Quotes from Nicola Griffith

The childlike thing sitting on a cygnet-coloured gelding with a silvered saddle and wearing a brooch worth a son's ransom must be the princess neice with a reputation as a seer and sorceress.

She looked nothing like that young wife, and nothing like the men with hair on their faces. Her mother's hair, almost, but not her eyes.

To hear you talk is like hearing him talk when he first become king.

Hild stood on the headland in the light mist of dawn with her toes hanging over the edge of the grassy east cliff. The edge of all things. Between day and night, between sky and earth, sea and land. The land smelt of iron and salt.

Breguswith was everywhere, touching everything, assessing, organising, nudging, anticipating.

She was tired of striving, tired of the sideways look of those who did not trust her.

A man was lord of his own hall, king or no.

The scent of spring flowers, delicate as lace, there and gone again. Utterly unlike Atlanta.

She touched the pool and fell the echo of that faraway lake, the promise of all that was wide and bright and clear that she would one one day find.

Peretur wanted to reach out and touch her hand, but Nimuë looked brittle enough to fall apart. So she just waited.

The world felt rude and fragile and new as though she had lately risen from her sickbed.

Begu looked a bit like a goat: a long, thin face with teeth grown every which way and wide-spaced eyes. Her hair was brown-blond, like a goat's, and always coming undone. She had a fondness for farm animals, as Hild liked creatures of the wild.

Useful men stay alive.

Hild looked down at her reflection. A tall, obdurate woman gazed back. Blue-green veil band embroidered with gold-and-silver thread, sewn with lapis and agate and beryl. Agate swinging from each ear. Heavy yellow gold resting between her breasts. Dyed-blue girdle. A matching purse with ivory lid.

She would have to remember that those who weren't used to her, or who hadn't been around her for a while, saw the legend first: twice uncanny. Wielder of wyrd, dealer of death, the king's seer.

This is your wyrd," Hild said. "You'll be a queen. You'll have children.

A woman with hair a dusty black-brown and eyes of deep blue-the deep dark blue of the dome of sky late in summer when the day turns towards night, but dark won't fall, not quite, because summer wants to stay, hold on the world, linger forever.

For the next hour and a half I watched him flirt indiscriminately with men and women, couples and groups and singles, flashing out that smile, hooking them in, dismissing them after a sentence or two when it became clear he could have them if he wanted.

For a moment my face hung near the opening of her robe, and I breathed in the soft, buttered-toast scent of sleepy, naked woman.

Did its magic work? It had not saved the man who wore it.

For some reason it wasn't as hard to have her touch me, now that she knew my name. Her fingers were strong and brisk. I wondered who she went home to, whether she washed their hair for them in the shower or bath, if she knew how easy it would be to hurt me across the larynx with a shampoo bottle and watch me choke to death. I almost sat up.

The words hung there, a declaration, a taunt. You can't stop me!

Blue eyes, royal blue, endlessly deep, and Peretur, helpless, fell in.

Wyrd never flowed along expected paths.