187
" I could see light shining through my own skin, making a blazing lantern of my body, and when I held up my hands, I saw to my horror faint shadows moving there beneath the surface. Forgetting the feverish pain, I caught at my dress and dragged it off over my head. He knelt down on the floor with me. I was shining like a sun, the thin shadows moving through me like fish swimming beneath the ice in winter.
“Get them out,” I said. Now that I saw them, I suddenly felt them, also, leaving a trail inside me like slime. I’d thought, stupidly, that I was safe because I hadn’t been scratched, or cut, or bitten. I’d thought he was only taking precautions. Now I understood: I’d breathed in corruption with the very air, under the boughs of the Wood, and I hadn’t noticed the creeping feeling of them because they’d slipped in, small and subtle. “Get them out— "
― Naomi Novik , Uprooted
188
" He made a noise of surprise against my mouth and gripped me by the arms, holding me off. “Listen, you impossible creature,” he said, “I’m a century and more older than—” “Oh, be quiet,” I said impatiently; of all the excuses he might have used. I scrambled up the tall side of the bed and climbed in on top of him, the thick featherbed yielding. I glared down. “Do you want me to go?” His hands tightened on my arms. He didn’t look me in the face. For a moment he didn’t speak. Then harshly he said, “No.” And then he pulled me down to him instead, his mouth sweet and feverish-hot and wonderful, obliterating. I didn’t have to think anymore. "
― Naomi Novik , Uprooted
192
" Her fingers stiffened, going wide, and suddenly her veins ran brilliant green in her arms. Drops of sap burst trickling from her eyes and nose in rivulets down her face like tears, the bright fresh sweet smell horribly wrong. Her mouth hung open in a silent cry, and then tiny white rootlets crept out from beneath her nails, like an oak-tree growing overnight. They climbed with sudden horrible speed all over the manacles, hardening into grey wood even as they went, and with a noise like ice breaking in midsummer, the chains broke. I did nothing. There was no time to do anything: it happened quicker than I could even see it. One moment Kasia was chained, the next she was leaping for me. She was impossibly strong, flinging me to the ground. I caught her shoulders and held her off with a scream. Sap was running from her face, staining her dress, and it fell on me with a pattering like rain. It crawled over my skin, beading up against my protection spell. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a snarl. Her hands closed around my throat like brands, hot, burning hot, and those strangling rootlets began to crawl over me. I looked up into Kasia’s face, hungry for one last sight of her, but the Wood looked out of her eyes at me: black rage, full of smoke, burning, roots planted too deep to uproot. "
― Naomi Novik , Uprooted
193
" I did my best to tell him, but I felt even as I did so that it was all wrong, and finally I blurted out, as he wrote angrily on his sheets, “But none of that matters at all.” His head raised to stare balefully at me, but I said, incoherent yet convinced, “It’s just—a way to go. There isn’t only one way to go.” I waved at his notes. “You’re trying to find a road where there isn’t one. It’s like—it’s gleaning in the woods,” I said abruptly. “You have to pick your way through the thickets and the trees, and it’s different every time. "
― Naomi Novik , Uprooted
200
" Our people were alone here a long time", she said, and I wondered, what was long to a tree? A thousand years, two thousand, ten? Endless generations, the roots growing deeper every one. "We began to gorget how to be people. We dwindled away little by little.
When the sorcerer-king came with his people, my sister let them come into the valley. She thought they could be renewed, and teach them in turn; we could give each other life. But they were afraid. They wanted to live, they wanted to grow stronger, but they didn't want to change. They learned the wrong things". "
― Naomi Novik , Uprooted