Patricia A. McKillip
American author of fantasy and science fiction novels.
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She lies like the moon lies, a different face every night, all but one of them false, and the one true face as barren and hard as stone. Why do you believe her?
“Love is what we say it is,” she said fiercely. “That’s all I know. That’s all anyone knows about it. I’m sorry.”
He was silent a moment, struggling. He said finally, “But you had a right to be angry.”
“Yes. But not to hurt those I love, or myself.”
Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart.
The small red eyes regarded him, unblinking. “What would you give me for all the wisdom of the world?”
“Nothing.” He turned back to his work. “I have heard you know the answers to every riddle save one. That will be the one I need answering.”
Perhaps there had never been anything at all to see.
Do you care for me at all? Or do you only need me?
I was running from my own thoughts as much as anything. I simply wanted to untangle myself from the web I had touched. A single, sticky, quivering strand of it was all I needed to warn me away. I did not want to think about people. I wanted the trees, the scents and colors, the shifting shadows of the wood, which spoke a language I understood. I wished I could simply disappear in it, live like a bird or a fox through the winter, and leave the things I had glimpsed to resolve themselves without me.
“You fought for your freedom and won a different kind of prison. I will fight for mine—”
“You can’t fight me,” Tearle reminded him harshly.
“I know.” In the placid light, his face looked chilled and very weary. “But I can die.”
“The Riddle Master himself lost the key to his own riddles one day,” he said in his deep, reed-pure voice, “and he found it again at the bottom of his heart.”
I could not find my way back in dreams, I knew then. They were memory and desire, terror and hope; they told me only what I already knew.
I do not want to choose which one of you I must love or hate. Here, I am free to do neither. I want no part of your bitterness.
What concern of mine are your affairs? Or Coren’s? What kind of peace would there be in me or in my house if I took interest in the wars and feuds that you weave in the courts below? I do not understand such things. I understand only what lies within my walls.
“But, Corbet, there were things—between us—”
“You imagined many of them. You wanted them to be true, and so they were. But only to you.”
I didn’t know anymore what love meant, or why we were not all better off without it.
Wisdom never learned silence, and it is most annoying when least wanted.
Men see what they are most afraid of.
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