing there, its jaws open and hungry.

To be a child is to be a visitor from another world muddling your way through the strange rules of this one, where up is always up, even when it would make more sense for it to be down, or backward, or sideways.

Parents lied to children when they thought it was necessary, or when they thought that it would somehow make things better. It only made sense that children should lie to parents in the same way.

It is an interesting thing, to trust one’s feet. The heart may yearn for adventure while the head thinks sensibly of home, but the feet are a mixture of the two, dipping first one way and then the other.

a bright, shimmering thing is almost certainly looking to be seen, and that which hopes to be seen is pursuing its own agenda.

Following the rules didn’t make you a good person, just like breaking them didn’t make you a bad one, but it could make you an invisible person, and invisible people got to do as they liked.

“‘Rule one,’” she read. “‘Ask for nothing.’

“‘Rule two,’” she read. “‘Names have power.’

Rule three was “always give fair value.” Rule four was “take what is offered and be grateful.” And rule five, most puzzling of all, was, “remember the curfew.”

little stalls with fabric walls and decorated awnings.

Tatterdemalion. That was a good word. Katherine seized on to it, trying to smother her screams with intellectual curiosity. She had known the word for months, of course, had learnt it in a book she was supposed to be too young to read, but this was the first time she’d seen someone who looked like it could apply to them.

there was something about her that spoke of midnights and secrets and things no one dared to say during the day.

It was like she’d foregone one place for another without traveling the distance between.

“Your name is your heart, and you don’t give your heart away. Promise.”

The Market knows, you see, when someone is acting to the best of their ability. The Market doesn’t punish us for having limitations. It only reminds us that fair value applies to everyone.”

Home always shrinks in times of absence, always bleeds away some of its majesty, because what is home, after all, apart from the place one returns to when the adventure is over? Home is an end to glory, a stopping point when the tale is done.

When Thursday arrived, creeping into the present one day at a time, as days are wont to do,

You can’t save anyone if you neglect yourself. All you can do is fall slowly with them.

No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.”

Let us speak, for a moment, on the matter of sisters. They can be enemies to fight or companions to lean upon: they can, at times, be strangers. They are not required to be friends, or to have involvement in one another’s lives, or to be anything more than strangers united by the circumstances of their birth. Still, there is a magic in the word “sister,” a magic which speaks of shared roots and hence shared branches, of a certain ease that is always to be pursued, if not always to be found.