Your wedding completely changes the direction of your life, you know, no matter how greatly you desire it. I think that moment of doubt and faintness comes from all those imagined and now impossible futures all pressing in on you at once. It is your last chance to experience them, you see, and they all want to be lived at that moment.

She smiled, if he could see that, and waited for him to ask the real question. But he was silent. He wanted her to volunteer the story, she realized, and she could just as easily choose to say nothing. But he deserved to know. They all deserved it, and Kirra already knew it, and Cammon may have guessed it, because Cammon could read souls, but Tayse was the only one she would tell.

If mankind's greatest achievement is to produce more spaces for mankind to live in, I do not think I am so impressed.

Yes, Jenna, I love you with all my heart. And with my atoms and molecules and electrons and whatever further breakdown you require.

Only the strongest are put through the fire,' Josiah said. 'And the forge creates things of great strength and beauty.' 'Then I shall be truly glorious by the time my tenure ends.

I have changed for the last time--this is the man I will be till I die. And that man loves you.

And you're not leaving," she said. "Promise me." It was as if she had asked him to promise to keep breathing, to notice sunshine, to permit the spinning of the earth. What choice did he have? Even if he left her, she would be camped in his heart, an insistent and willful presence. She would match her strides to his on any journey he ever took; she would lie beside him on any bed. Amalie, he said, "that's the easiest promise I've ever had to make.