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Granny bit her lip. She was never quite certain about children, thinking of them—when she thought about them at all—as coming somewhere between animals and people. She understood babies. You put milk in one end and kept the other end as clean as possible. Adults were even easier, because they did the feeding and cleaning themselves. But in between was a world of experience that she had never really inquired about. As far as she was aware, you just tried to stop them catching anything fatal and hoped that it would all turn out all right. Granny, in fact, was at a loss, but she knew she had to
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you can drink lots of cider and you just feel better and that’s it, isn’t it?” The smith nodded again. “But applejack, you drink that in little mugs and you don’t drink a lot and you don’t drink it often, because it goes right to your head?”
a wall said “Psst!” When Esk stared at it it turned out to be Granny. It wasn’t that Granny could make herself invisible, it was just that she had this talent for being able to fade into the foreground so that she wasn’t noticed.
“but you’re absolutely right. He’s really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. There’s so much about the universe we don’t know.”
They both savored the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.
“Didn’t I always say to you that if you use magic you should go through the world like a knife goes through water? Didn’t I say
you thought that was just old Granny’s way, didn’t you? But the fact is that if you use magic you draw attention to yourself. From Them.
They could no more survive in this world than a fish could live in a fire, but that doesn’t stop Them trying.
they’re just bright enough to hate us because we’re alive.”
“Ice,”
“If they are…where we think they are, then it’s very cold. As cold as the night between the stars, it is said. So the staff feels it too.”
“You felt left out,” said Granny. “There’s nothing strange in that. It happens to all of us. It was our choice.” “Wizards should never go home,” said Cutangle. “I don’t think they can go home,”
Zoon tribes are very proud of their Liars. Other races get very annoyed about all this. They feel that the Zoon ought to have adopted more suitable titles, like “diplomat” or “public relations officer.” They feel they are poking fun at the whole thing.
“the universe of time and space” is adrift in something much more unpleasant and unpredictable.
Strange Things circle and grunt outside the flimsy stockades of normality; there are weird hootings and howlings in the deep crevices at the edge of Time. There are things so horrible that even the dark is afraid of them.
gods were always demanding that their followers acted other than according to their true natures, and the human fallout this caused made plenty of work for witches.
he gave her back all her money plus quite a lot of money belonging to other people, and before she let him go had promised to have a shave, stand up straight, and be a better person for the rest of his life.
