Fool's Errand (Tawny Man, #1)

by Robin Hobb

He was dwindling, like the fire, taking in sustenance but, nonetheless, growing ever smaller. Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume that we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as times goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow all will come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be.

“Does it go away?” He asked the question in a very soft voice, but I knew it was for me. I took a breath, forced steadiness into my voice. “No.” “Not ever?” “There may be another for you someday. But you never forget the first.”

Cue more cried

“I think I’ll do nothing. I think I’ll let him be a boy. I think I’ll let him fall in love with a girl, and stay out later than he should, and have a pounding headache tomorrow when his master chides him for being late.” I turned to look at her. The firelight danced over her kindly face. “I think I’ll let the boy be a boy for a time.”

it always would, the past had broken free of my effort to define and understand it. History is no more fixed and dead than the future. The past is no further away than the last breath you took.