68
" Leslie-Ann set down her own bucket and watched, marveling, as a quarter of an inch of water covered the bottom.
When she looked away, she saw an older kid. She’d seen him around. But usually he was with Orc and she was too scared of Orc ever to get near him.
She tugged on Howard’s wet sleeve. He seemed not to be sharing in the general glee. His face was severe and sad.
“What?” he asked wearily.
“I know something.”
“Well, goody for you.”
“It’s about Albert.”
Howard sighed. “I heard. He’s dead. Orc’s gone and Albert’s dead and these idiots are partying like it’s Mardi Gras or something.”
“I think he might not be dead,” Leslie-Ann said.
Howard shook his head, angry at being distracted. He walked away. But then he stopped, turned, and walked back to her. “I know you,” he said. “You clean Albert’s house.”
“Yes. I’m Leslie-Ann.”
“What are you telling me about Albert?”
“I saw his eyes open. And he looked at me. "
― Michael Grant , Plague (Gone, #4)
76
" Merik swiveled his wrists slowly. At night, the temple was too dark to see the blood dripping from his arms, pooling on the granite flagstones. He felt it falling, though. Just as he felt the new, burned flesh on his hands stretching beneath torn gloves.
Yet even as pain shivered through his body, he couldn’t help but think: Only a fool ignores Noden’s gifts. For if Merik looked at this case of mistaken identity from the just the right angle, it could in fact all be seen as boon.
The assassin in the night. The fire on the Jana. The attack of a Waterwitch in Pin’s Keep. Each event had led Merik here, to Noden’s temple. To a fresco of the god’s left hand.
To the Fury.
Twice now, he’d been mistaken for that monstrous demigod, and twice now, it had worked in Merik’s favor. So why not continue using the fear invoked from that name? Was Merik not doing the Fury’s work by bringing justice to the wronged and punishment to the wicked? It was clear that Nubrevnans needed Merik’s help, and his sister Vivia…Well, she was stil out there. Alive. Wretched.
So was it not Merik’s moral duty to keep her off the throne? And he could do that if he could just prove she had indeed tried to kill him—that it was she who’d purchased that prisoner from Vizer Linday, and she who’d sent the prisoner to kill Merik.
Yes. This was right. This was Noden’s will. It throbbed in Merik’s wounds. It shivered across his scalp and down his raw back.
Take the god’s gift. Become the Fury.
Merik rose, stiff but strong, from the temple floor, and with a new purpose in his movements, he tugged his hood, his sleeves, his gloves into place. Then he turned away from the Fury’s gruesome fresco and set out to bring justice to the wronged.
Punishment to the wicked. "
― Susan Dennard , Windwitch (The Witchlands, #2)
77
" Dimitri moved closer to me, his eyes sparkling with a secret. " It gets better:you're Lissa's guardian." " What?" I almost pulled away. " That's impossible. They'd never..." " They did. She'll have others, so they probably figured it was okay to let you hang around if someone else could keep you in line," he teased." You're not..." A lump formed in my stomach, a reminder of a problem that has plagued so long ago. " You're not one of her guardian too, are you?" It had constantly been a concern, that conflict of interest. I wanted him near me. Always. But how could he watch Lissa and put her safely first if we were worried about each other? The past was returning to torment us." No. I have a different assignment." " Oh." For some reason, that made me a little sad too, even though I knew it was the smarter choice." I'm Christian's guardian." This time I did sit up, doctor's orders or no. Stitches tugged in my chest, but I ignored the sharp discomfort. " But that's...that's practically the same thing! "
78
" George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathroom sink and spinning on the top and pointing out the way the water swirled down the drain. Taking me to the bookshelf and flipping open a book on weather and showing me a cyclone. Then a spiral galaxy. Pulling me back to the bathroom sink, to my glass jar of collected seashells, and pointing out the same curl in a miniature conch. See? he said, holding the seashell up to his hair. Yes! I clapped. His eyes were warm with teaching pleasure. It's galactic hair, he said, smiling.
At school, George was legendary already. He was so natural at physics that one afternoon the eighth-grade science teacher had asked him to do a preview of the basics of relativity, really fast, for the class. George had stood up and done such a fine job, using a paperweight and a yardstick and the standard-issue school clock, that the teacher had pulled a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. I'd like to be the first person to pay you for your clarity of mind, the teacher had said. George used the cash to order pizza for the class. Double pepperoni, he told me later, when I'd asked. "
― Aimee Bender , The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
79
" He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body. "
― Virginia Woolf , Orlando
