Spear Nicola Griffith Quotes

A name, she thinks, is what makes a person who they are. A name is how they know themself.

Being here is like standing at the edge of the sea under a wide sky: clear, open, clean, and bright. Here is where I am meant to be.

Even the dead had names.

All different yet somehow alike-not family but easy with one another and loud, laughing and singing, bright and clean. The same bright, the same clean she remembered from the scent of the promised lake. The girl’s heart soared: a story came alive from legend, knights hunting dragons!

They would write songs of what followed: the horses dancing; the spears flickering like swords, faster than the eye could see; Llanza’s perfect seat; Peretur’s grace, lithe as a cat; the sweat running down their mounts’ flanks. The crack of Llanza’s spear as it split.

You fight not to take or break but to make.

Most of those who would become bandits were good, decent folk; they would form if they could. He is right to try. Right to hope for it, right to fight for it. That’s what I would fight for.

To hear you talk is like hearing him talk when he first become king.

Peretur wanted to reach out and touch her hand, but Nimuë looked brittle enough to fall apart. So she just waited.

For now that they sat close Peretur understood that the cool depths she had dreamt of lived as much in this woman as in the lake.

They sat opposite each other, like enemies at truce.

They are malicious, gods, these Tuath, to make such things to fight over.

For one brief moment the three of them were one, and they stood against six attackers almost without effort.

She moved faster, and so did he. She leaned farther, and so did he. Then she began to draw on the life around her-the hum in the air, the flight of the kicked dirt-and changed again.

Honesty and frankness did not mean the captured bandits were fine folk, or kind, only that they might not murder another in their sleep.

By the time the acorns began to harden, farmers had begun to send messages to her, pleas to rid their heath or valley or wood of bandits.

Peretur rode now through lands abandoned by people and sharp with the scent of vinegar where apples, unpicked, had fallen and rotted in the grass.

A good land, and rich, but poisoned by fear.

When she left it was the last full swell of summer, when apples hung formed but still green from the trees.

Midway across a cold, clear stream she caught the black scent of corruption, and stopped.

She might wish Bony were bigger, and she might wish for a shield, but this was what she had.

The shield on his left arm was matcing red leather stretched over wood and painted with a black snake with golden eyes and tongue; around its edge another snake, this time of armoured scales, glinted in the shimmering tree light.

Peretur patted Bony’s shoulder, and could not tell if the horse trembled or she did. Was this fear?

She felt once again Angharad’s breath on her cheek-Red is your colour-and that first cool kiss of the dream lake.

The lake was her destiny; her path to it lay through this knight.

She swayed with Bony, loose and lithe as the river, while the bandit knight bore down on like a red tide.

He was ferment and rot wearing the gear of a prince and lord, a wave of blood and rage.

Send me strength, she called-to whom?-and kicked Bony to a gallop, and hurled her javelin hard and true.

Now his knowledge was her knowledge.

She could not move fast against the weight of water, not against a mounted man, so she did the only thing she could and hurled the boar spear across the horse’s path, straight into the bank.

He grinned, and winked one of those startling greened-bronze eyes.

Cei called more taunts, but she was smelling the wind and no longer listening.

There was no wind in the hall, no fly to land on Gwenhwyfar’s hand and tell Peretur all she needed-and she could read nothing in the queen’s carefully judged smile.

His eyes were hooked so deep in their sockets she could not tell at first what colour they were. But she was not looking hard, because she had eyes only for the sword at this side, which drew her so strongly she had to use half her attention to not reach out to the silvery hilt.

Arturus looked at Peretur as though looking at an enemy, through his visor.

He rested his palm on the pommel of his sword in what Peretur recognized not as a threat but the habit of a possessive man reassuing himself of his treasure. Mine. This is mine and you may not have it.

The sword called to her, and somehow Arturus felt it.

I never knew my father,” she said again, slowly. She could only tell the truth. “Of the rest, I may not speak.

It was like the village all over again; she had won, but still must leave. She could not bear it.

You have thrown out a signal bright enough to draw any who can hear and see; now they will be clamouring to enter you, to know you, to have you as a bee might climb inside a flower. And like a bee they will strip you bare and leave you heavy will all that makes you who you are.

I’m flustered, because you startled me. No one has startled me in twenty years, Peretur Paladr Hir, not since I was a child. And now you have done it twice.

Artos is afraid of you, and I begin to understand why.

She could speak if she chose, but she was not ready to choose because she did not understand.

Was it her true nature to take from others her own power?

You get the look of a man haunted by guilt. Anyone might believe you’re keeping a dreadful secret. Well, there is no secret I know of that can’t be helped by food. So for pity’s sake come sit, and while we eat we’ll talk of what’s to be done about Artos.

She heard the secret, perhaps a secret no one wholly mortal should hear.

Peretur had never seen so many beasts living in so small a space; even closed, if she shut her eyes she could hear them, feel them, taste their curiosity.

It was a good place, a fine place, it should have been her place to belong. Only it was not; Arturus did not want her.

His eyes were as liquid as run honey, dark clover honey, and his hair was a rich brown with bronze sun straks, but his beard, like his eyebrows, was black. His face and hands were the colour of walnut, or perhaps elm bark, but lighter where his sleeves rose above his wrists. He was not thick-boned and heavy-muscled like Cei, but whippy as a hazel rod, and she knew she would not face him lightly in battle.

They both smiled, and Peretur felt a little less lonely, a little less lost.

She’s subtle and not to be meddled with.

Her childhood, her life, and she kept forgetting; her mother’s geas kept taking it away. Then she was thinking of her mother, seeing her in the clearing on one of her good days, forget-me-not eyes dancing with light. Mother? She listened. Nothing.

She wiped her eyes, her not-blue eyes, and walked on through a drift of rain so fine it settled on her sleeve like dew.

She was tired of striving, tired of the sideways look of those who did not trust her.

A woman with hair a dusty black-brown and eyes of deep blue-the deep dark blue of the dome of sky late in summer when the day turns towards night, but dark won’t fall, not quite, because summer wants to stay, hold on the world, linger forever.

Blue eyes, royal blue, endlessly deep, and Peretur, helpless, fell in.

The woman knelt by Peretur, close enough to touch her on the knee, though she did not.

For a moment Peretur could not speak, only sit with sensation flickering up and down her belly and back, like a school of fish swimming in and out of the light.

Peretur blinked, and the strange underwater image of the man lying on stone dissolved into mist. She swayed again, and this time Nimuë steadied her.

Peretur did not argue, she did not think of arguing. They were in accord, even though she could no longer see into Nimuë, in that shared moment she felt-and knew Nimuë felt-that they had known each other all their lives.

By the time they saw the outer walls of Caer Leon, her legs were steadier though inside she felt a shiver like an ash key twirling too fast in the wind.

Peretur tasted the despair in her words; the bone-bleaching fear of her recent life; starving, running, terrified, cold, always hunted, nowhere to rest, even-especially-from her own band.

This boy is a man. Twice the man you are. He is kind where you’re cruel, he is strong where you’re weak, and he knows full well how to make a girl want to be got, and to get her. And when he does, he can last long, longer, I wager, than you! He is Peretur Paladn Hir, and he is destined for greatness!

She wanted time to reel itself back to the morning then reel out again, rightly, the way it should have, the way it was faited.

Most importantly for me, historical accuracy also meant this could not be a story of only straight, white, nondisabled men. Crips, queers, women and other genders, and people of colour are an integral part of the history of Britain—we are embedded at every level of society, present during every change, and part of every problem and its solution. We are here now; we were there then. So we are in this story.

when the snow begins to fall once again, she catches a flake on her tongue and feels, lapping against her belly, the lake it was drawn from by summer sun, far away—a lake like a promise she will one day know. Then as the world folds down for winter, so too do the girl and her mother, listening to the crackle of flame and, beyond the leather door curtain, the soft hiss of snow settling over the hills and hollows like white felt.

One afternoon when the winter was done and the world had begun to turn towards the light, with green shoots thrusting through the dark earth, the girl roamed the high fell in the steeper, northern part of the valley.

We would have lost more without our mysterious helper who has melted away like mist.

The whole thing has the smell of the uncanny.

I imagined Cei as the kind of English rugby player I used to know: mostly kind—if he thinks you’re like him; not stupid but lazy and willing to learn only when prodded; and (mostly) just this side of being an asshole but (almost) always very close to the line. Basically, a jerk but with some good points, and useful in a fight. I’ve spent a lot of time in a lot of pubs with men like Cei.

The girl could tell he did not like this man whose business was the uncanny.

Artos, she thought. A king. In Caer Leon. The words rang in her head like a bell, like a scent of the lake, like the bright clean shimmer of the Companions.

She withdrew to the shadows and began the long walk back under a twist of stars.

She looked at her big hand, red now. Men’s blood. She had killed a man; more than one man. The world looked no different, but she felt different in it, as though it had tilted on its axis and the line of stars had changed.

The child would wake in the night to her mother’s dream cries-a man coming to steal her, steal her child, steal her payment-and her mother would not eat, only hunch over the bowel and scry, and follow the girl about with haunted eyes.

She will never say what the girl’s true name is, or who the other was, and the stories are never the same. And always the cave is hidden.

Even direct from the hearth it will not burn hand that holds it, and any who drink from it are healed.

And when she, too, goes back to her mother, cheeks blooming fresh with wild roaming, her mother weeps and begs her to stay close, stay safe-for the girl is hers, her gift, her treasure, her payment, all she has-but the girl feels her growing strength; she must run, she must climb, she must test her power.

They are noisy; their untidy feet snap twigs and kick stones without heed for what might hear.

She would shout at the girl and rant, confusing her, confusing the tales, for now Elen herself was in them.

These are tales of the world,” she told her. “All the adventure, all the different and new you need.

When a time came to carve her name, would it be Dawnged, girl of Ystrad, T´ywi or Tâl, payment to Elen, or would she one day find her true name?

She saw more blood in the snow that winter than she had in the whole of her life.

The urge to roam increased upon her like a thirst.

Now when she spied on women and men she crept close and closer, closer than was safe, because she was drawn to the curve of a lip, the gleam of sweat on a throat, and she longed to feel the weigh of glossy hair on her skin.

She looked nothing like that young wife, and nothing like the men with hair on their faces. Her mother’s hair, almost, but not her eyes.

She touched the pool and fell the echo of that faraway lake, the promise of all that was wide and bright and clear that she would one one day find.

Did its magic work? It had not saved the man who wore it.

Perhaps there was no magic for faling off your own mount and dying alone and unmasked.

The metal rippled and flowed where it was not rusted.

In the wild waste, a girl, growing.

The girl looked at the only home she had known, the furniture she had built with her own hands, the beautiful bowl by the hearth as new as the day the smith made it, and at her mother, who sat as though made of stone facing the cooling hearth with her back to the entrance and to the girl.

Nothing but the sigh of embers into ash.

He will find you,” Elen said. “Beyond this cave and this valley, he will scent you on the wind. And when he does he will come to claim what is his. I will never see you again. I loved you, child, loved you so much I did not name you, for naming calls. But now you are leaving, and I will give you your name. The four treasures of the Tuath are the sword, which is given, the stone, which is hidden, the cup, which I have, and the spear. You are that spear. You are that spear. You are Bêr-hyddur, my spear enduring. You are Peretur. Know that I do not remove my ward, and under my geas will remain hidden, even from you. Know, too: you have broken my heart.

After some months on the road she was taller still, her muscles hard but her smile more ready.

Those she met were wary at first-they saw the house and sword, they saw the fish-mail and spears and heard the way she spoke, and hid their gold and their daughters. But she learnt to hide most of her strength, hide her real self, drop her voice, and use the rougher tongue the common folk spoke on the fellside; she learn to use her soft face, hard muscles, and sweet smile to remind them of some son or nephew or long-ago sweetheart. And then they saw the careful mends of mismatched gear and the missing pommel stone, the bony unbitted horse, and set aside their misgivings for a while.

As she rode, her dreams filled with that yielding breast and warm breath and those luscious lips until she thought she might run mad.

She swallowed, and her heart filled with light she had known as a child.

Her lips were soft and plump as rain and Peretur wanted to plunge her hands deep into her golden yellow hair, deep under her skirts to the soft places beneath, and she could feel their hearts thundering like horss, like hoses yoked and racing together, pulling towards the same goal, beanth tearing in and out.

Whoever you are, Peretur, I would have you.