Quotes from Sarah Micklem

I knew by the signs it would be a hard winter. The hollies bore a heavy crop of berries and birds stripped them bare. Crows quarreled in reaped fields and owls cried in the mountains, mournful as widows. Fur and moss grew thicker than usual. Cold rains came, driven sideways through the trees by north winds, and snows followed.

The world the gods made is too big for us, so we make ourselves a smaller one.

But that was all bravado. Already - how had it come about so quickly - desire had begotten need. A few whispered words (perhaps he didn't mean them) and I was ready to follow. It was worse to think of staying behind, to grind one day upon another. Nothing to hold me here. None to regret my leaving, save Az.

He pushed up his visor and came over to me. He put his shield arm around me and pulled me close. This new skin of his was cold and hard, and I was glad of it. But I wished I could take him by the hair and dip him in metal, so that he was covered all over, for I didn't like the chinks, the way a dagger could find the back of his knee and hamstring him, or a sword find its way through the mail under his arm. We are imperfect vessels. We leak so easily.

I leaned toward him and whispered, "I'm drowning. Save me." But when I tried to grasp his shoulder my hand passed through him. "I'm over here," he said. I said, "No wonder I can't touch you. You're dead too." Or perhaps I didn't say it.

You still haven't said where you come from. Where is your home?" I said, "I am a sheath, so home is wherenever my shade, my blade is.

These Fatalists preach that Chance and Peril are merely masks for Fate's workings, nothing in themselves, and moreover that all the gods move at Fate's bidding. Their followers take comfort in thinking that their every deed is meant to be; it excuses all manner of meanness.

I awoke in the deepest night to find I had been divided from myself. There lay my body sleeping and dreaming, and I was outside it; awakening. When we dream we may take shapes other than our own; a man may be his brother, a woman a king, and never question it. So, with the certainty born of a dream, I knew I'd become my own shadow.

If he was wood, he was a flail, and I was grain on the threshing floor. I was a thousand grains, my thoughts blown like chaff. All that was left was the taste of salt.

An edge of a sword is made as much from the steel taken away as the steel that is left

The master and mistress of the house and the rest of the Blood -even the Crux himself- brought our food, poured the wine, did our bidding. The centerpiece was a roasted stag. crowned with gilded antlers and stuffed with songbirds; they had hunted well. We were forbidden to kill the deer that fattened on our coleworts and stole our grain, and the venison tasted all the better for the salt of revenge.