“To get ahead, sometimes you had to retrace your steps.”

“He just couldn’t be with people. There were a few kids he sometimes spoke with at school—at lunch, or walking home—but months ago even they had stopped trying to talk to him. Silas had no real answers for their predictable questions.”

“Though you may be a wanderer, living out your days in exile, home is with you always, in blood-song and bone map, and in the echo of your mother’s voice as you tell her favorite tale to your children or the children who gather around you in the land of your exile. Home is your most constant companion.”

“The day his dad didn’t come home, it was like a huge window over their heads had shattered, and every day they were walking through the broken pieces. Nothing fit together. Nothing made sense or seemed connected to anything else, and every step hurt. Maybe in Lichport he’d find a missing shard or two that would help him start piecing things back together.”

“But not unusual, for good girls sometimes come to bad ends.”

“Stories wander around, go from one land to another, sometimes parts change.”

“Just as you cannot wave your hands and reappear in your simple life before coming here, so you cannot merely clap them to wake up the dead from their troubles.”