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"Why did they callrope, or baskets, aleaving strands into so new Even in the darkness, he twined plant fiber into rope against one thigh "The elder races partake of nothing earthly but only of the pure elements We are their children inasmuch as some portion of e are made of is derived from those pure elements"
"So any creature born on Earth is in sohing drily "Yet there is more to you than your huht now is a es of hue of ateway of fire, and it ic lies heavier over us than any language made only of words"
"It seee known to my people as Dariyan"
"And to ue But I cannot believe that these two are the same The count of years that separates enerations of hue of my people elt on Earth How then can it be that you have ree all this tihtful answer "Long before I was born, an empire rose whose rulers clai of your kind and hue as their speech, and that is e can speak together now But truly, I don’t know The empresses and emperors of the old Dariyan Empire were half-breeds, so they claier They exist there only as ghosts,creatures Some say there never were true Aoi on Earth, that they’re only tales from the dawn time of hu shape to suit the teller If you wish to knohat the spirits meant when they addressed you as ‘child,’ then you must ask them yourself"
The stars scintillated so vividly that they seeely, she could find not one fa into a different plane of existence, yet the dirt under her feet sood dirt, and many of the plants were ones she remembered from her childhood, when she and Da had traveled in the lands whose southern boundary was the great middle sea: silver pine and white oak, olive and carob, prickly juniper and rose in the scent of rose, like a favorite childhood story retold
"I would ask them, if I could reach them"
"To reach them, you must learn to walk the spheres"
The arrow ca Pale as ivory, it buried its head in the trunk of a pine Grabbing her quiver, Liath rolled off her pallet and into the cover of a low-lying hol in his place, still rolling flax into rope against his leg He hadn’t even flinched Behind hiainst drought-blighted pine bark
"What is that?" she de hard In the four days since she had con of any other people except herself and her teacher
"It’s a suht comes, I must attend council"
"What will happen to you, and to me, if your people know I’m here?"
"That reht, waking up at intervals to find that he sat in trancelike silence beside her, completely still but with his eyes open Sometimes when she woke, half muddled from an unremembered and anxious dreanize the faht her; but always, in the next instant, they would shift in their place, leaving her to stare upward at an alien sky She could not even see the River of Heaven, which spanned the sky in her own land In that river, the souls of the dead swa them looked down upon the Earth beloatch over their loved ones, now left behind Was Da lost to her? Did his spirit gaze down upon Earth and wonder where she had gone?
Yet was she any different than he ondering what had become of those left behind? Da hadn’t meant to die, after all She had left behind those she loved of her own free will
At night, she often wondered if she had ht decision Sometimes she wondered if she really loved them
If she’d really loved theo