Skye kissed her forehead. "You saved my life." Katsa smiled. "You Lienid are very outward in your affection." "I'm going to name my firstborn child after you." Katsa laughed at that. "For the child's sake, wait for a girl. Or even better, wait until all your children are older and give my name to whichever is the most troublesome and obstinate." Skye burst into laughter and hugged her, and Katsa returned his embrace. And realized that quite without her intending it, her guarded heart had made another friend.

She would like to restrain from cruelty and receive no admiration for it.

I was doing science," Giddon said. "He threw a bean." "I was testing the impact of a bean upon water," Bann said. "That's not even a real thing." "Perhaps I'll test the impact of a bean upon your beautiful white shirt.

I have no doubt that you are more than capable of bringing the Monsean queen and my son and the rest of my sons and a hundred Nanderan kittens through an onslaught of howling raiders if you chose to.

Ivan had contrived somehow in the dark of night to replace every watermelon in the watermelon patch with a gravestone, and every gravestone in the engraver's lot with a watermelon

Dear Brigan, she thought to herself. People want incongruous, impossible things. Horses do, too.

Your sadness is one of the things that makes you beautiful to me. Don't you see that? I understand it. It makes my own sadness less frightening." (Brigan)