Quotes About Connection

Gwladus stood before her, close enough to smell. Hild didn't look up. If she did, she would pull Gwladus close and never let her go.

She moved faster, and so did he. She leaned farther, and so did he. Then she began to draw on the life around her-the hum in the air, the flight of the kicked dirt-and changed again.

She laid her hand, brief and light as a drift of hawthorn blossom, on Hild's head.

He looked so small and wounded in his bright jacket that I opened my arms and pulled him in. He wrapped his hands around my hips, leaned his forehead on my breastbone and wept. He smelled of woodsmoke and tea.

She breathed in and out, in and out. He breathed as fast as she did. She felt the muscles sliding over his ribs. He smelt of thyme and mead and that iron-and-salt tang that made her nostrils flare.

He held her gaze this time, though it made him sweat, and this time it was she who looked away.

She could never be certain of the queen's feelings, but perhaps on this they were of the same mind.

Your mother has built you a place where you can speak your word openly. Now she asks you to use that for her, and for yourself of course.

It was good to feel the living movement between two bodies, to feel the feedback, play with some of the strength.

When you understood what made people happy, you understood them.

They are noisy; their untidy feet snap twigs and kick stones without heed for what might hear.

Lying naked and cold beneath the perfect, whispering dark, I imagined I could feel the curve of the earth under my back, that I circled the whole planet so that my soles touched the top of my head and I blended with the dirt.

Her skin felt marvellously alive beneath mine. We moved back and forth, and my belly warmed, and I knew hers warmed, too, as we revolved around the gym and each other, a planet and each other, a planet and its satellite turning about the sun.

Onnen liked Mulstan, Hild could tell. She also knew Onnen liked the way he ran his holdings, though it lacked the fine and sharp efficiency a woman would bring to the housebold. She liked his daughter and his servants and the ease his housefolk felt in the hall. And she leaned in towards him as though she liked his smell. And Mulstan liked her; Hild saw the way his nostrils flared as Onnen laughed at something he said and patted his arm.

Something in her sudden stillness made him look down at her hand, and he nodded, and with one last look turned away with her down the path.

Peretur patted Bony's shoulder, and could not tell if the horse trembled or she did. Was this fear?

Gemæcce, Hild thought, staring at the pattern. She looked up, found Begu looking at her, blushed, looked down again. After a breath of two, she looked up.

Her mother sighed, then smiled a slow, regretful, entirely human smile that made Hild like her.

They both smiled, and Peretur felt a little less lonely, a little less lost.

You can never walk away. They'll always find you. You matter for your blood. And your mind." "Which you made." "To keep you safe.

You might have been talking gibberish, but your smile was radiant.

Her childhood, her life, and she kept forgetting; her mother's geas kept taking it away. Then she was thinking of her mother, seeing her in the clearing on one of her good days, forget-me-not eyes dancing with light. Mother? She listened. Nothing.

It didn't matter about Luz. She was nothing to do with me. Sending money was all I needed to do. More. I hadn't put her with the foster parents in Arkansas. I didn't have to help her, or any of the others-because, oh, suddenly it was so clear that there were others. Many, many others.

Always know what they like, her mother said. They will love you for it.