He’d said once to Serafina Pekkala that he didn’t care for flying, that it was only a job, but he hadn’t meant it. Soaring upwards, with a fair wind behind and a new world in front: what could be better in this life?

Some of the children looked like walking puffballs, they were so bulky, but their gear had been made in factories and laboratories far away from the cold, and it couldn’t really cope.

The problem was that the usual sources of her knowledge were natural ones. She could track any animal, catch any fish, find the rarest berries; and she could read the signs in the pine marten’s entrails, or decipher the wisdom in the scales of a perch, or interpret the warnings in the crocus-pollen; but these were children of nature, and they told

Someone will appear to guide you: the night is full of angels.

And this time, with a wrenching crack, the knife shattered and the blade fell in pieces to the ground, to glitter on the stones that were still wet with the rain of another universe.

That’s what you are. Argue with anything else, but don’t argue with your own nature.”

That is what the church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. So if a war comes, and the church is on one side of it, we must be on the other, no matter what strange allies we find ourselves bound to.

men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season.

and she would not do him the treachery of looking away, for if he looked at her he must see her shining eyes and their love and belief, not a face hidden in cowardice or a shoulder fearfully turned away.