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he wasn't going for the sake of corruption or the kingdom. His tower was broken, he'd drunk Spindle-water, and he'd held my hand. So now he was going to run away as quick as he could, and find himself some new stone walls to hide behind. He'd keep himself locked away for ten years this time, until he withered his own roots, and didn't feel the lack of them anymore.

I kissed her; she put her arms around me carefully and tightened her embrace little by little, until she was hugging me. I closed my eyes and held her close, and for a moment we were children again, girls again, under a dis-tant shadow but happy anyway.

They were all quarreling, it seemed to me, about whether to build a house on this side or that of a river, and ignoring the spring-flood mark on a tree nearby, higher than either door would be.

Natalya put me to sleep in Marta's old room, a little bedroom full of sun, with a worn rag doll sitting on the shelf and a small outgrown quilt. She'd gone to her own home now, but the room was still shaped around her.

The creaking was every song I'd ever heard about war and bat-tle; the horses clopping along, the drum-beat. All those stories must have ended this same way, with someone tired going home from a field full of death, but no one ever sang this part.

yesterday six thousand men had marched over this road; today they were all gone. They lay dead in the trenches, they lay dead in the hall, in the cellars, on the long winding stairs going down.

like a man throwing good money after bad because he couldn't stand to lose what he'd already spent.

I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them—this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn't a whole man.

They weren't alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I wanted to go and speak to that boy, to ask him his name, to find out what his story really was. But that would have been dishonest, a sop to my own feelings.

He wasn't saying anything I didn't know, hadn't known even when I'd come flying home like a bird to its burning nest.

his shoulders were relaxing as he listened to Solya, swallow-ing down that poisonously convenient explanation.

as if truth didn't mean anything without someone to share it with; you could shout truth into the air forever, and spend your life doing it, if someone didn't come and listen.

It was a warm kind presence in my hands, but with the kindness of a friend who sits with you in comfort by the fire and can't change what's wrong.

If Ballo couldn't find it in a book, that meant it couldn't be so, and if he found it in three books, that meant it was the unvarnished truth.

I think he was already gone in her mind by then: as though he'd been at a battle that had been lost, and she only waited to hear the final word.

I didn't feel sorry for him, but I understood him.

He fell silent. I hardly breathed, sitting like a mouse under an owl's tree so he would go on talking.

he said that she was gone, beyond the reach of any magic he knew.

But I had saved him, when he had thought himself beyond rescue, too. And I still knew so little, stumbling from one impossibility to another. I imagined the agony of finding a spell in a book, a month from now, a year, that might have worked. "Not yet," I whispered. "Not yet."

126 pages to go, my rating has steadily dropped from three stars to one star throughout the 700-page ebook. I am so tired of reading this, ready to be done.

A couple inconsistencies:
1. She walks into a room and sees a guy looking into a mirror, here's what he sees in this window mirror, and this is the look on his face. How does she see both?? One would be turned away if she sees the other.
2. The Willow says Nieshka spent all her magic against the tsoglav/Ballo and needs rest for a week before using magic, yet she instantly uses it (w/in 24h) and doesn't seemed phased.

Ch 24 is inconsistent. First paragraph says she fell asleep on the rug, second paragraph describes her waking up in bed, with Kasia on the rug at the foot of the bed.

this is so confusing, if she can say that word that gives her a new outfit, why does she still walk into parties with mud all over her? If you're going to walk to parties and talk about how dirty you are when you get there...why not just cast that very first spell you ever learned, yk the one that is incredibly easy and makes you instantly clean and fancy??

I'm so sick and tired of a really powerful heroine being on the spot and forgetting everything. Like as soon as she needs to prove herself, she goes to pieces. I cannot stand that it's so annoying.

There is no way she'd be able to walk after 23 years of not moving at all, they should have brought a stretcher and the author should have thought of muscles atrophying. Though this is fantasy, I just gotta keep suspending that disbelief.

She mentions there's no wildlife in the wood, no sound or sign of life - but then says they followed deer tracks. So are there animals or not? Unless she means old deer tracks, but those do not last long and it's been over 20 years since polosna (or whatever the town is called) was taken over so it would have to be pretty recent tracks.

That's so funny that preying mantises show up, bc I was picturing the walkers as mantises, so when they were there too, I had to start picturing smth else for the walkers lol

On chapter 14 and I genuinely don't understand the complete stupidity of bringing all three wizard/witch crew into the forest, who's going to say the chants over each other when you get out? You'll all have gone crazy by then.

And secondly, why did they bring kasia? Why did she even need to be there?? She's not a witch, she can't do anything except be re-corrupted (or at very least re-traumatized).