Quotes from Elizabeth Bear

The Light had failed and with it its children, but these other children-the mortal children, candle-flickers-continud endlessly fighting and dying and returning their blood to the wash of the sorrowful sea. The mortals had a saying, that blood was thicker than water. But to Muire blood was water: the water of the ocean, and the force of the Light upon it.

I felt even more hollow than I had.

Morgan met Kit's gaze calmly, her eyes dark and mysterious as emeralds in the weird, cold light.

I hope you'll forgive me for ruining the symmetry of your genocide. I was invested in being discreet.

He blinked, voice grinding if the words were buried somewhere very deep and he had to go after them.

Dripping water freckled his shoulders and tapped against his hair.

You manage to disentangle yourself, but then you're out in the hard, cold universe, and suddenly everybody is disagreeing with you-and you have no idea how to manage disagreement and how awful it makes you feel, having never experienced it at all.

If she could externalize, make the emotion other, she would not believe it.

He's a Faerie. Do you expect him to play straightforward?" Murchaud looked up. "Where are you going now?" Will smiled. "To strike a bargain with a snake.

She had anticipated that the cultural disconnect would be vast, and she was only just coming to understand how vast it might be.

There were times to rise to the bait, and times not to.

Night was all around her, but a denser patch flowed forward, stepping over the dying boy to pause beyond the reach of her blade.

A whirl of color, patches like autumn leaves tossed in a wind, and when Will squinted right, knowing what he was looking for, he could make out a slender man huddled under a black velvet hood, his shoulders aswirl with a cloak that caught the light through the leaded windows in all colors and none. When Will looked at him directly, he seemed to fade into transparency and shadows.

Cricket-Fisher-was starting to prefer her new name. Especially the way Nouel said it, with a little twinkle, as if it were a joke shared.

Wrath held him silent long enough for the corner of Morgan's mouth to twitch with discomfort.

The crown of shadows that capped his golden hair seemed to draw a rich dark tint from the crimson velvet of his breeches, and his eyes caught more light than the sunset sky had to offer.

I wait at the airlock, Gabe on my left side, Patty on my right. Captain Wainwright is three steps in front of us, Richard hovering like an anxious blind date in my head.

They had not been lied to. The men were gentle; when one leaned, moved, spoke, the other mirrored. She sensed it in the energy between them, their calm failure to react on any visceral level to her smile, the swell of her breasts, the curve of her lips-or to the more youthful charms of her security detail. She knew it as surely as she would have known fear or hunger. Not only were they gentle, they were together.

It was a delicious rumor. Will resolved to spread it at every opportunity.

Her dad raised his eyes from the newsfeed and offered her a level, considering look that told her he'd caught the impending request in her voice.

His name flew from her lips as if on the wings of a swan.

She dug her toes into the cool carpet place with a sigh of relief and hung up her hat, grateful to House for taking the edge of the sun.

Murchaud's silver rapier gleamed when the torchlight touched it, made itself a brand of darkness in between.

The worst of it was, he had come to like the Jacobeans, in all their sophipathic insanity. They might be grotesaries, caricatures, larger than life and full of violence-but they were also shockingly generous and, sometimes, shockingly funny.