Dora’s Reviews > The Book of Atrix Wolfe > Status Update

"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."

"I could never cry," she whispered. "I envy you."
He felt his throat burn again, this time with wonder, with pity. "Why? What have you lost?"
"Love," she said simply. "Sorrow."
He was mute, staring at her. The tear hung like a cut jewel below her eye. He lifted his hand, touched it, and it fell, glittering, to the grass. "No one cries for sorrow."
"I know."

💔

If you're thinking she is what I think you're thinking, and she took him lightly and carelessly as they take humans, then we might be old men before she tires of him."
"Fine," Burne said "As long as she sets him loose before I die. What are you saying? That I shouldn't bother looking for him?"
"No, but-"
"I warned him. I tried to. You don't offer your heart to what shapes itself out of water or light or white birch."

And then.. then she let me see her face. She was very..she was more beautiful than-"
The King grunted. "They always are," he said unexpectedly. "The women you meet in a wood, or a meadow, or beside water, whose names you never know. Far more beautiful than those you know too well."
Talis held the lens to his eye. "It wasn't like that."
"It never is."

burne is such an older brother, gotta love him 💖

He could not find the place where she had appeared to him; every sunlit glint of water, every outstretched oak bough seemed to promise her. He rode slowly, aimlessly, wandering through light and shadow, seeing one clear world and one blurred, and her in neither of them. He did not know if he rode deep into the wood, or circled near its boundary; he did not care.