Uprooted Quotes
"Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley."
"He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful."
"Everyone says you love a Dragon-born girl differently as she gets older; you can’t help it."
"I wasn’t old enough to be wise, so I loved her more, not less, because I knew she would be taken from me soon."
"No parent could really be sorry, to have a few faults in a Dragon-born girl."
"You village girls are all tedious at the beginning, more or less."
"If only I’d been better trained to serve, if only I’d ever really thought I might be chosen and had been more ready for it."
"Those with the gift must be taught: the king’s law requires it."
"I would have been delighted to leave you moldering in your coin-sized village, but my options were painfully limited."
"Don’t all peasant girls dream of princes and ballgowns? Try to degrade it, then."
"He loved his magic, and he would have shared that love with me."
"But that was as far as my gifts went, I’d always thought."
"I didn’t mind my own lack of progress, or how much it maddened him."
"They needed help, and I was the only one left who could give it."
"I began desperately to rip apart the rest of my heap of dresses."
"I was still heavy-eyed and grieving, more awkward even than usual."
"I realized only then that he was leaving me here."
"It was hard to be alone and cold in my high tower room, locked away."
"Looking down at my tiny feast only made me feel more desperately lonely."
"It comes, I suppose, of spending too much time alone indoors."
"But there’s no kindness in offering false hope."
"I followed my own faint breath and imagined myself a small mouse hiding from owls."
"I lost myself in the cool shady green, in the songs of birds and frogs."
"There was a song in this forest, too, but it was a savage song, whispering of madness and tearing and rage."
"The earth had closed up around the middle of its body, and it couldn’t pull itself out."
"Magic was pouring out of me, a torrent: every warning the Dragon had ever given me forgotten and ignored."
"I couldn’t imagine a world where I lived, where I left this behind me."
"I caught her wrist, her arm limp and heavy, and pulled."
"She fell out of the horrible dark gap bending at the waist like a rag doll."
"Her skin was fish-pale, sickly, like all the sun had been drunk out of her."
"I bent down and heaved her onto my shoulders."
"The entire book must be invoked in a single sitting to make the spell."
"The spell came singing out of us, effortless as water running downhill."
"I looked up into Kasia’s face, hungry for one last sight of her, but the Wood looked out of her eyes at me."
"Kasia fell upon me. I screamed with joy and threw my arms around her."
"I caught her shoulders and held her off with a scream. Sap was running from her face, staining her dress."
"The light of the Summoning was brightening, filling every corner of the room, impossible to evade."
"Kasia still held her own hands away from my throat."
"But once the tree was lost — and it was surely already too far gone, whether the girl lived or died — then of course it would try to find a way to turn the loss to good account."
"I hadn’t connected it to sex — sex was poetic references in songs, my mother’s practical instructions, and those few awful hideous moments in the tower with Prince Marek, where I might as well have been a rag doll as far as he’d cared."
"I started laughing, helplessly, almost snorting: I was dizzy with magic and alarm."
""I think so," I said, and he slowly eased his hand from mine, leaving me to keep up the wild sprawling rosebush."
""You won’t get anything here," I told the hovering bee, and blew at it, but it only tried again."
"The Dragon had stopped staring over my head, any awkwardness falling before his passion for magic."
"Together we managed to drag ourselves out. The rosebush dwindled little by little down to a single bloom; the false bees climbed into flowers as they closed, or simply dissolved into the air."
""Better than a deliberate coward," the prince said, grinning at him with all his teeth, violence like a living thing in the room taking shape between them."
""What I intend to do now is attach the watching spell to them. The one the sentinels carry," he added."
""You intolerable lunatic," he snarled at me, and then he caught my face between his hands and kissed me."
"The only mercy you can give the corrupted is a sharpened blade."
"I would have thought even a noblewoman had more sense than that."
"I'm Agnieszka. I came with Kasia and the queen."
"Men to fight the Wood, as many as you can spare, Your Majesty."
"Everything’s to be done right and by the law."
"Well, I’m surprised to hear it of Sarkan; but better men than he have lost their heads over a girl not half their age."
"Is that magic enough to put me on the list? Or do you want to see more?"
"My dear Lady Agnieszka, how lovely that you were able to come, and what a charming gown: you are sure to start a new fashion."
"I don’t choose to let you lock my mother up in your tower until it pleases you to let her out again, Dragon."
"They wanted to find their way to flesh, and he was only showing them the way to go."
"Sowing seeds of silver lines into the air felt like an easy task, a mere extension of one's will."
"The rhythm of battle is like hauling on a heavy fishing-net, then pausing to sip water and rest."
"He can't have an endless supply of them," I said, drained and aching from the relentless assault.
"The taste of home rested in those deep wine-red cherries, preserved in sugar and spirits."
"Lie down and get a little sleep. He'll likely try a final push just before morning."
"The Wood is in her," a realization that changed everything.
"The queen lifted her sword again and again, stabbing and hacking with brutal practicality."
"The dead didn't bleed. Their faces were sagging and blank, uninterested in their own demise."
"Let them cut me limb from limb first!" she cried out, her voice ringing with defiance.
"They learned the wrong things," Linaya said, her voice carrying the weight of centuries.
"Our sorrow and fear will poison my roots," she explained, a solemn promise of inevitable decay.
"The Wood-queen's essence dragged over our skin with the oily horror of corruption."
"A prison meant to hold her, a tomb that became her throne."
"We decided that we would rather not remember," Linaya's choice was a silent testament to their despair.
"The ground was trembling with her, not with cold but rage."
"His body arched, horror in his face...his toes were stretched out into new roots."
"The sapling sank away with the grove; the broken tree rose with us."
"The misery clung to my skin, wanting to climb inside."
"I had to stop them...They burned the trees...They will always cut them down."
"She’d remembered how to kill and how to hate, and she’d forgotten how to grow."
"I’ll help you, if you want to save her, you can."
"I knew she’d tried. She’d killed the tower-lord and his soldiers, she’d planted all the fields with new trees."
"I reached out, and from the one low-hanging bough of the broken tree, I took the single waiting fruit."
"The deep quiet was already settling back upon the grove, as if all the fire and rage we’d brought could make only a brief interruption in its peace."
"I stood with my hands on the bark for a long time, trying to reach them."
"The grey sorrow of it stayed with me afterwards."
"All the songs streaming out of Polnya were wrong about me in different and alarming ways."
"I sang Jaga’s walking-song and hurried away, back towards home."
"I could taste the forest in it, the running magic of the Spindle caught in roots and branches and fruit, infused with sunlight to become sweet juice on my tongue."
"I was hungry, so I ate a fruit from my basket as I walked."
"We were all happy, all together, and I could recognize the song of the river running through the ground beneath our feet, the song we really danced to."
"He looked grander than the king’s ballroom, and perfectly improbable."