“My dad told me he knew where to find Zay. Which meant I had to cooperate with him...."Do you see what we have accomplished together? The healing of souls with the magic you carry. We have healed souls in death. With light and dark magic."“We? No, you stuck your hands in my chest and stole my magic and threw it at them. If you try that again, you won’t have hands. Where’s Zayvion?” Okay, maybe I was a little rusty on the whole cooperation thing.”

“Do you hate me because I have magic?""Of course not.""Do you love me despite my magic?"He thought a minute. "No. I love everything about you, and your magic is part of you. That was how I got past the Confessor's magic. If I had loved you despite your power, I wouldn't have been accepting you for who you are. Your magic would have destroyed me.”

“The whole thing reeked of faerie mischief."Screw you. Me and my magic hands will be fine, thank you very much.I'm staying right where I am.”

“You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.That’s what I believe.The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.”

“You threw Shackle," Terric said. "At his head. With a hell of a lot of magic.""He was trying to kill you guys. He'd trapped Zay. What did you want me to do, challenge him to a game of dominos? I was supposed to ride to the rescue, right? I rode.”

“Runach didn't consider himself particularly dull, but he had to admit he was baffled. "Then what now?""What do you mean, what now?" Weger echoed in disbelief. "Do what is necessary! Bloody hell, man, must I instruct you in every bloody step? Take your mighty magic and heal her!"Runach blinked. "What in the world are you talking about?"Weger threw up his hands in frustration. "Heal her, you fool! Use Fadaire or whatever elvish rot comes first to mind.""I have no magic.""Of course you have magic--" Weger stopped suddenly. "You what?" "I have no magic," Runach repeated, through gritted teeth. "My father took it at the well."Weger looked suddenly as if he needed to sit down. "Bloody hell," he said faintly. He sagged back against the door. "I had no idea"Weger rubbed his hands over his face and indulged in a selection of very vile curses. "Damn it," he said, finally. He looked at Runach. "What are we to do now?""If magic will work here" Runach said, "why don't you use yours?"Weger folded his arms over his chest. "I haven't used a word of magic in over three hundred years!""No time like the present to dust it off then, is there?"Weger hesitated. Runach suspected it was the first time in those same three centuries the man had done so. He considered, then looked at Runach."I could," he said, sounding as if the words had been dragged from him by a thousand irresistible spells, "but I have no elegant magic."Runach shrugged. "Then use Wexham.""It will leave a scar.""I don't think she'll care.""It will leave a very large, ugly scar," Weger amended."Then use Camanae or Fadaire," Runach suggested."And have my mouth catch on fire? You ask too much."Runach looked at him seriously. "I honestly don't care what you use, as long as you save her life. Whilst you still can."Weger looked as if his fondest wish was to turn and flee. But he apparently wasn't the master of Gobhann because he was a coward. He took a deep breath, cursed fluently, then knelt down. Runach listened to him spit out an eminently useful spell of Croxteth, then follow that bit of healing with a very long string of curses in which Lothar of Wychweald and Runach's own father figured prominently.”