Status Updates From The Book of Atrix Wolfe

"It's frightening," he said finally, so softly that Atrix strained to hear, "knowing that someone as powerful and experienced and wise as you, could make such a mockery of everything we were taught."

“Nothing that exists is insignificant.”

“You have so much power,” she said, “and so little regard for your life, you would have let me kill you. I don’t know what you care about enough to threaten you with.”

“Close your eyes,” the Oak lord suggested. “It blinds you because you’re trying to see. Listen.”

What a master storyteller McKillip was…

So far, I’m not as taken with this one as I have been with the last many McKillip books I’ve read, but I’m still definitely intrigued, and at the moment, it’s growing on me…

“Sun laid soft, warm hands on Talis’ hair; he lifted his face to it blindly, felt light like sweet wine on his lips.”

“You’re coming alive,” he said. “Your eyes are listening.”

“His own face did not; it was quite calm under her gaze. There was something odd about it she could not have described, except that it was the only face she had ever seen that made her want to keep looking at it.”

I already have such affection for Talis. Amazing how McKillip can do that💜

"Each moment must concern itself with life."

“There is no honor for you here. And therefore no dishonor in retreat.”

He loosed the Queen's hand finally, touched her lips with his fingers. Then he looked at Saro. "I thought I knew what sorrow is," he said. "Now I must leave you, and now I know."

💔

"This is only a dream.If I could stay,if somehow I could unweave myself from his spell and stay, I would burn these woods again with memory.These Hunter's hands are my hands, these hounds and burning horns are mine. I died that night. There is nothing left of Ilyos but memory." Her face grew still then, tearless.
"Stay," the Queen said softly. "If you are nothing but memory, then stay. Here among my memories."

Ihave been surrounded all my life by ghosts.This war has never ended- Atrix kept it alive, you and everyone in this house.Can you blame me for taking what peace I can in the only place where I recognize the word?
"You might as well be pining after a ghost," Burne snapped "Youre in love with your own memories.Nothing else.She'll give you nothing but pain.And there will be little left of you than what haunts these wals

"I am under some spell..No. I'm not under some spell. I wish I were. I would give anything to be spellbound."
Burne set his own cup down slowly. If he said one word, Talis knew, it would be the wrong word, and any word would be too many.He waited, unable to leave for there was no place to go, unable to stay and keep looking at Burne's tired, human face.
"We need you too" Burne said,his heart battered but still alive

"I spoke to you in your dreams. I rode through them. I sent you portents, images. But I never saw your face. I thought you would be different."
"You thought," he suggested painfully, "I would resemble what I had made."
"I thought," she said, "you would be less human. Arrogant, thoughtless, dangerous with power. Or perhaps I should say more human."
"I have been all of those things."

💔

"I watched your father die on Hunter's Field.I will not watch you die here, not for the sake of any woodland queen. I promised your brother I would bring you back to him, wherever you were. And then I promised him he could kill me. You will leave this place before the sun sets. This is not your battle, and you are not powerful enough to argue the point with me.
"You cant bring my father back by becoming another ghost

"I saw her face," Atrix said, "in my dreams." He stopped pacing, dropped into a chair, silent a moment, dreaming of her again. "She is like the wood. Like golden light falling through the golden branches of the oak. The fierce, hot green stillness of midsummer, or the colors blowing everywhere in autumn when the winds are clear and wild as water."
"She is."
"In my dream she is."