“My fall began, as many stories do, with a girl.”
“You're here," I murmured, reaching out to touch him, hardly believing this was real. "You came back." Ash's breath hitched, and he put his hand over mine.
"I came home.”
“I have come from the End of the World. From the River of Dreams, through the gauntlet and the Briar and the Deep Wyld, in order to stand before you today. I have but one request—to take my place at your side. To resume my duty as your knight, and to protect you and your kingdom for as long as I draw breath.”
“Be careful, boy. In some tales, the hero gets eaten by the monster after all.”
“Crazy Ash just doesn't have the same ring as Don't-bother-me-or-I'll-kill-you Ash.”
“Geez, you guys. I know I'm popular and all, but seriously, you're a bit too co-dependent for me. I'm going to need you to step away from my personal bubble." A wispy vine-woman curled ivy tendrils around his arm, and he sliced through them with his dagger. "No! Bad Wraith! No touchie!”
“I’m going to kill you one day,” I told him as we hurried after Grimalkin, back into the swampy marshland. It was not an idle threat.
Puck just laughed. “Yeah. You and everyone else, prince. Join the club.”
“I will be with her again, or I will die. There aren’t any other options”
“Do not be deceived by the the politeness of the fey. Fey are almost always polite. This does not mean they will not happily remove your head.”
“... it means putting up with my fiercest and most annoying rival, Robin Goodfellow, who - despite all his attempts to hide it - is in love with my queen as well. I don't know why I haven't killed him yet. Maybe because Puck is Meghan's closest friend and she would mourn him terribly if he were gone (though I can't imagine why).”
“Does a crow become a salmon simply because it wished to? You do not know the first thing about mortality, prince-who-is-not. Why would you want to become like them?"
"Because," Grimalkin answered before I could say anything, "he is in love."
"Ahhh." The Witch looked at me and shook her head. "I see. Poor creature. Then you will not hear a word I have to say"
I was in love. With a human.
I smiled bitterly at the thought. The old Ash, if faced with such a suggestion, would've either laughed scornfully or removed the offender's head from his neck.”
“Quick question.” Puck’s voice broke the silence. “Did anyone think to bring a can of Off?”
“From this day forth, I vow to protect Meghan Chase, daughter of the Summer King, with my sword, my honor and my life. Should even the world stand against her, my blade will be at her side. And should it fail to protect her, let my own life be forfeit.”
“Mercy is for the weak… let me show you how much of an Unseelie I still am.”
“I was Ashallayn’darkmyr Tallyn, son of Mab, former prince of the Unseelie Court, and I was not afraid of a witch on a broom.”
“I had been in love with Ariella. I remembered what she'd meant to me, what I'd felt for her then...
... and what I didn't feel for her now.”
“There is nothing more terrible than a spurned faery queen, particularly if you defy her a second time. I escaped the Winter Court with my life intact, but just barely, and I won't be returning anytime soon. My loyalty - and my heart - belongs to another queen now.”
“Time is the cog that turns the wheel
Winter leaves scars that do not heal
Summer is a fire that burns inside
Knowledge is a terrible burden to hide
Strength and death go hand in hand
One answer lies within the sand
But seek the answer all alone
Lest the sand claim you as its own.”
“Additionally, you can paint a neon sign over our heads that says, 'Easy meal, follow the flashing lights.”
“Working for Mab now, are you, Wolfman?" he smirked. "Like a good little attack dog? Will you also roll over and beg if she asks?”
“Ash, it's because of you that I am here today. You have always been there, never wavering, protecting me with no thought for yourself. You've been my teacher, my knight and my only love. Now it's my turn to make that promise.”
“Prince,' said Puck's voice, drawing me out of my dark thoughts, back to the present. 'Prince. Oy, ice-boy!”
“No, ice-boy. I never thought I'd see the day when Grimalkin was wrong." - Puck”
“You realize you've been duped by a fish," I said, watching the catfish grin at me before slipping into the dark waters, lost from view. Puck shrugged.
"Hey, it was going to name one of its grandfish after me," he said, tossing the line into the water again. "That's one of my rules, you know. I refuse to eat anything that names its kid after me.”
“I admire your tenacity, young prince. Grimalkin is not easy to find in the best of times. You must have come far to seek him out.... And this is not the first place you have searched. I can see it on your face. Why, I wonder? Why does he come so far? What is it that he desires so badly, to risk the ire of the Bone Witch? What is it you want, Ash of the Winter Court?'
'Would you believe the cat owes him money?' Puck's voice came from behind my shoulder, making me wince.”
“Meghan rose with the regal grace of a queen, calm and unruffled. I noticed she subtly moved in front of me when facing Ariella, a familiar gesture that caught me off guard. The Iron Queen was protecting me.”
“Ari...I will always love you. I always have.Nothing will change that." I squeezed her hand, then gently released it. "You'll always be a part of me. But...I'm not in love with you...anymore.And despite my promise,despite seeing you again, I do this because I want to be with Meghan, nothing else" Ariella's eyes glazed over, and I eased back, speaking as gently as I could "I can't be yours, Ariella. I'm sorry.”
“Wait, you already know where you are?” Puck demanded as we edged toward the mouth of the alley, stepping over trash and piles of debris.
“How does that work, cat?”
“Most cities are very much the same, Goodfellow.” Grimalkin reached the edge of the sidewalk and peered back, waving his tail. “Trods are everywhere, if you know where to look. Also, I am a cat.” And he trotted off down the street.”
“You don't think I regret what I did, every single day? You lost Ariella, but I lost you both! Believe it or not, I was kind of a mess too, Ash. It got to a point where I actually looked forward to our random duels, because that was the only time I could talk to you. When you were freaking trying to kill me!”
“I glanced at Puck. "You take one, I'll get the other?"
"You're on Ice-boy.”
“No one should ever ask themselves that: why am I unhappy? The question carries within it the virus that will destroy everything. If we ask that question, it means we want to find out what makes us happy. If what makes us happy is different from what we have now, then we must either change once and for all or stay as we are, feeling even more unhappy.”
“Mark this one thing my boy: never, never, never can a man make himself ridiculous in the eyes of a woman by anything he may do on her account. Not even by the most childish performances. Do anything you like, stand on your head, talk the most utter twaddle, swank like a peacock, sing under her window - anything at all but one thing: don't be matter of fact, don't be sensible.”
“Put your good where it will do the most!”
“Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. When”
“We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it's up to us to survive it. You need to understand that.”
“We can't control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.”
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