3
" Why, Reshi?" The words poured out of Bast in a sudden gush. " Why did you stay there when it was so awful?" Kvothe nodded to himself, as if he had been expecting the question. " Where else was there for me to go, Bast? Everyone I knew was dead." " Not everyone," Bast insisted. " There was Abenthy. You could have gone to him." " Hallowfell was hundreds of miles away, Bast," Kvothe said wearily as he wandered to the other side of the room and moved behind the bar. Hundreds of miles without my father's maps to guide me. Hundredsof miles without wagons to ride or sleep in. Without help of any sort, or money, or shoes. Not an impossible journey, I suppose. But for a young child, still numb with the shock of losing his parents. . . ." Kvothe shook his head. " No. In Tarbean at least I could beg or steal. I'd managed to survive in the forest for a summer, barely. But over the winter?" He shook his head. " I would have starved or frozen todeath." Standing at the bar, Kvothe filled his mug and began to add pinches of spice from several small containers, then walked toward the great stone fireplace, a thoughtful expression on his face. " You're right, of course. Anywhere would have been better than Tarbean." He shrugged, facing the fire. " But we are all creatures of habit. It is far too easy to stay in the familiar ruts we dig for ourselves. Perhaps I even viewed it as fair. My punishment for not being there to help when the Chandrian came. My punishment for not dying when I should have, with the rest of my family." Bast opened his mouth, then closed it and looked down at the tabletop, frowning.Kvothe looked over his shoulder and gave a gentle smile. " I'm not saying it's rational, Bast. Emotions by their very nature are not reasonable things. I don't feel that way now, but back then I did. I remember." He turned back to the fire. " Ben's training has given me a memory so clean and sharp I have to be careful not to cut myself sometimes." Kvothe took a mulling stone from the fire and dropped it into his wooden mug. It sank with a sharp hiss.The smell of searing clove and nutmeg filled the room.Kvothe stirred his cider with a long-handled spoon as he made his way back to the table. " You must also remember that I was not in my right mind. Much of me was still in shock, sleeping if you will. I needed something, or someone, to wake me up." He nodded to Chronicler, who casually shook his writing hand to loosen it, then unstoppered his inkwell.Kvothe leaned back in his seat. " I needed to be reminded of things I had forgotten. I needed a reason to leave. It was years before I met someone who could do those things." He smiled at Chronicler. " Before I met Skarpi. "
7
" It was Friday, so the farmers' market was in full autumnal swing, a sea of potted chrysanthemums and bushel after bushel of apples, pears, Fauvist gourds, and pumpkins with erotically fanciful stems. On one table stood galvanized buckets of the year's final roses; on another, skeins of yarn in muted, soulful purples and reds. Walter loved this part of the season- and not just because it was the time of year his restaurant flourished, when people felt the first yearnings to sit by a fire, to eat stew and bread pudding and meatloaf, drink cider and toddies and cocoa. He loved the season's transient intensity, its gaudy colors and tempestuous skies. "
― Julia Glass , The Whole World Over
11
" I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two.
Autumn in Fairyland is all that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland Forest or the morbidity of a Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland.
And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring high wheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel to mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day. "
― Catherynne M. Valente , The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1)