The swordmaiden wears her loyalty like a necklace of dead stars. Their worth is eternal, although they no longer shine.
Maris was a renegade general, Galaron a rebel, the False Countess a bandit. Which of these now reclines on a couch of light?- p. 27, The History of the Sword, Chapter 2: Loyalty Like a Necklace of Dead Stars
"What am I seeing?" I asked her, smiling. An old game. Her voice came out clearly and with a fierce undertone: "It's our rowboat on the Oun."
"We couldn't row on the Oun right now," I said. "It'll be dry."
"You're not playing right. You're supposed to see it."
"All right," I said. "I see it."
And I did. Sun on the chipped white paint, sunlight on the water under leaves.
- p. 33, The History of the Sword, Chapter 2: Loyalty Like a Necklace of Dead Stars
Did she recognize something in my murderous look? Did she, too, dream of murder every day? Did Siski? Do they still? Is that how they survive, these bright society women--by chewing on visions of violence as if on milim leaves?
- p. 46, The History of the Sword, Chapter 2: Loyalty Like a Necklace of Dead Stars
The prince was silent for a moment. Then he said: "Look at me."
The priest's daughter looked. In the green radiance of the lamp his face had a mineral sheen. A face like a desert. A smile like a broken mirror. "Do you think," he said stiffly, "that any amount of writing will do me good?"
"I don't know," she heard herself saying. But it was a lie.
Her father's voice reached them from the hall, harsh, disapproving--he must be speaking to the Telkan. Their fathers were coming: one soft as jelly, the other a hard knife. The prince held her eyes, and she wanted to tell him: No. No. She wanted to say: No, this work won't do you any good because
in the end you will be claimed by whoever is stronger. My father, your mother, your aunt. The one who wins. And that person will wield you like a scepter to rule the empire. You will appear on feast days, she wanted to tell him, in gold brocade or a black wool robe, but you will appear as a sign of power.
There was no time to say all of this, so she bent down and whispered a single word, the one she did not have the courage to say to herself: "
Run."
- p. 157, The History of the Stone, Chapter 4: A curse on these orphans darkening my path!
We thought the message of the Stone, arriving in such a spectacular form, would unite us. But perhaps its true message was one of disintegration... Or perhaps it spoke a message of unity we could not understand, one that did not unfold in language as my father thought, but rather in the way the lines crossed over one another, cutting across one another, one word into the next. If the message is not in the words but in the cutting. How flint etches stone, how diamond enters. How flesh intersects with flesh. Newer languages digging themselves into old ones, accounts of vampires into the meditations of some nameless saint.
How we are written into one another. How this is history. Then the meaning of a line like "
Sever all ties" is not in the words themselves, but in their entanglement with the words written underneath them: "
For in a field you have found a hidden treasure."
- p. 169, The History of the Stone, Chapter 5: For in a field you have found a hidden treasure.
I have had to imagine everything of importance: the coal cellar and the stolen nuts, the horns of the Telkan's riding party, and yes, even the iconic, the inimitable pink peppercorn tree. I have breathed on shadows, as one breathes into a soap bubble, to give it breadth and life.
I did it because I had to, because human beings cannot live without history, and I have no history or tradition that is not located in a pale, aggressive body lying in the dirt, or hanging from a tree. How cruel it is to live in a community of two.
- p. 174, The History of the Stone, Chapter 5: For in a field you have found a hidden treasure.
If Ura, the Bloody Imp, was right, and suffering causes lumps to form in the heart, then
surely suffering is the geography of the body. I have tried to reconstruct the inner geography of a visionary by imagining how those lumps, those hills, were raised. Dear gods, the powers of children are terrible! A child can conjure a universe from the feel of a worn glove. A child like the one I was, given only a hand-mirror and a cold figure in a black robe, will make a family saga: Ivrom and Tenais.
Such delicate history. Blow on it and it flies away like soot
- p. 175, The History of the Stone, Chapter 5: For in a field you have found a hidden treasure.
The men are going to war and the women are spinning. The women are spinning and the men are going to war. The men are going to war for the women. The women are singing the men to war. The men's hearts grow hot and sharp as blades from the singing of the women. The women are memory. They are the memory of men, of those who have died. The men sing of the fallen and the women keep their songs and memories alive. The women spin threads that never break. The women are spinning shrouds. All the men and women are singing themselves to death.
- p. 193, The History of Music
You are afraid of the dead in the Valley. The ones who died in the war, your war, the fire that freed Kestenya from the empire. When you entered that war, you believed it would be clean. one swift stroke, a final blow for honor, a farewell to the sword. But the dead in the Valley cling to you, breathing smoke.
What you are learning now is not clean war. It is the absence of war.What you are trying to learn. "No more," you say. And the dead cling.
And your hand remembers the sword, its friend. So true. So sweet.
We need new songs, I think.
- p. 194, The History of Music
To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There's no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this.
/
I think when we love we look for someone against whom to say: But I am like this.Say something. Speak against me.
- pp. 198-9, The History of Music.
All of us, singing ourselves to death.
Sometimes, yes, sometimes an aching sadness comes to me across the plain. I think of the girls in stories who are set impossible tasks: count every grain in the field, weave a net out of water. Always a girl. She's bent over, counting grain. She doesn't know why. It is her fate. She is the victim of a closed and shining logic. Why does she never stand up? She says: "I have to save the world." Tav, let's never go back. Let's not even remember.
- p. 216, The History of Music
You hope he is free, but he might be dead. In your war. So he clings. And when you're riding, if a stone falls, you whirl, ready for violence.
Your body remembers war. This body I love. War has shaped the beloved body.- p. 217, The History of Music
You have to forget, but at the same time you remember. This is how it makes a circle.
/
This is our story. The beginning. The part we remember over and over. We can't forget it, and maybe we shouldn't forget. We shouldn't forget that you forgot me. I reminded you later and now we can't forget.
I dream of a way of remembering that would not leave a scar. I dream of a way of forgetting that would not mean destruction, burial, loss. A spinning that makes something, that makes a thread, a thread to sew feathers to a shawl, a shawl unfurling in the air.
- p. 219, The History of Music
If music is everything, then music is even my grandmother's taunting. That ragged note. Then music is even the thunder of my brother's horse. My brother's horse when he rode away. My heart was tied to the back of his horse, beaten on all the rocks, smeared by all the dust.
Learn to keep the music in your voice. By the time I met you my heart was bruised and swollen and still I thought my perfect my exact. When I saw you. Your cold look. Then music is not only in the voice, then music is under everything like bone.
- p. 223, The History of Music
For I am unhappy without you, lakes are dimmed by the absence of your eyes. An old poem, clumsy in rhythm, harsh with longing. She sees the stern poet sitting beside the lake in which a stone, when he throws it, sinks like a man whose beloved has gone away. That's the way I'll feel, she thinks. She says: "That's the way I'll feel when we leave." She turns on her side to look at him, and his eye, unexpectedly close to hers, meets her with its darkness in which her face is reflected as in an obsidian mirror.
- p. 257, The History of Flight, Chapter 2: And All the Windows Fade
How beautiful everything is! It will gleam in her memory afterward, this night, like a pendant flashing at the end of a long chain, after a subtle poison has seeped into everything, a creeping weakness and fog she will recognize, many years later, as shame.
- p. 261, The History of Flight, Chapter 2: And All the Windows Fade
Siski forces her hands to relax, to release the plush of her chair. A tiny movement. She doesn't want her aunt to notice. She understands now that
her body speaks a language of which she is unaware and the thought makes her feel exposed, stripped down to nothing.
- p. 265, The History of Flight, Chapter 2: And All the Windows Fade
"Tuik is dead," she chokes. "I killed him. And you're not happy here anymore."
He crouches beside her, jacketless in the cold. "I am happy."
She shakes her head. "You're not."
/
"Siski," he says. "Look, stand up. You can't stay there."
He pulls her up. Suddenly she feels quiet, remote. As if all the world has fallen away from them. He holds her hand as they walk to the end of the garden and stand looking out at the snow-dark night. Two figures in a shapeless landscape.
- pp. 280-1, The History of Flight, Chapter 3: Beloved the Color of Almonds
And Siski wanders among the morning-glory vines embalmed in frost. Why is it impossible to see beyond this whiteness, into life? Into the dawn of another life. She walks in the gardens, muffled in furs. Her lashes emerge from the softness, starred with cold or tears. Her footprints follow her everywhere she goes. Down the path between the lilac bushes, past the decimated tulip garden. To the high wall. To the wall. She cannot even reach it because of the snowdrifts, could never climb it. Perhaps, on the other side, life begins. A life that would allow her to abandon the past, as her sister has abandoned hers, running away to the north. Tav with her toy arrows. And Dasya with his. Dasya with. Her mind stops at him, like the heart of that dead robin in the snow.
- p. 299, The History of Flight, Chapter 5: Seven Years in the West
She reads the page, then reads it again more closely, determined to suffer and not to yield. His name has a power that never weakness. Every time she reads it the same jolt of anguish shocks her heart, undiminished by repetition.
When she looks up, the maid has gone. Only Aunt Mardith's calm dark eyes. She knew, of course. Siski hears the click of that ivory heart.
- p. 300, The History of Flight, Chapter 5: Seven Years in the West
There was a self-destructive quality to the game, a desire to tear down everything. This is what she has always told herself. Or--as she has sometimes thought--
there was simply a desire for bruises, for the uncomplicated sensation of physical pain, for a pain that could be solved, unlike the suffering in the house, the servants whispering, her father sitting with his face in his hands. And so they ran to the edge of the hill and crashed over, fierce and reckless. But now she wonders if, in fact, they believed that they could fly. They held hands, screaming, until they hit the slope and were jolted apart. The sky seemed to burst above her like a crystal lamp.
- p. 315, The History of Flight, Chapter 6: The Prince of Snows
When Dai Fanlei can see again, she finds herself encircled. Dai Norla is weeping. Beautiful sympathy of the body.
They murmur. They stroke her hands. They say: "I know."
She wants to say no. She wants to say, you don't know, you don't know us. She wants to say: my sister and cousin made this war. You don't know how we have harnessed you and murdered you and made you refugees. She thinks:
For this the gods cursed you with monsters.
These women should strip her and take her apart like an old piece of furniture. Throw her down, slice her open with Dai Kouranu's curved knife. Tear out everything inside. She begs them in her mind:
Make me new. But they are not her servants.
So she succumbs. She allows herself to be led. In the kitchen, they make her tea.
Afterward she walks up the dark hill alone. Dragging herself through the mud toward the temple where the great white shadow sleeps. She sings through numb lips:
My heart is white with love.- p. 318, The History of Flight, Chapter 6: The Prince of Snows
I hope I have made you weep. I hope I have made you think of me for one moment. Just one moment. I dream sometimes of your wrist. Your shoe.
"Like blue leaves of a murderous autumn," Hailoth says.
Siski I am so afraid.
/
So little time, and in the short time we had we lost everything. You took it from us. Your cloak disappearing between the trees.
/
We are such frail creatures, we--I still can't write the word. How did we conquer anyone? How did we terrorize the world? We, with our burdens. Our pain. Our fear. Our woe. Our wings.- p. 321, The History of Flight, Chapter 6: The Prince of Snows
That you were cursed, and that I was cursed through my love for you. I believed it for a long time, and I lived as if I were dead.
/
When I went back to Ashenlo last year, I walked to the clearing and I prayed. You know I have never been particularly devout. I couldn't even remember any prayers. I was saying your name, again and again, and then I realized I was praying. I called upon Avalei because my life was a plain of stones and I could not see any way out of what was coming: a marriage to some nobleman, a house, children, feast days, jewelry, gowns, and you lost, and Tav lost, and our autumns lost. Those autumns at Sarenha Haladli, the only times in my life I have been alive. I prayed to Avalei to save me, to set me free. I prayed for a door, and I saw that the door was open. It had been open all along. I only needed to step through.
/
We are told that the Drevedi are portents. Bream goes so far as to call them "absolute language." But to themselves, surely, they are something other than words.
Where are the Dreved books, and what is written in them? Dasya, I want to read the true Dreved Histories.
And then I think that the Drevedi have no history, because they belong to the Time before Time. Perhaps, in some terrifying, mysterious way, our most fearsome dreams belong to paradise.
For me, paradise was reading with you at Faluidhen. The words between us. Even the shadows were luminous. Do you remember? The way those words, those signs, seemed to burn through everything, the leaves, the lace at your collar, the light, the book itself.
/
Everything transmuted into fire. History is useless to me, Dasya. I'm living on memory instead.
/
When you were at war in the Lelevai, I almost asked my sister to steal your shirt. I would have done it, only I couldn't think of a way that would not sound strange. "One of his shirts, recently worn, not washed." The stupidity of longing. And what would your shirt have done for me? I see myself wrapped in it, biting it, suffocating, undone.
Do you remember what Oulef wrote? That the Drevedi exist in the same relation to human beings as the future.
I am ready for the future. I am saying yes. Dasya, let's go through the door. Let's go together.
/
I thought we'd die, we'd fall, and I did not care, or rather I felt happy at the thought: to die with you and Tav. To die in flight, with you and my sister, the hero--it seemed marvelous. But of course Tav would never let us fall.- pp. 321-4, The History of Flight, Chapter 6: The Prince of Snows
Too late. She thanks Avalei for this lateness, this absolute lack of choice. Thank you, bless you, Ripener of the Grain! She could weep for this blessing, this gift. She does not trust her body not to run.
- p. 325, The History of Flight, Chapter 7: Dark Butterfly
Somewhere, perhaps, his memory is alive. This is her hope: that he will understand the language of gesture, this word pulled out of memory, this sign.
In the desert there are empty places. Places of utter stillness, utter silence. The sky meets the rim of the world with no window, no escape. There is only sunlight, desolation, wind. The heart grows brittle. These are the regions known as
the fires, or
the seas of glass.
- p. 326, The History of Flight, Chapter 7: Dark Butterfly
She puts her hand to his cheek. He is warm, familiar, his hair smelling of the mountains. He closes his burning, alien eyes, and now he is almost Dasya, his smooth cheek a perfect fragment of the past.
She sees him in his desert, his excruciating solitude. The burden of his sorrow and of his wings. His secret, all along, all through the war he planned with Tav, the private knowledge that he had so little time. She seems to see him in gardens, dim rooms, forests, always alone.
But we were never alone, when we were together then. Never, not even when reading or playing music, or asleep. By the dead fountain we stood whispering hand in hand. The fountain was white, like a swan. He opens his eyes. She is shocked again by their smooth darkness, darkness all the way to the skin. She trembles. He has not touched her yet and everything is lost, the world is made of fire, the seas are molten glass.
/
She strokes his cheek. Reckless now, she moves closer to the heat of his body. He closes his eyes again. He's trapped there, pinned, as if afraid to move, to lose one instant of her dazzling caress.
The fires. The seas of glass.
But there were lamps hung on the houses, shadows of trees. There was a library. There was snow.
/
In the desert there are empty places, but once we were not afraid. We rode through noon. You sang, my heart is white with love. - p. 329 , The History of Flight, Chapter 7: Dark Butterfly
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