The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood Quotes

“It will end one day, of course. Everything does. Until then, we have the ground we hold against the dark, and the stories we fill it with.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“Mother, I said, and her lips curved in the smile, young and playful and clever, that I had made Viviane’s.
Then her head fell back, and the magic she was holding flooded from her hand.
My heart opened, and Lake water rushed in.
I had always known that my mother was the Lady of the Lake. I had seen the way the waters responded to her, the way she drew power from its depths, the way its light and shade flickered in her eyes when she cast spells. I had never fully realized what that meant. I felt its magic now, flooding every vein and capillary, seething luminous and cool under my skin. My lungs were filled with water, and yet I had no need to breathe. My hair ruffled with the wind off the waves.
This was my magic, in a way that none had ever been before. I wasn’t borrowing it, or bending it to my will. It was my legacy, part of my blood. I had never felt like my mother’s daughter— I had been a tool to her, conceived and fashioned for a single purpose, aching to be more. Here, at the end of her life, I was. It all took only a moment— the space of a sigh— and yet in that moment everything shifted.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“Merlin and Nimue sprang to meet him. In one swift movement, so fast that she missed the moment of transformation, two great scaled beasts took flight.
One was red, the dark glowing red of burning embers. One was the grey-white of fresh snow. Long elegant necks, sinuous bodies, forked tails, and sharp teeth bared in snarls. Dragons.
Merlin had met them when he was seven years old. They were the very last dragons in England, gone before Nimue’s time. But there were dragons aplenty in Avalon, and she’d had well over a thousand years to find them.
Nimue and Merlin collided with the great bird in midair, scales flashing, leathery wings beating, corkscrewing and spiraling with the aerobatic elegance of a Spitfire. The three of them twisted through the sky like eels through water, all fire and fury and blood. Ellie stared in wonder. For the space of a heartbeat, grief and fear and pain and the terrible battleground melted away, and she knew she was seeing the most beautiful sight she would ever see in her life.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“And the times we had, the snatched days and months and years across the centuries, they were glorious. We explored the forests of England as wolves and the skies as hawks. We lived with the Picts for a freezing northern winter, learning to work silver and stone; we traded with Vikings, once even going back with them to dine in the halls of the Volsungs. We camped a full year off the coast of Ireland, windswept and battered, never once seeing another human soul. We spent a summer with Robin of Locksley and Marian Fitzwalter and their band of outlaws in the Greenwood, helping them rob from the rich and give to the poor. I have a suspicion they crossed into Avalon themselves in the end. Marian was a far better witch than the stories ever gave her credit for. We saved each other’s lives, we drove each other mad, and every day we learned each other’s bodies and minds and stories anew.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“I kissed him.
It was nothing like the kiss Lancelot had given me— decorous, compassionate, well-meaning and well-meant. Nor was it the kiss we would have had at midsummer, when the stars glittered above us and Camelot lay safe before us and we could do anything, always. It was a beginning and an ending at once, the first time I would kiss him and the last time he would kiss me. It was wild and tender and breathless, the rush of the wind and the crash of the sea and the burning of the stars. It was Merlin and Nimue, with all the weight of story that would blaze for hundreds of years.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“But I had been trained by Morgan le Fay and by Merlin Emrys. I was the daughter of the most powerful witch in the world, advisor to the greatest of all kings. I was Nimue and Viviane. I was the Lady of the Lake.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“My heart opened, and Lake water rushed in.
I had always known that my mother was the Lady of the Lake. I had seen the way the waters responded to her, the way she drew power from its depths, the its light and shade flickered in her eyes when she cast spells. I had never fully realized what that meant. I felt its magic now, flooding every vein and capillary, seething luminous and cool under my skin. My lungs were filled with water, and yet I had no need to breathe. My hair ruffled with the wind off the waves.
This was my magic, in a way that none had ever been before. I wasn’t borrowing it, or bending it to my will. It was my legacy, part of my blood. I had never felt like my mother’s daughter— I had been a tool to her, conceived and fashioned for a single purpose, aching to be more. Here, at the end of her life, I was. It all took only a moment— the space of a sigh— and yet in that moment everything shifted.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“That’s the trouble with destiny, and with despair, Mother had said, the night Mordred had come to Camelot. Both make it too easy to tell yourself you had no choice.
And yet I did have a choice. Perhaps I could go nowhere else in the end, but I could refuse to walk that path willingly. I could fight, every step of the way, to turn aside. It might make no difference in the end. But this was not yet the end.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“Elaine was the name of my mother’s eldest sister, as well as the woman who had fallen in love with Lancelot and given him Galahad, and probably hundreds of other women in the world I didn’t know.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“I think being brave is something you do, not something you are. It’s a decision you have to make, every time.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“It's the story of the last resistance, perfect because without hope.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The veil thins for all sorts of reasons. It isn’t unusual for dreams to pass between the Otherworld and your world when times are dark. People reach out in their sleep for something to believe in, and brush against a legend or a story on the other side. And Arthur has very strong ties to his old kingdom. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if his people are reaching for him when they find themselves under threat.”
She was struggling to put the matter-of-fact words together. “Are you saying that Arthur is in Avalon? The real Arthur?”
“Of course he is. He was brought there after the Battle of Camlann— don’t you know the myth?”
“We knew it in our day,” Marian put in. “Back in Sherwood Forest. The minstrels told tales of Arthur all the time.”
She did know the myth, of course. After his final battle with Mordred, Arthur was taken to the edge of a lake, barely alive. In Malory, he commanded Sir Bedivere to throw Excalibur into the waters, and come back and tell him what he saw. A barge arrived across the lake, helmed by a queen and many fair ladies, and bore Arthur away to Avalon. In some versions, the queen in the barge was Morgan le Fay, the Lady of the Lake. If that was the case, then something in her dreams was going to change, and soon. The Morgan le Fay she knew had no desire to see Arthur saved.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“I dreamed of the sword in the stone. It was raining, and Arthur was alone in a churchyard. He was so young. I felt the pommel of the sword in his hand. For just a moment, it was the heaviest thing on earth, then it slid from the slab of rock like a knife from cake.
I dreamed of a lake. Arthur stood with Merlin beside him. It was drizzling, and there was a fine mist on the surface of the water. A hand broke through, holding a sword.
The Green Knight came to Camelot. It was dark and cold outside, and the court was ringing with Christmas festivities. He walked towards Arthur, at least eight feet tall, holding a giant axe.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The two worlds formed before my eyes in gold dust: Camelot, towering above the cliffs with its marketplaces and forts and tiny knights jousting in the fields; Avalon, a riot of trees and waves through which beings flitted too fast to be seen. As I watched, they merged together, each going about their own business, oblivious to each other's affairs.
"They overlay each other," Merlin said, "separated by what we can call a veil. See?" I could see: a thin layer of light shimmering between the two worlds, like the sheen of a bubble or the gauze of a cobweb. "Usually that veil is impermeable. At different times and in different places, it thins. Midsummer's Eve is the thinnest it stretches, which is why we do rites on that night. But it can be glimpsed at other times. Dreams pass through it often. People with fae blood, like you, can usually see it better than most, and that ability can be taught and refined. Animals see it best of all.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The dreams she’d had couldn’t be true history. Even without the magic, the time period was too vague— a myth’s idea of medieval, seventh century mingled with fifteenth mingled with who knew what else. The language was too modern. It was the way writers like Malory and Tennyson and Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote. Arthurian myth: a hodgepodge of history and fact, looked at through the eyes of their own present day.
And yet they rang with truth. There was no other way to put it— a steel ring, like the reverberation of a sword striking armor. She could feel in her bones that even if the events she was witnessing never happened, they were real. She understood now why those who dreamed of Arthur all looked as though the world in front of them no longer made sense.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“His face was aglow with wonder and disbelief. “Bloody hell.”
The questing beast floundered in the shallow rock pool, bewildered and panicked, ridiculous and beautiful. Its lithe, spotted body was soaked through; it scrabbled at the rim with cloven-hoofed feet. Its head— scaled, delicate, with enormous dark eyes— thrashed at the end of a long neck. Now that she was looking at it again, there was no doubt what it was. It didn’t matter what made sense, what was possible, what she believed the world to be. It couldn’t be anything else.
“Excuse my language,” Tom added, as an afterthought.
“No, no,” Ellie assured him. “I thought it was quite right.”
The head of a snake, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion and the feet of a deer. Her lecturer at university had said it was probably a medieval description of a giraffe. She had been wrong.
The howling noise rattled through the air— a quiet muttering this time, building to a mournful whine.
“That’s what we heard last night,” Ellie whispered. “When it isn’t drinking, its belly makes a noise ‘like unto the questing of thirty couple hounds.’”
“Where’s that from?”
“Malory. Le Morte d’Arthur.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“But there was nothing lonely or strange about a roomful of books. They called to her, as if they could barely stand to stay on the shelves.
They were extraordinary. In the first hour, she discovered a fifteenth-century incunable, its leather cover cracked but the block-printed pages within startlingly well-preserved, and a medieval codex, perhaps tenth century, lavishly decorated with a great dragon covering the first page. These were stacked haphazardly alongside a great many beautiful but unexceptional Victorian tomes. It took her longer than it should to realize that the books were all Welsh folklore, and these beautiful pieces of history had been grouped by subject, as though they were no more or less than reference books.
The grouping continued throughout the shelves. History, mythology, botany, astronomy; collections of riddles from the Middle Ages and scientific papers on moths from last century.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The rest of the knights passed in a confusing blur. A few I had heard of— Sir Kay, Arthur's foster brother; Sir Palomides, the Saracen who hunted the questing beast; Sir Bedivere, who in his youth killed a giant with a magic spear— but many of those around the table now were young men, with no deeds or reputation behind them. A great number of Arthur's most famous knights had never returned from the Grail quest the year before, and the court, my mother had told me with satisfaction, was a pale shadow of what it had once been. I took careful note of the four Orkney brothers, Morgause's sons and Mordred's half-brothers. Sir Gawain, broad-shouldered and smiling— it had been he who had called out to Merlin across the table. Sir Agravaine, frowning and intense. Sir Gareth, pale and handsome. Sir Gaheris, like Gawain in appearance but quieter, less given to shouts of laughter and temper. They looked a little like Arthur too, but their dark hair and pale skin reminded me more strongly of my mother.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“That’s the trouble with destiny, and with despair. Both make it too easy to tell yourself you had no choice.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“I was no stranger to grandeur. I had watched my mother curve the water and shape the wind with spell craft. I had grown up in a vast underwater city at least as large as this one. But my mother’s magic felt natural, or at least supernatural”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The hawthorn tree was right where Mother said it would be: in a clearing just off the road to Camelot, its long limbs reaching for the light, white blossoms falling gently to the forest floor. It looked quiet, innocuous, sleepy in the spring afternoon. But my blood stirred at the sight of it. There’s a trick to seeing through spells, a way of looking and not looking at the same time. I let my gaze unfocus, my vision blur, until I saw it. A glowing rune carved into the trunk. When I took a step closer, the leaves above quivered with a rustle like a human sigh.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The blood of the Old Ones was unpredictable, Mother had told me once, but it tended to run stronger through the female line. I knew that my skin was pale, like my mother’s, but my hair was the warm brown of the earth above the Lake. And I knew that one day I would be sent to the surface of the Lake, to Camelot, to find Merlin and become his apprentice. I would gain his trust, and I would betray him. My name was Nimue, but Merlin knew the stories as well as my mother, and so he could never know me by that name. To him, I would be Viviane.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“Now that I know how many people there are in the world, I can see how it might have been lonely growing up under the Lake. We lived in the ruins of what must have been a vast civilization, long since sunk beneath the waves. We went to the surface rarely, and always under my mother’s guidance; even then, the nearest villages were many miles away, and in my entire childhood I saw them only a handful of times. But back then, I never thought of it. My whole world was the drowned city, with its crumbling chambers and flooded corridors”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The Lake made a rippling ceiling over our heads, and I would lie dreamily watching the fractured moonlight through the water and the small fish that darted back and forth like the glint of a needle.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood