Can you be sure?" "I haven't spent the last fifteen hundred years learning how to knit my own socks, boy!" The crone looked like she might box Heinrich's ears, if she could reach them.

I already have a plan." Celie said, raising her hand as she would with her tutor. "Do you?" Rolf's eyes gleamed. "What is it?" "I don't think you'll like it, Lilah." Celie apologized straightaway. "It involves manure...a great deal of manure." Rolf started to laugh again.

Shaking herself, Petunia looked around. Several of her sisters had been talking to her, but she hadn't heard them. "And that answers our questions about why he gave himself up," Poppy was saying, a smile turning up one corner of her mouth as she looked at Petunia. "Now if everyone could please avoid saying his name [Oliver], so that Petunia doesn't drift off again...?

How wonderful," he purred. "I've been longing to speak to you for days, Princess Cecelia." "And I've been wanting to kick you in the shin for days.

You were a soldier?" "Yes, sir." "You barely look old enough to have seen the last battle." "My father was a career army man, sir. I was there at the first engagement with Analousia, and took up my father's rifle when I was barely fifteen." "Saints preserve us," Dr. Kelling said, and squeezed Galen's shoulder. "What have we done to our youth?

And the prince who had once been a bear pulled close the girl who had once had no name, and kissed her.

Be careful. Wait out your year. Come home.