mairiachi’s Reviews > Uprooted > Status Update

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.