Juliet Marillier

“You are a devious woman, Blackthorn,' she said. 'I prefer the term strategic thinker.”

“Trust is a thing you know without words.”

“You know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bold; that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life.”

“I wonder how it takes you, that moment when everything turns to shadows. - Somerled.”

“There is no truth on this island of yours. Rather, there are as many truths as there are stars in the sky; and every one of them different.”

“My world was changing, and I was not ready for it.”

“His touch was like a bard's on his instrument, and it awakened a deep and mysterious music in my body.”

“Now he understood what it was to be a man: that it was to be weak as well as strong, to be foolish sometimes and wise sometimes, to know love as well as to kill. And he had learned that there were other paths for him, other gods who called in the deep places of the earth, in the lap of wavelets on the shore, in the breath of the wind. He had learned that there were other kinds of courage. He knew, with deep certainty, that the islands held a new path for him. He need only move forward and find it.”

“His touch warmed my whole body. I was longing to throw my arms around him and hold him close, but the magic of this moment was like a single, lovely strand of cobweb, fragile and delicate. One wrong move and it would snap beyond mending.”

“For the others, it was still just a tale, like all the tales we told, night by night, tales comical and strange, tales heroic and awe-inspiring, the tales that formed the fabric of our spirits.”