The strongest trees on the mountain are the short, gnarled jacks. They let themselves bow and twist, and they live. They survive snowstorms and avalanches and wind. Those.

Flying on the backs of a flock of paper birds is less comfortable than you might imagine.

The more he learned, the more he knew what more there was to learn. There were deep pools of knowledge in dusty volumes quietly shelved in libraries, and Antain thirsted for all of them.

She was eleven, after all. She was both even and odd. She was ready to be many things at once – child, grown-up, poet, engineer, botanist, dragon. The list went on.

Excuse me,” Fyrian said. And he heaved himself over to a low shrub and vomited profusely. “Oh dear. I seem to have lit some things on fire.

Starlight, as every witch knows, is a marvelous food for a growing infant.

Intelligence does not mean infallibility, nor does it mean immobility. Intelligence means the ability to learn.

But then you were enmagicked. I didn’t mean to, darling; it was an accident, but it couldn’t be undone. And I loved you. I loved you so much. And that couldn’t be undone either.

Sometimes it felt to him that the world was heavy, that the air, thick with sorrow, draped over his mind and body and vision, like a fog.

A word, after all, is a kind of magic. It locks the substance of a thing in sound or symbol, and affixes it to the ear, or paper, or stone. Words call the world into being. That’s power indeed.