Home > Work > A Radical Act of Free Magic (The Shadow Histories, #2)
1 " People weather storms they should never be able to survive and then collapse once they’ve passed, as though the storm itself kept them upright. "
― H.G. Parry , A Radical Act of Free Magic (The Shadow Histories, #2)
2 " You could die in the war," she reminded him."I know. And I'm scared of that too. But I'd die free, at least, or as free as people like us can ever be.""Does that matter, really?""I don't know," he admitted with a sigh. "But it feels like it should. "
3 " Are you smiling?""It's a serious frown, but I put it on backward.""Well, straighten it. "
4 " War doesn't last forever. But change, once set in motion, is very difficult to undo. It's one of the first rules of magic: you can never truly reverse a spell. Dirt will remember being turned into gold, a conjured storm leaves marks on the landscape, a shadow will remember being bound - or free. And when this war passes, Commoner magic will be very difficult to bind again." She paused. "Besides. God works in mysterious ways.""I won't argue, or course," Wilberforce said. "But it does seem difficult to see God in the last few years. "
5 " That was the trouble with the magic that bespelled the walls of the House of Commoners. It responded to eloquence, not truth. Wilberforce had once, a very long time ago, thought the two were interchangeable. Now he knew it was just as easy to be eloquent and wrong as it was to be eloquent and right. "
6 " The stranger didn't care about me at Trafalgar. He only cared about you. I don't see why the dragon would.""The stranger didn't see me at first either! If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the stranger doesn't always see everybody he should. He sees women and slaves and commoners when he ought to see magicians."Hester's chin rose at that, as Fina had hoped it would. Her jaw tightened. "Very well," she said. "Let's show him. "
7 " The dragon was above them when Hester stopped climbing and turned to face it. It's neck pulled back and Fina saw the glow of fire in it's chest. Hester's voice was almost snatched away by the wind from its wings. But Fina heard her."Here I am!" She called. It was defiance and declaration and joy at once. It didn't matter that the words were barely audible; it didn't matter that the dragon had no language to understand them. It was the call with which Camille Desmoulins had set a revolution on fire and with which Toussaint Louverture had summoned a storm; the call of magic wild and free. Her eyes blazed with it. "Come to me. "
8 " At her back, the walls sang. It was no warm trilling this time, but a deep, profound not of joy, impossibly clear and sweet and painful, the kind that reached down into her heart and touched her soul. She knew it was only responding to a speech, that it only understood the magic of words and rhetoric and meaning. But she also knew that because of that peculiar alchemy the world had changed, and somehow the walls knew it too. She closed her eyes and listened. "
9 " But gentleness couldn’t be fought. It could only be ignored or accepted, "
10 " Perhaps it was simply that she never doubted her right to be anywhere. "
11 " I’m not here, in this house or on this earth, to be an instrument of punishment. I want to make things better, for as many as I can. "
12 " Forester nodded, just once. “I hope you’re ready for the new world.” “I don’t think it matters if I’m ready for it or not,” he said. “It wasn’t meant for me. "
