Into the Narrowdark: Book Three of The Last King of Osten Ard

by Tad Williams

We make marks on maps to separate one country from the next, then write treaties to make law of those separations, she thought. But in truth, unless people contest the borders, the differences mean little. Most folk who live on the edges speak the language of both sides, and there is little else to separate one nation’s people from another’s. So is there something wrong in the way men rule each other? she wondered. Animals walk and birds fly freely from one land to the next and no one thinks to stop them doing it. And God makes no lines across His Heavens—the sky is blue from one horizon to the other with scarcely a difference to be seen, let alone a boundary. And yet His children fight each other to the death over lines they can only imagine.

“When you discover a flaw in stone, do not examine only the flaw but how it formed, what it will do if left alone, and how the stone around it has responded.”

‘Carry only what you can and leave the rest beside the road. Either someone else will carry it for you, or it will still be there for you to pick up on another day.”

“Thank you.” He lifted his finger to his eye. “So lead on, then. But remember—food first, then painful death.”

But God could, and God had. John Josua would always be the little child Simon had carried on his back through the Hedge Garden, and also the serious, bearded young man who had been so astonished to hold his own first child that he had wept at Morgan’s birth. He would always be every age his loving parents remembered, but he would never be old.