Minor Mage

by T. Kingfisher

There is something about a group of people that is less than the sum of its parts.

A real wizard wouldn’t be huddled in a ditch wishing for his mother. (In this, at least, Oliver was dead wrong—many wizards over the ages, some of them very major mages indeed, have found themselves curled in ditches and wishing desperately for their mothers. But they tend not to mention these things in their memoirs.)

“You’re a cynical kid,” said Trebastion. “You make harps out of dead people,” said Oliver. “Yes, but I haven’t allowed it to taint my basic optimism.”

“Humans need to let stuff out or they get weird.

When kindness came from murdered ghosts and lost pigs, and the adults that were supposed to help you were monsters that walked like men… What was he supposed to do? It wasn’t right. He wanted the world to be different.

Humans. You beat yourselves up for failure and you beat yourselves up almost as bad for success. Feh.

“There is enough darkness in the world,” said the Herder. “We do not add to it unless we must.”

“That is the price your village paid. You will never love them with your whole heart again. The shadow of what they did in their fear will lie between you forever. But they will be alive, nonetheless, and learning to bridge that shadow—or decide not to—is the work of adulthood.”