Everyone is afraid of you and when folk are afraid of a person it usually means the person is cruel in some way, and I think you are cruel, Miss Marquess, but please don’t punish me for saying it. I think you know you’re cruel. I think you like being cruel. I think calling you cruel is the same as calling someone else kind. And I don’t want to run errands for someone cruel.

I am the Walker and the Maze.

I am freedom and I will eat your heart

I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.

The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it.

A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.

I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.