At the Feet of the Sun Quotes

“Fitzroy made me an island this morning. I cannot think about philosophy right now. I have only poetry in my heart.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“Fitzroy smiled slowly, like the sunrise. “Let us walk in legends, Kip Mdang.”

Cliopher’s heart was hammering. “Yes,” he breathed. “Yes. What—What is your island, Fitzroy Angursell?”

“This one.”

Fitzroy dropped his hands.

The fire at the heart of the world rose up.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“Ghilly returned with a tiarë flower tucked behind her ear and another for each of them. “There’s a thicket of them over there,” she said, handing the flowers out. “There, Fitzroy, that’s a proper Islander look.”

“Proper for Tisiamo,” Toucan murmured, but he was smiling. “No, Fitzroy, you put it behind your left ear if you’re single—your right if you’re taken.”

Fitzroy gave Cliopher a very brilliant look and carefully moved the flower to his right ear.

Cliopher felt a wash of some nameless emotion—some indescribable wonder, some intense humility, some astonishing gratitude, some sort of awe. He blinked hard, unable to prevent the smile, the dawning joy, from showing on his face.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Toucan whispered. “He’ll still be there tomorrow.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“Fitzroy gave him a burning, gloriously amused look, the sort that had made everyone fall in love with him. But Cliopher was the one he had chosen back.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“But first: Kip Mdang, I would like you to have this, as a token of my esteem, a promise of my affection, an affirmation of my readiness to follow your star wherever you wander with it, an acknowledgement of my willingness to raise an island for you whenever you need one, and…” Fitzroy took a deep breath. “And a statement of something I have never quite dared say in its full simplicity before, which is that I love you.”

Before Cliopher could say anything—before Cliopher could do anything—Fitzroy tugged off his signet ring and placed it on the palm of Cliopher’s hand.

Cliopher looked at his fanoa. “That’s the Imperial Seal,” he said, but even without looking down he had closed his hand around the ring. It was warm in his hand from Fitzroy’s body-heat, his inner fire.

“It is,” said Fitzroy. “And you know very well that there is not another person in all the Nine Worlds and the lands beyond whom I would trust with it.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Cliopher said, knowing his face and his heart were both open as the proverbial shell on the beach.

Now Fitzroy smiled, a curving, splendid smile, a Fitzroy Angursell smile. “‘Thank you’ will be quite sufficient, my dear Kip. Seeing as you’ve already done all the hard work of taking down the empire and creating a home for me.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“The book of censored poetry was the only thing he'd ever stolen from the Palace.
Well. Except for the government, of course.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“They should send grown men on quests more often,” the sea-witch said, giving him a deeply unsettling smile.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“Did you want to be buried there?”

Fitzroy shook his head convulsively. “No. I want to be cremated and my ashes scattered. You’ll see that done, if I die before you?”

“Of course,” Cliopher said, forbearing any protests or the grief that rose up in his throat at the mere thought. “Of course.”

“Of course,” Fitzroy repeated, not quite sarcastically, and stared, dry-eyed, at the bones of his distant relative. “I suppose you’d want to be taken to the Island of the Dead? Someone pointed it out—To lie with your ancestors? In the manner of your people?”

Cliopher was about to say of course, but there was a note in Fitzroy’s voice—

And he recalled the stories that the Sea-Witch sent her birds down to fetch the spirits of those lost at sea, to return them home.

The Sea-Witch had given him the garnet that still rattled in the efela the Grandmother (The Old Woman Who Lives in the Deeps, the in-gatherer of all life, in the end) had named Kiofa’a. Cliopher carried the mirimiri of Ani, to give to Vou’a to take to his fanoa. Vou’a was his great-uncle’s husband.

He would not be lost, though he did not follow the traditions of his people.

“If I die first,” he said, “cremate me and keep the ashes until—until—until they can be scattered with yours. So you can be free but you don’t have to be—alone—we can sail with the Ancestors together—”

Fitzroy said, “Kip.”

His voice was not the serene one, but fighting for equanimity.

“I will not be lost, and neither will you,” Cliopher replied fiercely. “The Sea-Witch likes me. The Old Woman Who Lives in the Deeps likes me. Your ancestors have not forgotten you.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“Before Cliopher could speak, Fitzroy suddenly leaned forward again, grabbed his hands in his, and drew Cliopher’s up to his heart. “Cliopher, Kip, you are my right hand, my outrigger, my mirror that shows me my better side. My people do not have a word for this, but yours do.”

Now he had too much air in his lungs to speak, as if all the winds of the whole sky were contained inside him. “Yes.”

“Ask me,” Fitzroy whispered. “Ask me so I can say yes.”

They held there, hands clasped, the air thundering around them, roaring like a bonfire.

Then Cliopher spoke, his quiet words falling clear as water drops. “You are my fanoa. My beloved. My own. Will you let me be yours?”

“Not let,” said Fitzroy. “You are. You are.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“Fitzroy laughed merrily. 'No one hear? When a god asks you a question, and your voice lifted up in an answer that cracked through the air like thunder? I have walked into stories before, Cliopher Mdang, and I know a legend when I see on spun around me. My dear Kip! No one in that marketplace could have missed that encounter.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“Cliopher had not been right, after all, about what fanoa meant.
Not right at all.
He felt sick with loss, as if his heart had been pierced and all his wistful dreams had gushed out of it, disappearing into the sand below their feet.
It did not matter, Cliopher told himself fiercely, that they were lovers as well as friends. They could still be the greatest of friends. They could still be fanoa, reaching across cultures and across oceans and even across the divide between the human worlds and Sky Ocean, the realms of the gods.
And yet-
People understood the idea that a lover might follow his beloved anywhere. It had always been a strange and difficult idea that one might love a friend that deeply.
That was how people always talked about romantic, sexual love. As if that sort of love was necessarily better, greater, more, than friendship. As if being the greatest of friends was a step down.
It had always been so important to Cliopher that Elonoa'a and Aurelius Magnus were celebrated for their great friendship, and that no one had ever hinted at that sort of romance. Even for the Islanders there were many stories of lovers loving that profoundly... and there was this one story of the greatest of friends, the human iteration of Ani and Vou'a's friendship.
Cliopher had never thought it was a step down.
He had wanted-”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“The thunderstorm-heaviness in the air intensified; above them there was a jangle as if the wind had blown through the glass floats in the solarium. The same gust whipped through the room, scattering the limericks and sending a spray of sparks up out of the brazier.
Very deliberately, Cliopher smiled.
Fitzroy uttered one of those words of magic, which made the air ring like the inside of a struck bell, and without moving a step he growled out a line of poetry.
'Hear, O ye children of the sun and of the wind, of the emperor Aurelius called Magnus and his fanoa from across the sea: sing with me of their deeds of magic and daring, their high-hearted courage, their love that crested the very sky, and weep, all you lovers of beauty, for what glory once was in the world.'
Oh, thought Cliopher, very clearly: There it is.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“I have been fortunate beyond the lot of many men that not only can I, do I, admire and respect my lord and my master, but that I could, that I do, also love him.
My lord, my ... Tor ... if you were my brother or my cousin I could not love you more.
When you are no longer sitting on the Lion Throne, I would like to know the man behind the Serenity. As a friend.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“My lord!"
"That's the iguana!”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun

“Voiceless, handless, lost; darkness before him, behind him, pressing close, and behind the faintly luminous edges of the cliffs of waters held back for them there were the great curling shapes of monsters. They slid down the air falling from the sky down the exposed slopes of the volcano, down and down into the roots of the sea. Thunder behind him, and a leading edge of a more urgent wind, as the walls of water crashed together in their wake.”
― Victoria Goddard, At the Feet of the Sun