Bent Tree Quotes

My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

In nature, nothing is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways and they're still beautiful.

Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandfather!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned around and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’ Which of us was right, boss?

in my veins that roll you run citrus watercolor images of serpents on orange trees quietly arise and grow sweet in my midst

When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

It was when she returned to him, chilled & clearheaded, that it happened. He sat against the tree, his knees bent & his head in his hands. His shoulders slumped. Tired, unhappy. Something tender caught in her breath at the sight of him. And then he raised his eyes and looked at her, and she saw what she had not seen before. She gasped. His eyes were beautiful. His face was beautiful to her in every way, and his shoulders and hands. And his arms that hung over his knees, and his chest that was not moving, because he held his breath as he watched her. And the heart in his chest. This friend. How had she not seen this before? How had she not seen him? She was blind. And then tears choked her eyes, for she had not asked for this. She had not asked for this beautiful man before her, with something hopeful in his eyes that she did not want.

bent like the branches of a tree broken like the pieces of my heart cracked like the seventeenth moon shattered like the glass in the window the day we met

A strong wind sang sadly as it bent the trees in front of the Hall. A half moon shone through the dark, flying clouds on to the wild and empty moor.

Look, Gail." Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. "Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life." "Your strength?" "Your work." He tossed the branch aside. "The material the earth offers you and what you make of it . . .

He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisible wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. You could see a bare tree on the skyline bent by the wind, holding up twisted branches and bent twigs, and suddenly its formless form would resolve itself into that of the trickster.

Daylight...In my mind, the night faded. It was daytime and the neighborhood was busy. Miss Stephenie Crawford crossed the street to tell the latest to Miss Rachel. Miss Maudie bent over the azaleas. It was summertime, and two children scampered down the sidewalk toward a man approaching in the distance. The man waved, and the children raced each other to him. It was still summertime, and the children came closer. A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishingpole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yeard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention. It was fall and his children fought ont he sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose's. The boy helped his sister to her feet and they made their way home. Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woe's and triymph's on their face. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled apprehensive. Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and show a dog. Summer, and he watched his children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him.

Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.

The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air. When we think of the downs, we think of the downs in daylight, as with think of a rabbit with its fur on. Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not: and we do not usually envisage the downs without daylight, even though the light is not a part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it us utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that event the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity---so much lower than that of daylight---makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.

I picked up a fallen branch and struck a tree with it. Apples fell from the tree. The rope around one of the skeletons gave way and it fell to the ground. It lay there, crumpled and bent in ridiculous angles. I wondered if the person who the skeleton used to live inside would be embarrassed if he or she could see themselves now. I looked around the area but didn’t see any ghosts. Why would I see a ghost? They didn’t exist. Still, I looked a second time.

As a twig is bent the tree inclines.

My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a water'd shoot; My heart is like an apple-tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit; My heart is like a rainbow shell That paddles in a halcyon sea; My heart is gladder than all these, Because my love is come to me. Raise me a daïs of silk and down; Hang it with vair and purple dyes; Carve it in doves and pomegranates, And peacocks with a hundred eyes; Work it in gold and silver grapes, In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys; Because the birthday of my life Is come, my love is come to me.

The good news is that by the second year, those cravings were about as half as frequent, and by the third year, half as much again. I'm still a little bent, a little crooked, but all things crooked, I can't complain. After all those years of all kinds of abuse and crashing into trees at eighty miles an hour and jumping off buildings and living through overdoses and liver disease, I feel better now than I did ten years ago. I might have some scar tissue, but that's alright, I'm still making progress.

See that tree?" It was a stubby cypress tree, all bent and twisted. "Yeah, I see it." "It's my favorite tree." "It's not that great a tree," I said. "That's it. That's exactly it. It's like me. The wind beat the holy crap out of it when it was just a sapling. Never could straighten itself out again." He sort of smiled at me. "But, Zach, it didn't die." He looked like maybe he wanted to cry. But he didn't. "It's alive." "Maybe it should have just given up." "That tree didn't know how to do that. It only knew how to live. Crooked. Bent. Taller trees dwarfing it even more. It just wanted to live. I named it, you know?" He was waiting for me to ask what he'd named it--but I decided I didn't want to ask. "Zach," he whispered. "The tree's name is Zach."[p. 135]

I thought I would love you forever—and, a little, I may, in the way I still move toward a crate, knees bent, or reach for a man: as one might stretch for the three or four fruit that lie in the sun at the top of the tree; too ripe for any moment but this, they open their skin at first touch, yielding sweetness, sweetness and heat, and in me, each time since, the answering yes.

At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver

And like any dog, like any savage, I lay there enjoying myself, harming no man, selling nothing, competing not at all, thinking no evil, smiled on by the sun, bent over by the trees, and softly folded in the arms of the earth.

What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.

Every one follows his own bent. Man is like a tree. You’ve never quarrelled with a fig tree because it doesn’t bear cherries, have you?

When the fig-tree stood without fruit no one looked at it. Wishing by producing this fruit be praised by men, it was bent and broken by them.

The secret island had looked mysterious enough on the night they had seen it before - but now, swimming in the hot June haze, it seemed more enchanting than ever. As they drew near to it, and saw the willow trees that bent over the water-edge and heard the sharp call of moorhens that scuttled off, the children gazed in delight. Nothing but trees and birds and little wild animals. Oh, what a secret island, all for their very own, to live on and play on.

The Balrog reached the bridge. Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Glamdring gleamed, cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings. It raised the whip, and the thongs whined and cracked. Fire came from its nostrils. But Gandalf stood firm. 'You cannot pass,' he said. The orcs stood still, and a dead silence fell. 'I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass.' The Balrog made no answer. The fire in it seemed to die, but the darkness grew. It stepped forward slowly onto the bridge, and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall; but still Gandalf could be seen, glimmering in the gloom; he seemed small, and altogether alone: grey and bent, like a wizened tree before the onset of a storm. From out of the shadow a red sword leaped flaming. Glamdring glittered white in answer. There was a ringing clash and a stab of white fire. The Balrog fell back and its sword flew up in molten fragments. The wizard swayed on the bridge, stepped back a pace, and then again stood still. 'You cannot pass!' he said. With a bound the Balrog leaped full upon the bridge. Its whip whirled and hissed. 'He cannot stand alone!' cried Aragorn suddenly and ran back along the bridge. 'Elendil!' he shouted. 'I am with you, Gandalf!' 'Gondor!' cried Boromir and leaped after him. At that moment Gandalf lifted his staff, and crying aloud he smote the bridge before him. The staff broke asunder and fell from his hand. A blinding sheet of white flame sprang up. The bridge cracked. Right at the Balrog's feet it broke, and the stone upon which it stood crashed into the gulf, while the rest remained, poised, quivering like a tongue of rock thrust out into emptiness. With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard's knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss. 'Fly, you fools!' he cried, and was gone.

If a tree is bent, every goat will jump on it.

The sunlight sparkled through the wind-bent boughs of trees, dancing in an ever-shifting pattern

He placed his hands against the Jeep on either side of my head and leaned forward, forcing me to press back against the door. He leaned in even closer, his face inches from mine. I had no room to escape. "Now," he breathed, and just his smell disturbed my thought processes, "what exactly are you worrying about?" "Well, um, hitting a tree -" I gulped "- and dying. And then getting sick." He fought back a smile. Then he bent his head down and touched his cold lips softly to the hollow at the base of my throat. "Are you still worried now?" he murmured against my skin. "Yes." I struggled to concentrate. "About hitting trees and getting sick." His nose drew a line up the skin of my throat to the point of my chin. His cold breath tickled my skin. "And now?" His lips whispered against my jaw. "Trees," I gasped. "Motion sickness." He lifted his face to kiss my eyelids. "Bella, you don't really think I would hit a tree, do you?" "No, but I might." There was no confidence in my voice. He smelled an easy victory. He kissed slowly down my cheek, stopping just at the corner of my mouth. "Would I let a tree hurt you?" His lips barely brushed against my trembling lower lip. "No," I breathed. I knew there was a second part to my brillant defense, but I couldn't quite call it back. "You see," he said, his lips moving against mine. "There's nothing to be afraid of, is there?" "No," I sighed, giving up. Then he took my face in his hands almost roughly, and kissed me in earnest, his unyielding lips moving against mine. There was really no excuse for my behavior. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn't seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck, and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure. I sighed, and his lips parted.

Eldest, that's what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the Little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless - before the Dark Lord came from Outside.

A hundred years or more, she's bent her crown in storm, in sun, in moonsplashed midnight breeze. surviving all the random vagaries of this harsh world. A dense - twigged veil drifts down from crown along her trunk - mourning slow wood that rustles tattered, in a hint of wind this January dusk, cloudy, purpling the ground with sudden shadows. How she broods - you speculate - on dark surprise and loss, alone these many years, despondent, bent, her bolt-cracked mate transformed to splinters, moss. Though not alone, you feel the sadness of a twilight breeze. There's never enough love; the widow nods to you. Her branches moan.

Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like jewels cascaded from their spidery hands.

I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two. Autumn in Fairyland is all that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland Forest or the morbidity of a Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland. And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring high wheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel to mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

Every one follows his own bent. Man is like a tree. You've never quarrelled with a fig tree because it doesn't bear cherries, have you?

The tree laden with fruits is always a bit bent. Not because of any burden but because it has something to offer. Humility

The campus, an academy of trees, under which some hand, the wind's I guess, had scattered the pale light of thousands of spring beauties, petals stained with pink veins; secret, blooming for themselves. We sat among them. Your long fingers, thin body, and long bones of improbable genius; some scattered gene as Kafka must have had. Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles. That simple that was myself, half conscious, as though each moment was a page where words appeared; the bent hammer of the type struck against the moving ribbon. The light air, the restless leaves; the ripple of time warped by our longing. There, as if we were painted by some unknown impressionist.

The heavy eyelids snapped open. Jack froze. A huge gold-and-amber eye, as big as a dinner plater, stared at him. The dark pupil shrank, focusing. Jack stood very still. The colossal head turned, the scaled lip only three feet from Jack. The golden eyes gazed at him, wirling with fiery color. Jack breathed in tiny, shallow breaths. Dont blink. Don't blink... Two gusts of wind erutped from the wyvern's nostrils Jack jumped straight up, bounced off the ground into another jump, and scrambled up the nearest tree. In the clearing, Gaston bent over, guffawing like an idiot. 'It's not funny!

When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

The Portuguese remind me of those ancient olive trees you come across around the country - bent out of shape by bigger forces, flawed and suffering, but robustly surviving with an unusual beauty.

If I wished to shake this tree with my hands, I should not be able to do so. But the wind, which we do not see, troubles and bends it as it lists. We are worst bent and troubled by invisible hands.

A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life -- kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction.

But what Tyler longed for was to have The Feeling arrive; when every flicker of light that touched the dipping branches of a weeping willow, every breath of breeze that bent the grass towards the row of apple trees, every shower of yellow ginko leaves dropping to the ground with such direct and tender sweetness, would fill the minister with profound and irreducible knowledge that God was right there.

Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.

Love Letter" Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, then I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it, Staying put according to habit. You didn't just tow me an inch, no- Nor leave me to set my small bald eye Skyward again, without hope, of course, Of apprehending blueness, or stars. That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake Masked among black rocks as a black rock In the white hiatus of winter- Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure In the million perfectly-chisled Cheeks alighting each moment to melt My cheeks of basalt. They turned to tears, Angels weeping over dull natures, But didn't convince me. Those tears froze. Each dead head had a visor of ice. And I slept on like a bent finger. The first thing I was was sheer air And the locked drops rising in dew Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay Dense and expressionless round about. I didn't know what to make of it. I shone, mice-scaled, and unfolded To pour myself out like a fluid Among bird feet and the stems of plants. I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once. Tree and stone glittered, without shadows. My finger-length grew lucent as glass. I started to bud like a March twig: An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg. From stone to cloud, so I ascended. Now I resemble a sort of god Floating through the air in my soul-shift Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.

The yard consisted of grass and a Russian Olive tree, which was about the only kind of tree able to survive on the high prairies. Its thin, grey leaves made it look as though it were on the verge of dying, thereby fooling the elements and the bad weather into thinking that they didn't have to bother with something so spindly and bent, something so obviously on its last legs.

weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.

The bells gave tongue: Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul, rioting and exulting high up in the dark tower, wide mouths rising and falling, brazen tongues clamouring, huge wheels turning to the dance of the leaping ropes. Tin tan din dan bim bam bom bo--tan tin din dan bam bim bo bom--tan dan tin bam din bo bim bom--every bell in her place striking tuneably, hunting up, hunting down, dodging, snapping, laying her blows behind, making her thirds and fourths, working down to lead the dance again. Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells--little Gaude, silver Sabaoth, strong John and Jericho, glad Jubilee, sweet Dimity and old Batty Thomas, with great Tailor Paul bawling and striding like a giant in the midst of them. Up and down went the shadows of the ringers upon the walls, up and down went the scarlet sallies flickering roofwards and floorwards, and up and down, hunting in their courses, went the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul.

Benny took a steadying breath and let it out slowly. "Nix, I do understand what you're going through. I'm going through it too." "It's not the same thing," she said very quietly. An elk poked its head out from behind some sagebrush, studied them for a moment, then bent to eat berries from another bush. "Then why won't you tell me what it is?" She glared at him. "Honestly, Benny, sometimes I think you don't even know who I am." With that she turned and stalked away, her spine as stiff as a board. Benny stood openmouthed until she was almost back to the tree where Chong sat with Eve. "What the hell was that all about?" he asked the elk. The elk, being and elk, said nothing.

Albine now yielded to him, and Serge possessed her. And the whole garden was engulfed together with the couple in one last cry of love's passion. The tree-trunks bent as under a powerful wind. The blades of grass emitted sobs of intoxication. The flowers, fainting, lips half-open, breathed out their souls. The sky itself, aflame with the setting of the great star, held its clouds motionless, faint with love, whence superhuman rapture fell. And it was the victory of all the wild creatures, all plants and all things natural, which willed the entry of these two children into the eternity of life.

Panting and gasping, Harry slowed down, skirting the Willow’s swiping branches, peering through the darkness toward its thick trunk, trying to see the single knot in the bark of the old tree that would paralyze it. Ron and Hermione caught up, Hermione so out of breath she could not speak. “How — how’re we going to get in?” panted Ron. “I can — see the place — if we just had — Crookshanks again —” “Crookshanks?” wheezed Hermione, bent double, clutching her chest. “Are you a wizard, or what?” “Oh — right — yeah —

I am happy to say that there is nothing to report." The guard's voice grew muffled as he bent to shrug off his armor. "Save that I now know every path and stream in this village as though I were born here and had never set foot outside it, and have counted all the leaves on all the trees and found them in good health and order, and have taken the liberty of naming all the frogs down by the creek, placing them into clans by the markings on their back and taking for myself the title King and Overlord of all Frog-Kind.

He was particulary drawn to these two clerks by the fact that they both had crooked noses, one bent to the left and the other to the right. They took him finally to a pleasure garden, where he paid for their entrance. There was one lanky three-year-old pine tree and three bushes in the garden, besides a vauxhal, which was in reality a drinking-bar where tea too was served...

Time that had not come yet—an anomaly in itself—had the fiercest reality for her. It was a hard wind in her face; if she had made the world, every tree would be bent, every stone weathered, every bough stripped by that steady and contrary wind. Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change.

Now I can see: even the trees are tired: they are bones bent forward in a skin of wind, leaning in osteoporosis, reaching for a little more than any oxygen can give: when living is in season, they can live; but living is no reason to continue: everything begins: and everything is desperate to extend: and everything is insufficient in the end: and everything is ending: Now I can see: even the trees

White men grow on an open, level field. White women grow on far steeper and rougher terrain because the field wasn't made for them. Women of color grow not just on a hill, but on a cliffside over the ocean, battered by wind and waves. None of us chooses the landscape in which we're planted. If you find yourself on an ocean-battered cliff, your only choice is to grow there, or fall into the ocean. So if we transplant a survivor of the steep hill and cliff to the level field, natives of the field may look at that survivor and wonder why she has so much trouble trusting people, systems, and even her own bodily sensations. Why is this tree so bent and gnarled? It's because that is what it took to survive in the place where she grew. A tree that's fought wind and gravity and erosion to grow strong and green on a steep cliff is going to look strange and out of place when moved to the level playing field. The gnarled, wind-blown tree from an oceanside cliff might not conform with our ideas of what a tree should look like, but it works well in the context where it grew. And that tall straight tree wouldn't stand a chance if it was transplanted to the cliffside.

A feeling settled over Cora. She had not been under its spell in years, since she brought the hatchet down on Blake's doghouse and sent the splinters into the air. She had seen men hung from trees and left for buzzards and crows. Women carved open to the bones with the cat-o'-nine-tails. Bodies alive and dead roasted on pyres. Feet cut off to prevent escape and hands cut off to stop theft. She had seen boys and girls younger than this beaten and had done nothing. This night the feeling settled on her heart again. It grabbed hold of her and before the slave part of her caught up with the human part of her, she was bent over the boy's body as a shield.

Huge clouds were already careering in the skies, and distant flashes announced a tempest. About ten o'clock, the storm burst forth; and Milady found some consolation in seeing Nature partake of the commotion within her. The thunder bellowed in the air like the angry passions in her soul; and it seemed to her as if the passing gusts disturbed her brow, as they did the trees of which they bent down the branches and sept off the leaves. She howled like the tempest, but her voice was unheard Amidst the vast voice of Nature, which also appeared to be herself groaning in despair.

I’ve found that just saying the word “treehouse” causes people to smile, no matter their age. It is like a password to the inner child’s sanctum, a place both exotic and familiar, a place of memories and dreams. The treehouse doesn’t bring us to the highest elevations. It doesn’t offer the broadest vistas. Yet even a shabby, ramshackle tree shelter—a few old boards held together with bent nails and a rope ladder—will radiate more joy than the swankest hilltop estate.

Diana hooted in triumph as her feet met the path, sprinting higher to where the trees were sparse, their trunks bent and twisted by the wind. They looked like women, frozen in a mad dance, the tangle of their hair tossed forward in abandon, their backs arched in ecstasy or bent in supplication, a processional of dancers that led Diana up the mountainside.

As the wind swelled, my tree started to sway. Almost like a human body it swung back and around, gently at first, then more and more wildly. While the swaying intensified, so did my fears that the trunk might snap and hurl me to the ground. But in time my confidence returned. Amazed at how the tree could be at once so flexible and so sturdy, I held on tight as it bent and waved, twisted and swirled, slicing curves and arcs through the air. With each graceful swing, I felt less a creature of the land and more a part of the wind itself. "The rain began falling, it's sound merging with the splashing river and the singing trees. Branches streamed like waterfalls of green. Tiny rivers cascaded down every trunk, twisting through moss meadows and bark canyons. All the while, I rode out the gale. I could not have felt wetter. I could not have felt freer. "When, at last, the storm subsided, the entire world seemed newly born. Sunbeams danced on rain-washed leaves. Curling columns of mist rose from every glade. The forest's colors shown more vivid, its smells struck more fresh. And I understood, for the first time in my life, that the Earth was always being remade, that life was always being renewed. That it may have been the afternoon of this particular day, but it was still the very morning of Creation.

TO SOME I HAVE TALKED WITH BY THE FIRE WHILE I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes, My heart would brim with dreams about the times When we bent down above the fading coals And talked of the dark folk who live in souls Of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees; And of the wayward twilight companies Who sigh with mingled sorrow and content, Because their blossoming dreams have never bent Under the fruit of evil and of good: And of the embattled flaming multitude Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame, And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name, And with the clashing of their sword-blades make A rapturous music, till the morning break And the white hush end all but the loud beat Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet.

That maybe I’m the answer,’ I blurted. ‘To healing your heart. I could … you know, be your boyfriend. As Lester. If you wanted. You and me. You know, like … yeah.’ I was absolutely certain that up on Mount Olympus, the other Olympians all had their phones out and were filming me to post on Euterpe-Tube. Reyna stared at me long enough for the marching band in my circulatory system to play a complete stanza of ‘You’re a Grand Old Flag’. Her eyes were dark and dangerous. Her expression was unreadable, like the outer surface of an explosive device. She was going to murder me. No. She would order her dogs to murder me. By the time Meg rushed to my aid, it would be too late. Or worse – Meg would help Reyna bury my remains, and no one would be the wiser. When they returned to camp, the Romans would ask, What happened to Apollo? Who? Reyna would say. Oh, that guy? Dunno, we lost him. Oh, well! the Romans would reply, and that would be that. Reyna’s mouth tightened into a grimace. She bent over, gripping her knees. Her body began to shake. Oh, gods, what had I done? Perhaps I should comfort her, hold her in my arms. Perhaps I should run for my life. Why was I so bad at romance? Reyna made a squeaking sound, then a sort of sustained whimper. I really had hurt her! Then she straightened, tears streaming down her face, and burst into laughter. The sound reminded me of water rushing over a riverbed that had been dry for ages. Once she started, she couldn’t seem to stop. She doubled over, stood upright again, leaned against a tree and looked at her dogs as if to share the joke. ‘Oh … my … gods,’ she wheezed. She managed to restrain her mirth long enough to blink at me through the tears, as if to make sure I was really there and she’d heard me correctly. ‘You. Me? HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA.

...raised herself on one round elbow and looked out on a tiny river like a gleaming blue snake winding itself around a purple hill. Right below the house was a field white as snow with daisies, and the shadow of the huge maple tree that bent over the little house fell lacily across it. Far beyond it were the white crests of Four Winds Harbour and a long range of sun-washed dunes and red cliffs.

Who’s there?” the voice from inside said and there was a quality about it now that seemed final. The knob rattled and the voice said peremptorily, “Who’s there, I ast you?” Parker bent down and put his mouth near the stuffed keyhole. “Obadiah,” he whispered and all at once he felt the light pouring through him, turning his spider web soul into a perfect arabesque of colors, a garden of trees and birds and beasts.

Theseus put his club aside. He approached the Pine Bender and sized up the situation. He wasn’t as strong as Sinis. He didn’t have the ability to root himself to the earth. He didn’t even have a plan. But he glanced over at the girl Perigune, and his distractible brain started racing. A girl in the trees. A girl. A tree. Trees have spirits. I’m hungry. Wow, Sinis smells bad. A dryad. I bet the dryads in these trees are really tired of getting bent. Hey, there’s a chipmunk.

At first Alexander could not believe it was his Tania. He blinked and tried to refocus his eyes. She was walking around the table, gesturing, showing, leaning forward, bending over. At one point she straightened out and wiped her forehead. She was wearing a short-sleeved yellow peasant dress. She was barefoot, and her slender legs were exposed above her knee. Her bare arms were lightly tanned. Her blonde hair looked bleached by the sun and was parted into two shoulder-length braids tucked behind her ears. Even from a distance he could see the summer freckles on her nose. She was achingly beautiful. And alive. Alexander closed his eyes, then opened them again. She was still there, bending over the boy’s work. She said something, everyone laughed loudly, and Alexander watched as the boy’s arm touched Tatiana’s back. Tatiana smiled. Her white teeth sparkled like the rest of her. Alexander didn’t know what to do. She was alive, that was obvious. Then why hadn’t she written him? And where was Dasha? Alexander couldn’t very well continue to stand under a lilac tree. He went back out onto the main road, took a deep breath, stubbed out his cigarette, and walked toward the square, never taking his eyes off her braids. His heart was thundering in his chest, as if he were going into battle. Tatiana looked up, saw him, and covered her face with her hands. Alexander watched everyone get up and rush to her, the old ladies showing unexpected agility and speed. She pushed them all away, pushed the table away, pushed the bench away, and ran to him. Alexander was paralyzed by his emotion. He wanted to smile, but he thought any second he was going to fall to his knees and cry. He dropped all his gear, including his rifle. God, he thought, in a second I’m going to feel her. And that’s when he smiled. Tatiana sprang into his open arms, and Alexander, lifting her off her feet with the force of his embrace, couldn’t hug her tight enough, couldn’t breathe in enough of her. She flung her arms around his neck, burying her face in his bearded cheek. Dry sobs racked her entire body. She was heavier than the last time he felt her in all her clothes as he lifted her into the Lake Ladoga truck. She, with her boots, her clothes, coats, and coverings, had not weighed what she weighed now. She smelled incredible. She smelled of soap and sunshine and caramelized sugar. She felt incredible. Holding her to him, Alexander rubbed his face into her braids, murmuring a few pointless words. “Shh, shh…come on, now, shh, Tatia. Please…” His voice broke. “Oh, Alexander,” Tatiana said softly into his neck. She was clutching the back of his head. “You’re alive. Thank God.” “Oh, Tatiana,” Alexander said, hugging her tighter, if that were possible, his arms swaddling her summer body. “You’re alive. Thank God.” His hands ran up to her neck and down to the small of her back. Her dress was made of very thin cotton. He could almost feel her skin through it. She felt very soft. Finally he let her feet touch the ground. Tatiana looked up at him. His hands remained around her little waist. He wasn’t letting go of her. Was she always this tiny, standing barefoot in front of him? “I like your beard,” Tatiana said, smiling shyly and touching his face. “I love your hair,” Alexander said, pulling on a braid and smiling back. “You’re messy…” He looked her over. “And you’re stunning.” He could not take his eyes off her glorious, eager, vivid lips. They were the color of July tomatoes— He bent to her—

She walked down the lawn and surveyed the world as they'd both seen it--the wild limbs of the leaning apple tree, the golden-brown evening sky, the black silhouettes of the mountains. The trunk and the branches of the tree had bent over the years, under the weight of the heavy fruit. One of the biggest branches had grown down from the canopy of the leaves, all the way to the ground and straight along the grass...the end of that same branch had begun growing up again, at a right angle, the wood bending toward the sky.

These boys bent over their food, intense as harmless cubs feeding, rapt with every morsel melting in their mouths—feral rhythm moves their very breath, their strong young teeth chomping, grinding the gristle of meat. So little it takes to pleasure them— they eat what they can get, savoring a fine fillet with equal fervor as the bits stuck to a bone or clinging to a plate. Watching them feed, I seem to see them under my very eyes growing, bones lengthening, muscle stretching, their very skulls thickening around each one’s own danger zones of memory.

Benjamin and I sat in the middle of one of the large canoes with our grandmother in the stern, directing us past shoals and through rapids and into magnificent stretches of water. One day the clouds hung low and light rain freckled the slate-grey water that peeled across our bow. The pellets of rain were warm and Benjamin and I caught them on our tongues as our grandmother laughed behind us. Our canoes skimmed along and as I watched the shoreline it seemed the land itself was in motion. The rocks lay lodged like hymns in the breast of it, and the trees bent upward in praise like crooked fingers. It was glorious. Ben felt it too. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and I held his look a long time, drinking in the face of my brother.

We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that even the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity--so much lower than that of daylight--makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.

But, Aunt... I don't want to go to the grave site set aside for me a few years ago at the ancestral grave site. I don't want to go there. When I lived here and woke up from the fog in my head, I would walk by myself to the grave site set aside for me, so that I could feel comfortable if I lived there after death. It was sunny, and I liked the pine tree that stood bent but tall, but remaining a member of this family even in death would be too much and too hard. To try to change my mind, I would sing and pull weeds, sitting there until the sun set, but nothing made me feel comfortable there. I lived with this family for over fifty years; please let me go now.

In a rush, the world opened its mouth to her—and it was screaming. Everywhere—the air around her, the ground beneath her, the stars above—rippled with the soul-wrenching cries of hunger: the trees and bushes and plants all twisted and bent, their branches and stems clawing the sky in skeletal panic; the animals and insects, flying and crawling and burrowing, each frantic in its own way, searching incessantly to end the gnawing demand in its belly; the swarms of people, clotting the world, stuffing themselves only to beg for more, be it food or wealth or attention—all of them, desperate, insatiable. So very hungry. All of them, leeching on to her. Sucking her dry.

And he saw a youth approaching, Dressed in garments green and yellow, Coming through the purple twilight, Through the splendor of the sunset; Plumes of green bent o'er his forehead, And his hair was soft and golden. Standing at the open doorway, Long he looked at Hiawatha, Looked with pity and compassion On his wasted form and features, And, in accents like the sighing Of the South-Wind in the tree-tops, Said he, "O my Hiawatha! All your prayers are heard in heaven, For you pray not like the others, Not for greater skill in hunting, Not for greater craft in fishing, Not for triumph in the battle, Nor renown among the warriors, But for profit of the people, For advantage of the nations. "From the Master of Life descending, I, the friend of man, Mondamin, Come to warn you and instruct you, How by struggle and by labor You shall gain what you have prayed for. Rise up from your bed of branches, Rise, O youth, and wrestle with me!

Though this new forest grew mightily, elsewhere the mighty jungles fell. Elsewhere the coastal rain forests that furred the body of the world were torn and riven. Elsewhere the last of the old growth the last of the world’s own garment were ripped away. It was in this time, now, that the mother of us all was stripped naked and left to die in shame of her children, she who had been robed in glory like this, adorned like this. I bent my head upon the roots and wept, sorrowing for the trees.

O wind, songs have ye in her name? Plucked her did ye from midnight blasted millyard winds and made her renown ring in stone and brick and ice? Hard implacable bridges of iron cross her milk of brows? God bent from his steel arc welded her a hammer of honey and of balm? The rutted mud of hardrock Time . . . was it wetted, springified, greened, blossomied for me to grow in nameless bloodied lutey naming of her? Wood on cold trees would her coffin bare? Keys of stone rippled by icy streaks would ope my needy warm interiors and make her eat the soft sin of me? No iron bend or melt to make my rocky travail ease--I was all alone, my fate was banged behind an iron door, I'd come like butter looking for Hot Metals to love, I'd raise my feeble orgone bones and let them be rove and split the half and goop the big sad eyes to see it and say nothing. The laurel wreath is made of iron, and thorns of nails; acid spit, impossible mountains, and incomprehensible satires of blank humanity--congeal, cark, sink and seal my blood--

Jim Thunder, at seventy-five the youngest of the speakers, is a round brown man of serious demeanor who spoke only in Potawatomi. He began solemnly, but as he warmed to his subject his voice lifted like a breeze in the birch trees and his hands began to tell the story. He became more and more animated, rising to his feet, holding us rapt and silent although almost no one understood a single word. He paused as if reaching the climax of his story and looked out at the audience with a twinkle of expectation. One of the grandmothers behind him covered her mouth in a giggle and his stern face suddenly broke into a smile as big and sweet as a cracked watermelon. He bent over laughing and the grandmas dabbed away tears of laughter, holding their sides, while the rest of us looked on in wonderment. When the laughter subsided, he spoke at last in English: "What will happen to a joke if no one will hear it any more? How lonely those words will be, when their is power gone. Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can never be told again.

funeral wreath for the queen.” He sat in the clear space between the bank and the first line of trees and bent a pine bough into a circle, tying it with a piece of wet string from the castle. And because it looked cold and green, he picked spring beauties from the forest floor and wove them among the needles. He put it down in front of him. A cardinal flew down to the bank, cocked its brilliant head, and seemed to stare at the wreath. P. T. let out a growl which sounded more like a purr. Jess put his hand on the dog to quiet him. The bird hopped about a moment more, then flew leisurely away. “It’s a sign from the Spirits,” Jess said quietly. “We made a worthy offering.” He walked slowly, as part of a great procession, though only the puppy could be seen, slowly forward carrying the queen’s wreath to the sacred grove.

In the tense silence the continual buzzing of the horseflies was the only audible sound, that and the constant rain beating down in the distance, and, uniting the two, the ever more frequent scritch-scratch of the bent acacia trees outside, and the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs and in various parts of the counter whose irregular pulse measured out the small parcels of time, apportioning the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit. The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision: a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metaled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they don't hang together. So with the door left open as if forever, with the lock that will never open. There is a chasm, a crevice.

Chloe had her knees pulled up, one arm wrapped around them. Her other hand was entwined with Derek's. He leaned back against the tree. Slumping, as if it was holding him up. His face glowed with sweat and his eyes were closed. When I'd seen Derek in wolf form, I figured werewolves grew when they shifted, like the ones in movies. They didn't. He was really that big. Even slumped, he was more than a head taller then Chloe. A huge football player of a guy. Beside me, Daniel whispered, "I was going to tell him off for bullying you. But I'm having second thoughts." I smiled at him. "I don't blame you." Despite his size, Derek was obviously no older than us. His cheeks were dotted with mild acne and I could see the ghosts of fading pocks, as if it had been much worse not too long ago. Dark hair tumbled into his eyes as he rested with his head bent forward.

She was a hunchback with a sweet smile. She smiled sweetly at anything; she couldn't help it; the trees, me, the grass, anything. The basket pulled her down, dragging her toward the ground. She was such a tiny woman, with a hurt face, as if slapped forever. She wore a funny old hat, an absurd hat, a maddening hat, a hat to make me cry, a hat with faded red berries on the brim. And there she was, smiling at everything, struggling across the carpet with a heavy basket containing Lord knew what, wearing a plumed hat with red berries. I got up. It was so mysterious. There I was, like magic, standing up, my two feet on the ground, my eyes drenched. I said, "Let me help." She smiled again and gave me the basket. We began to walk. She led the way. Beyond the trees it was stifling. And she smiled. It was so sweet it nearly tore my head off. She talked, she told me things I never remembered. It didn't matter. In a« dream she held me, in a dream I followed under the blinding sun. For blocks we went forward. I hoped it would never end. Always she talked in a low voice made of human music. What words! What she said! I remembered nothing. I was only happy. But in my heart I was dying. It should have been so. We stepped from so many curbs, I wondered why she did not sit upon one and hold my head while I drifted away. It was the chance that never came again. That old woman with the bent back! Old woman, I feel so joyfully your pain. Ask me a favor, you old woman you! Anything. To die is easy. Make it that. To cry is easy, lift your skirt and let me cry and let my tears wash your feet to let you know I know what life has been for you, because my back is bent too, but my heart is whole, my tears are delicious, my love is yours, to give you joy where God has failed. To die is so easy and you may have my life if you wish it, you old woman, you hurt me so, you did, I will do anything for you, to die for you, the blood of my eighteen years flowing in the gutters of Wilmington and down to the sea for you, for you that you might find such joy as is now mine and stand erect without the horror of that twist. I left the old woman at her door. The trees shimmered. The clouds laughed. The blue sky took me up. Where am I? Is this Wilmington, California? Haven't I been here before? A melody moved my feet. The air soared with Arturo in it, puffing him in and out and making him something and nothing. My heart laughed and laughed. Goodbye to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and all of you, you fools, I am much greater than all of you! Through my veins ran music of blood. Would it last? It could not last. I must hurry. But where? And I ran toward home. Now I am home. I left the book in the park. To hell with it. No more books for me. I kissed my mother. I clung to her passionately. On my knees I fell at her feet to kiss her feet and cling to her ankles until it must have hurt her and amazed her that it was I.

He knew he needed to release her, but once he allowed his physical connection to drop away, he was uncertain if he’d ever have a chance to reconnect. Instinctively, he knew Azami was elusive, like water flowing through fingers, or the wind shifting in the trees. He needed a way to seal her to him. “How does one court a woman in Japan? Do I need your brothers’ permission?” She blinked again. Shocked. A hint of uncertainty crept into her eyes. She frowned, and he bent his head to swallow her protest before she could utter it. Her mouth trembled beneath his, and then she opened to him, like a flower, luring him deeper. Her arms slid around his neck, her body pressing tightly against his. He tightened his fingers in her hair. He was burning, through and through, from the inside out, a hot melting of bone and tissue. He hadn’t known he was lonely or even looking for something. He’d been complete. He loved his wife. He was a man with teammates he trusted implicitly. He lived in wild places of beauty he enjoyed. He hadn’t considered there would be a woman who could ever fit with him, who would ever turn his insides soft and his body hard. Feel the same way, Azami. He didn’t lift his mouth, kissing her again and again because one he’d made the mistake, he was addicted and what was the use fighting it? Not when it felt so damn right. Somewhere along the line, his kiss went from sheer aggression and command, to absolute tenderness. The emotion for her rose like a volcano, encompassing him entirely, drawn from some part of him he’d never known even existed. His mouth was gentle, his hands on her, possessive, yet just as gentle. Another claiming, this coming from that deep unknown well. Feel the same way, Azami, he whispered into her mind. An enticement. A need. He waited, something in him going still, waiting for her answer. Tell me how you’re feeling? She hadn’t pulled away. If anything, her arms had tightened around his neck. He shared every single breath she took, feeling the slight movement of her rib cage and breasts against him, the warm air they exchanged. Like I’m burning alive. Drowning. Like I never want this moment to end. He wasn’t a man to say flowery things to a woman, nor did he even think them, but he shared the honest truth with her. Like we belong. Once he let her go, the world would slip back into kilter. He wanted her to stay with him, to give him a chance with her. She didn’t hesitate, and he loved that about her as well. She gave herself in truth in the same way he did. I feel the same, but one of us has to be sane. She initiated the kiss when he pulled back slightly, chasing after him with her soft mouth, fingers digging tightly into the heavy muscle at his neck, sighing when his lips settled once more over hers. He took his time, kissing her thoroughly, again and again, all the while slipping deeper into her spell and hoping she was falling under his. Is this your idea of sanity? He’d make it his reality. He was falling further down the rabbit hole and he’d make her his sanity if she’d fall with him. Her soft laughter slipped inside his heart, winding there until there was no shaking her loose. Not really, but you have to be the strong one. He kissed her again. And again. Why is that? You started this.

The Congregating of Stars They often meet in mountain lakes, No matter how remote, no matter how deep Down and far they must stream to arrive, Navigating between the steep, vertical piles Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter, Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches Of boulders and ripping ice. Silently, the stars have assembled On the surface of this lost lake tonight, Arranged themselves to match the patterns They maintain in the highest spheres Of the surrounding sky. And they continue on, passing through The smooth, black countenance of the lake, Through that mirror of themselves, down through The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom Stillness of the invisible life and death existing In the nether of those depths. Sky-bound- yet touching every needle In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone, Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars Appear the same as in ancient human ages On the currents of the old seas and the darkened Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized. The stars are congregating, perhaps in celebration, passing through their own names and legends, through fogs, airs, and thunders, the vapors of winter frost and summer pollens. They are ancestors of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes of the night. What can they know?

I turned to go home. Street lights winked down the street all the way to town. I had never seen our neighborhood from this angle. There were Miss Maudie’s, Miss Stephanie’s—there was our house, I could see the porch swing—Miss Rachel’s house was beyond us, plainly visible. I could even see Mrs. Dubose’s. I looked behind me. To the left of the brown door was a long shuttered window. I walked to it, stood in front of it, and turned around. In daylight, I thought, you could see to the postoffice corner. Daylight… in my mind, the night faded. It was daytime and the neighborhood was busy. Miss Stephanie Crawford crossed the street to tell the latest to Miss Rachel. Miss Maudie bent over her azaleas. It was summertime, and two children scampered down the sidewalk toward a man approaching in the distance. The man waved, and the children raced each other to him. It was still summertime, and the children came closer. A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishingpole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention. It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs. Dubose’s. The boy helped his sister to her feet, and they made their way home. Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day’s woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive. Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog. Summer, and he watched his children’s heart break. Autumn again, and Boo’s children needed him. Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

Tamper with my memory?" I asked nervously. "Something like that." He was watching me intently, carefully, but there was humor deep in his eyes. He placed his hands against the Jeep on either side of my head and leaned forward, forcing me to press back against the door. He leaned in even closer, his face inches from mine. I had no room to escape. "Now," he breathed, and just his smell disturbed my thought processes, "what exactly are you worrying about?" "Well, um, hitting a tree —" I gulped "— and dying. And then getting sick." He fought back a smile. Then he bent his head down and touched his cold lips softly to the hollow at the base of my throat. "Are you still worried now?" he murmured against my skin. "Yes." I struggled to concentrate. "About hitting trees and getting sick." His nose drew a line up the skin of my throat to the point of my chin. His cold breath tickled my skin. "And now?" His lips whispered against my jaw. "Trees," I gasped. "Motion sickness." He lifted his face to kiss my eyelids. "Bella, you don't really think I would hit a tree, do you?" "No, but I might." There was no confidence in my voice. He smelled an easy victory. He kissed slowly down my cheek, stopping just at the corner of my mouth. "Would I let a tree hurt you?" His lips barely brushed against my trembling lower lip. "No," I breathed. I knew there was a second part to my brilliant defense, but I couldn't quite call it back. "You see," he said, his lips moving against mine. "There's nothing to be afraid of, is there?" "No," I sighed, giving up. Then he took my face in his hands almost roughly, and kissed me in earnest, his unyielding lips moving against mine. There really was no excuse for my behavior. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn't seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck, and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure. I sighed, and my lips parted. He staggered back, breaking my grip effortlessly. "Damn it, Bella!" he broke off, gasping. "You'll be the death of me, I swear you will." I leaned over, bracing my hands against my knees for support. "You're indestructible," I mumbled, trying to catch my breath. "I might have believed that before I met you.

Age, that brings a dwindling to most forms of life, is at its most majestic in the trees. I have seen living olives that were planted when Caesar was in Gaul. I remember, in Illinois woods, a burr oak which was bent over as a sapling a hundred years ago, to mark an Indian portage trail, and the thews in that flexed bough were still in the prime of life. Compared to that, the strongest human sinew is feeble and quick to decay. Yet structure in both cases is cellular; life in both is protoplasmic. A tree drinks water as I do, and breathes oxygen. There is the difference that it exhales more oxygen than it consumes, so that it sweetens the air where it grows. It lays the dust and tempers the wind. Even when it is felled, it but enters on a new kind of life. Sawn and seasoned and finished, it lays bare the hidden beauty of its heart, in figures and grains more lovely than the most premeditated design. It is stronger, now, than it was in the living tree, and may bear great strains and take many shapes.

The Last Hero The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day, There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away, And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide, Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride. The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars, With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars, Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above, The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love. Feast in my hall, O foemen, and eat and drink and drain, You never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain. The chance of battle changes -- so may all battle be; I stole my lady bride from them, they stole her back from me. I rent her from her red-roofed hall, I rode and saw arise, More lovely than the living flowers the hatred in her eyes. She never loved me, never bent, never was less divine; The sunset never loved me, the wind was never mine. Was it all nothing that she stood imperial in duresse? Silence itself made softer with the sweeping of her dress. O you who drain the cup of life, O you who wear the crown, You never loved a woman's smile as I have loved her frown. The wind blew out from Bergen to the dawning of the day, They ride and run with fifty spears to break and bar my way, I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers, As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers. How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave, Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave. Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie, When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky. The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, -- You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes. Know you what earth shall lose to-night, what rich uncounted loans, What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones? My loves in deep dim meadows, my ships that rode at ease, Ruffling the purple plumage of strange and secret seas. To see this fair earth as it is to me alone was given, The blow that breaks my brow to-night shall break the dome of heaven. The skies I saw, the trees I saw after no eyes shall see, To-night I die the death of God; the stars shall die with me; One sound shall sunder all the spears and break the trumpet's breath: You never laughed in all your life as I shall laugh in death.

A Night Piece The sky is overcast With a continuous cloud of texture close, Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon, Which through that veil is indistinctly seen, A dull, contracted circle, yielding light So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls, Chequering the ground--from rock, plant, tree, or tower. At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam Startles the pensive traveller while he treads His lonesome path, with unobserving eye Bent earthwards; he looks up--the clouds are split Asunder,--and above his head he sees The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens. There, in a black-blue vault she sails along, Followed by multitudes of stars, that, small And sharp, and bright, along the dark abyss Drive as she drives: how fast they wheel away, Yet vanish not!--the wind is in the tree, But they are silent;--still they roll along Immeasurably distant; and the vault, Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, Still deepens its unfathomable depth. At length the Vision closes; and the mind, Not undisturbed by the delight it feels, Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, Is left to muse upon the solemn scene

Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom- apple, plum, pear, cherry; and as we drove by I could see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals. In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the 'Mittel Land' ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which here and there ran down the hillside like tongues of flame. The road was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste. I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadors would not repair them, lest the Turks should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point. Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colors of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water.

I. IN WINTER Myself Pale mornings, and I rise. Still Morning Snow air--my fingers curl. Awakening New snow, O pine of dawn! Winter Echo Thin air! My mind is gone. The Hunter Run! In the magpie's shadow. No Being I, bent. Thin nights receding. II. IN SPRING Spring I walk out the world's door. May Oh, evening in my hair! Spring Rain My doorframe smells of leaves. Song Why should I stop for spring? III. IN SUMMER AND AUTUMN Sunrise Pale bees! O whither now? Fields I did not pick a flower. At Evening Like leaves my feet passed by. Cool Nights At night bare feet on flowers! Sleep Like winds my eyelids close. The Aspen's Song The summer holds me here. The Walker In dream my feet are still. Blue Mountains A deer walks that mountain. God of Roads I, peregrine of noon. September Faint gold! O think not here. A Lady She's sun on autumn leaves. Alone I saw day's shadow strike. A Deer The trees rose in the dawn. Man in Desert His feet run as eyes blink. Desert The tented autumn, gone! The End Dawn rose, and desert shrunk. High Valleys In sleep I filled these lands. Awaiting Snow The well of autumn--dry.

Because you still have that,” he said, pointing toward the wolf. “You kept it secret. You kept it safe.” “It was important,” I muttered. “I had this cubbyhole in the back of my closet in the compound. I hid it away.” “Like a hole in a tree.” I closed my eyes. “Yeah. I guess.” “And no one was able to take it from you.” “No.” “Good,” he said. “And I know you’re still you, Robbie. I know it with everything I have, because that’s not your wolf. It’s Kelly’s.” I took in a stuttering breath. He was in front of me then, and he bent over, trailing his nose along my hairline to my ear. “You took it with you wherever you went,” he whispered. “Because you loved it so and couldn’t bear to leave it behind. With you, it was safe. With you, he was safe. After he was taken from your mind, part of you still held on. Even if you can’t remember anything else, remember that. I asked you once why you carried it with you all the time. You said it was because you never thought you could have something so special, and you needed to remind yourself that it was real.” He kissed my forehead and let me be, closing the door behind him. I sat there for a long time, the wolf of stone in my hands.

light is not a part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse’s mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that even the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer

Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.

Жираф Сегодня, я вижу, особенно грустен твой взгляд, И руки особенно тонки, колени обняв. Послушай: далёко, далёко на озере Чад Изысканный бродит жираф. Ему грациозная стройность и нега дана, И шкуру его украшает волшебный узор, С которым равняться осмелиться только Луна, Дробясь и качаясь на влаге широких озёр. Вдали он подобен цветным парусам корабля, И бег его плавен, как радостный птичий полёт. Я знаю, что много чудесного видит земля, Когда на закате он прячется в мраморный грот. Я знаю весёлые сказки таинственных стран Про чёрную деву, про страсть молодого вождя, Но ты слишком долго вдыхала тяжёлый туман, Ты верить не хочешь во что-нибудь, кроме дождя. И как я тебе расскажу про тропический сад, Про стройный пальмы, про запах немыслимых трав... Ты плачешь? Послушай... далёко, на озере Чад Изысканный бродит жираф. The Giraffe O, the look in your eyes this morning is more than usually sad, With your little arms wrapped round your knees and body bent in half. Let me tell you a story: far, far away, on the distant shores of Lake Chad, There roams a most majestic giraffe Blessed with a handsome build and graceful carriage And a coat painted hypnotic, magical patterns, With which none but the moon above dare compare When her light falls down to be scattered and rocked on the waters, Passing like a blazing sail far out at sea As she runs by, nimble and carefree as a bird in flight. I hear tell the earth has seen many wonderful things When the giraffe hides herself away and the sun sets into night. I know fabulous tales of far off, alien lands, Of a dark maiden, of a young captain’s burning desire, all this I know, But you’ve breathed in the damp marsh air for so long You don’t want to believe in anything but the rain out your window. I still haven’t told you about her tropic garden, with the slenderest palm trees, The sweetest wildflowers, meadows of unbelievable grass . . . Are you crying? Let me tell you a story: far away, on the distant shores of Lake Chad, There roams a most majestic giraffe.

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what’s to come. Between the curtain of trees at every side, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you, and your own plodding weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come. Each time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope there is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long. Eventually you reach a height where you can see the tops of the topmost trees, with nothing but clear sky beyond, and your faltering spirit stirs—nearly there now!—but this is a pitiless deception. The elusive summit continually retreats by whatever distance you press forward, so that each time the canopy parts enough to give a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as remote, as unattainable, as before. Still you stagger on. What else can you do? When, after ages and ages, you finally reach the telltale world of truly high ground, where the chilled air smells of pine sap and the vegetation is gnarled and tough and wind bent, and push through to the mountain’s open pinnacle, you are, alas, past caring. You sprawl face down on a sloping pavement of gneiss, pressed to the rock by the weight of your pack, and lie there for some minutes, reflecting in a distant, out-of-body way that you have never before looked this closely at lichen, not in fact looked this closely at anything in the natural world since you were four years old and had your first magnifying glass. Finally, with a weary puff, you roll over, unhook yourself from your pack, struggle to your feet, and realize—again in a remote, light-headed, curiously not-there way—that the view is sensational: a boundless vista of wooded mountains, unmarked by human hand, marching off in every direction. This really could be heaven.

Astarte has come again, more powerful than before. She possesses me. She lies in wait for me. December 97 My cruelty has also returned: the cruelty which frightens me. It lies dormant for months, for years, and then all at once awakens, bursts forth and - once the crisis is over - leaves me in mortal terror of myself. Just now in the avenue of the Bois, I whipped my dog till he bled, and for nothing - for not coming immediately when I called! The poor animal was there before me, his spine arched, cowering close to the ground, with his great, almost human, eyes fixed on me... and his lamentable howling! It was as though he were waiting for the butcher! But it was as if a kind of drunkenness had possessed me. The more I struck out the more I wanted to strike; every shudder of that quivering flesh filled me with some incomprehensible ardour. A circle of onlookers formed around me, and I only stopped myself for the sake of my self-respect. Afterwards, I was ashamed. I am always ashamed of myself nowadays. The pulse of life has always filled me with a peculiar rage to destroy. When I think of two beings in love, I experience an agonising sensation; by virtue of some bizarre backlash, there is something which smothers and oppresses me, and I suffocate, to the point of anguish. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night to the muted hubbub of bumps and voices which suddenly become perceptible in the dormant city - all the cries of sexual excitement and sensuality which are the nocturnal respiration of cities - I feel weak. They rise up around me, submerging me in a sluggish flux of embraces and a tide of spasms. A crushing weight presses down on my chest; a cold sweat breaks out on my brow and my heart is heavy - so heavy that I have to get up, run bare-foot and breathless, to my window, and open both shutters, trying desperately to breathe. What an atrocious sensation it is! It is as if two arms of steel bear down upon my shoulders and a kind of hunger hollows out my stomach, tearing apart my whole being! A hunger to exterminate love. Oh, those nights! The long hours I have spent at my window, bent over the immobile trees of the square and the paving-stones of the deserted street, on watch in the silence of the city, starting at the least noise! The nights I have passed, my heart hammering in anguish, wretchedly and impatiently waiting for my torment to consent to leave me, and for my desire to fold up the heavy wings which beat inside the walls of my being like the wings of some great fluttering bird! Oh, my cruel and interminable nights of impotent rebellion against the rutting of Paris abed: those nights when I would have liked to embrace all the bodies, to suck in all the breaths and sup all the mouths... those nights which would find me, in the morning, prostrate on the carpet, scratching it still with inert and ineffectual fingers... fingers which never know anything but emptiness, whose nails are still taut with the passion of murder twenty-four hours after the crises... nails which I will one day end up plunging into the satined flesh of a neck, and... It is quite clear, you see, that I am possessed by a demon... a demon which doctors would treat with some bromide or with all-healing sal ammoniac! As if medicines could ever be imagined to be effective against such evil!

He knew he needed to release her, but once he allowed his physical connection to drop away, he was uncertain if he’d ever have a chance to reconnect. Instinctively, he knew Azami was elusive, like water flowing through fingers, or the wind shifting in the trees. He needed a way to seal her to him. “How does one court a woman in Japan? Do I need your brothers’ permission?” She blinked again. Shocked. A hint of uncertainty crept into her eyes. She frowned, and he bent his head to swallow her protest before she could utter it. Her mouth trembled beneath his, and then she opened to him, like a flower, luring him deeper. Her arms slid around his neck, her body pressing tightly against his. He tightened his fingers in her hair. He was burning, through and through, from the inside out, a hot melting of bone and tissue. He hadn’t known he was lonely or even looking for something. He’d been complete. He loved his life. He was a man with teammates he trusted implicitly. He lived in wild places of beauty he enjoyed. He hadn’t considered there would be a woman who could ever fit with him, who would ever turn his insides soft and his body hard. Feel the same way, Azami. He didn’t lift his mouth, kissing her again and again because one he’d made the mistake, he was addicted and what was the use fighting it? Not when it felt so damn right. Somewhere along the line, his kiss went from sheer aggression and command, to absolute tenderness. The emotion for her rose like a volcano, encompassing him entirely, drawn from some part of him he’d never known even existed. His mouth was gentle, his hands on her, possessive, yet just as gentle. Another claiming, this coming from that deep unknown well. Feel the same way, Azami, he whispered into her mind. An enticement. A need. He waited, something in him going still, waiting for her answer.

Merry Christmas,Ja-" To which he immediately cut her off with a very testy, "Bloody hell it is." Though he did halt his progress to offer her a brief smile, adding, "Good to see you,Molly," then in the very same breath, "Where's that worthless brother of mine?" She was surprised enough to ask, "Ah,which brother would that be?" when she knew very well he would never refer to Edward or Jason, whom the two younger brothers termed the elders, in that way.But then,Jason shared everything with her about his family, so she knew them as well as he did. So his derogatory answer didn't really add to her surprise. "The infant." She winced at his tone,though, as well as his expression, which had reverted to deadly menace at mention of the "infant." Big,blond, and handsome, James Malory was,just like his elder brothers, and rarely did anyone actually see him looking angry. When James was annoyed with someone, he usually very calmly ripped the person to shreds with his devilish wit, and by his inscrutable expression, the victim had absolutely no warning such pointed barbs would be headed his or her way. The infant, or rather, Anthony, had heard James's voice and, unfortunately, stuck his head around the parlor door to determine James's mood, which wasn't hard to misinterpret with the baleful glare that came his way. Which was probably why the parlor door immediately slammed shut. "Oh,dear," Molly said as James stormed off. Through the years she'd become accustomed to the Malorys' behavior, but a times it still alarmed her. What ensued was a tug of war in the reverse, so to speak, with James shoving his considerable weight against the parlor door, and Anthony on the other side doing his best to keep it from opening. Anthony managed for a bit. He wasn't as hefty as his brother, but he was taller and well muscled. But he must have known he couldn't hold out indefinitely, especially when James started to slam his shoulder against the door,which got it nearly half open before Anthony could manage to slam it shut again. But what Anthony did to solve his dilemma produced Molly's second "Oh,dear." When James threw his weight against the door for the third time, it opened ahead of him and he unfortunately couldn't halt his progress into the room. A rather loud crash followed. A few moments later James was up again suting pine needles off his shoulders. Reggie and Molly,alarmed by the noise, soon followed the men into the room. Anthony had picked up his daughter Jamie who had been looking at the tree with her nursemaid and was now holding her like a shield in front of him while the tree lay ingloriously on its side. Anthony knew his brother wouldn't risk harming one of the children for any reason, and the ploy worked. "Infants hiding behind infants, how apropos," James sneered. "Is,aint it?" Anthony grinned and kissed the top of his daughter's head. "Least it works." James was not amused, and ordered, barked, actually. "Put my niece down." "Wouldn't think of it, old man-least not until I find out why you want to murder me." Anthony's wife, Roslynn, bent over one of the twins, didn't turn about to say, "Excuse me? There will be no murdering in front of the children.

You see,” continued the minister, bowing thankfully to the duke, “Dictionopolis is the place where all the words in the world come from. They’re grown right here in our orchards.” “I didn’t know that words grew on trees,” said Milo timidly. “Where did you think they grew?” shouted the earl irritably. A small crowd began to gather to see the little boy who didn’t know that letters grew on trees. “I didn’t know they grew at all,” admitted Milo even more timidly. Several people shook their heads sadly. “Well, money doesn’t grow on trees, does it?” demanded the count. “I’ve heard not,” said Milo. “Then something must. Why not words?” exclaimed the undersecretary triumphantly. The crowd cheered his display of logic and continued about its business. “To continue,” continued the minister impatiently. “Once a week by royal proclamation the word market is held here in the great square and people come from everywhere to buy the words they need or trade in the words they haven’t used.” “Our job,” said the count, “is to see that all the words sold are proper ones, for it wouldn’t do to sell someone a word that had no meaning or didn’t exist at all. For instance, if you bought a word like ghlbtsk, where would you use it?” “It would be difficult,” thought Milo—but there were so many words that were difficult, and he knew hardly any of them. “But we never choose which ones to use,” explained the earl as they walked toward the market stalls, “for as long as they mean what they mean to mean we don’t care if they make sense or nonsense.” “Innocence or magnificence,” added the count. “Reticence or common sense,” said the undersecretary. “That seems simple enough,” said Milo, trying to be polite. “Easy as falling off a log,” cried the earl, falling off a log with a loud thump. “Must you be so clumsy?” shouted the duke. “All I said was——” began the earl, rubbing his head. “We heard you,” said the minister angrily, “and you’ll have to find an expression that’s less dangerous.” The earl dusted himself off as the others snickered audibly. “You see,” cautioned the count, “you must pick your words very carefully and be sure to say just what you intend to say. And now we must leave to make preparations for the Royal Banquet.” “You’ll be there, of course,” said the minister. But before Milo had a chance to say anything, they were rushing off across the square as fast as they had come. “Enjoy yourself in the market,” shouted back the undersecretary. “Market,” recited the duke: “an open space or covered building in which——” And that was the last Milo heard as they disappeared into the crowd. “I never knew words could be so confusing,” Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog’s ear. “Only when you use a lot to say a little,” answered Tock. Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he’d heard all day. “Come,” he shouted, “let’s see the market. It looks very exciting.

Please,' she says, her head bent. 'Please. You must try to break the curse. I know that you are the queen by right and that you may not want him back, but-' If anything could have increased my astonishment, it was that. 'You think that I'd-' 'I didn't know you, before,' she says, the anguish clear in her voice. There is a hitch in her breath that comes with weeping. 'I thought you were just some mortal.' I have to bite my tongue at that, but I don't interrupt her. 'When you became his seneschal, I told myself that he wanted you for your lying tongue. Or because you'd become biddable, although you never were before. I should have believed you when you told him he didn't know the least of what you could do. 'While you were in exile, I got more of the story out of him. I know you don't believe this, but Cardan and I were friends before we were lovers, before Locke. He was my first friend when I came here from the Undersea. And we were friends, even after everything. I hate that he loves you.' 'He hated it, too,' I say with a laugh that sounds more brittle than I'd like. Nicasia fixes me with a long look. 'No, he didn't.' To that, I can only be silent. 'He frightens the Folk, but he's not what you think he is,' Nicasia says. 'Do you remember the servants that Balekin had? The human servants?' I nod mutely. Of course I remember. I will never forget Sophie and her pockets full of stones. 'They'd go missing sometimes, and there were rumours that Cardan hurt them, but it wasn't true. He'd return them to the mortal world.' I admit, I'm surprised. 'Why?' She throws up a hand. 'I don't know! Perhaps to annoy his brother. But you're human, so I thought you'd like that he did it. And he sent you a gown. For the coronation.' I remember it- the ball gown in the colours of the night, with the stark outlines of trees stitched on it and the crystals for stars. A thousand times more beautiful than the dress I commissioned. I had thought perhaps it came from Prince Dain, since it was his coronation and I'd sworn to be his creature when I'd joined the Court of Shadows. 'He never told you, did he?' Nicasia says. 'So see? Those are two nice things about him you didn't know. And I saw the way you used to look at him when you didn't think anyone was watching you.' I bite the inside of my cheek, embarrassed despite the fact that we were lovers, and wed, and it should hardly be a secret that we like each other. 'So promise me,' she says. 'Promise me you'll help him.' I think of the golden bridle, about the future the stars predicted. 'I don't know how to break the curse,' I say, all the tears I haven't shed welling up in my eyes. 'If I could, do you think i would be at this stupid banquet? Tell me what I must slay, what I must steal, tell me the riddle I must solve or the hag I must trick. Only tell me the way, and I will do it, no matter the danger, no matter the hardship, no matter the cost.' My voice breaks. She gives me a steady look. Whatever else I might think of her, she really does care for Cardan. And as tears roll down my cheeks, to her astonishment, I think she realises I do, too. Much good it does him.

It is true. I did fall asleep at the wheel. We nearly went right off a cliff down into a gorge. But there were extenuating circumstances.” Ian snickered. “Are you going to pull out the cry-baby card? He had a little bitty wound he forgot to tell us about, that’s how small it was. Ever since he fell asleep he’s been trying to make us believe that contributed.” “It wasn’t little. I have a scar. A knife fight.” Sam was righteous about it. “He barely nicked you,” Ian sneered. “A tiny little slice that looked like a paper cut.” Sam extended his arm to Azami so she could see the evidence of the two-inch line of white marring his darker skin. “I bled profusely. I was weak and we hadn’t slept in days.” “Profusely?” Ian echoed. “Ha! Two drops of blood is not profuse bleeding, Knight. We hadn’t slept in days, that much is true, but the rest . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head and rolling his eyes at Azami. Azami examined the barely there scar. The knife hadn’t inflicted much damage, and Sam knew she’d seen evidence of much worse wounds. “Had you been drinking?” she asked, her eyes wide with innocence. Those long lashes fanned her cheeks as she gaze at him until his heart tripped all over itself. Sam groaned. “Don’t listen to him. I wasn’t drinking, but once we were pretty much in the middle of a hurricane in the South Pacific on a rescue mission and Ian here decides he has to go into this bar . . .” “Oh, no.” Ian burst out laughing. “You’re not telling her that story.” “You did, man. He made us all go in there, with the dirtbag we’d rescued, by the way,” Sam told Azami. “We had to climb out the windows and get on the roof at one point when the place flooded. I swear ther was a crocodile as big as a house coming right at us. We were running for our lives, laughing and trying to keep that idiot Frenchman alive.” “You said to throw him to the crocs,” Ian reminded. “What was in the bar that you had to go in?” Azami asked, clearly puzzled. “Crocodiles,” Sam and Ian said simultaneously. They both burst out laughing. Azami shook her head. “You two could be crazy. Are you making these stories up?” “Ryland wishes we made them up,” Sam said. “Seriously, we’re sneaking past this bar right in the middle of an enemy-occupied village and there’s this sign on the bar that says swim with the crocs and if you survive, free drinks forever. The wind is howling and trees are bent almost double and we’re carrying the sack of shit . . . er . . . our prize because the dirtbag refuses to run even to save his own life—” “The man is seriously heavy,” Ian interrupted. “He was kidnapped and held for ransom for two years. I guess he decided to cook for his captors so they wouldn’t treat him bad. He tried to hide in the closet when we came for him. He didn’t want to go out in the rain.” “He was the biggest pain in the ass you could imagine,” Sam continued, laughing at the memory. “He squealed every time we slipped in the mud and went down.” “The river had flooded the village,” Sam added. “We were walking through a couple of feet of water. We’re all muddy and he’s wiggling and squeaking in a high-pitched voice and Ian spots this sign hanging on the bar.