“He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.”

“And it's the wonders I'm after, even if I have to bleed for them.”

“She leaned in, and kissed her Marid gently, sweetly. She tried to kiss him the way she’d always thought kisses would be. His lips tasted like the sea.”

“Don’t you ever feel like you’re just a story someone is telling about someone like you?”

“Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.”

“The old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brother’s cousin’s friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesn’t matter that she didn’t ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it.”

“It’s up to you. Everyone should get to choose their own way, and that’s all I mean by yelling. But I shall choose to remember you, and it would be nice if it went both ways. That’s how it generally goes in my country.” But does it? September thought. If a body is hurt, they try to forget the person who hurt them and never think about the pain again. Remembering aches, like when I remember my father. It’d be so much easier to never wonder about him. I’m sure he remembers my face, but it’s hard to remember his, when he’s been gone so long! Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.”