24 Quotes by Hank Quense

In the years that followed, Tsula would find that she could not recall that walk to the edge or the thrust of her legs into the air. Her clearest memory more than twenty years later is of the long, breathless wait as she fell, seemingly forever, and the water swallowing her at last. When she burst from its surface, unhurt, her mind noisy and electric, she grabbed for Jamie and kissed him hard.

Kings and dukes tended to appoint wizards as their principal advisors, a practice that often proved catastrophically wrong.

Harlan chuckles to himself and shakes his head, as though enjoying a joke only he has heard. ‘Now I guess it’s only fair to warn you,’ he says. ‘This is not going to go the way you want it to.

He tips his cap forward over his face and inhales deeply of the moist air. It seems to Harlan that he can smell the whole of these mountains’ lives in that single breath. The gentle notes of wild herbs and grasses, of seedlings introducing themselves to the world. Also the thick and bittersweet must of leaf litter, felled trees, and decaying animals returning to the soil.

The mountains she’d viewed in childhood as nurturing have now taken on a menacing quality. Their stippled surfaces – the dark of trees rising from a background of white – give the impression of something more mythic than geological. Leviathans hibernating in the open, ready to stir at any moment and swallow her whole.

Over time, it became apparent that no matter who ruled the country of Gundarland, the Godmother ruled the city of Dun Hythe.