“He thought of the Riviera, as it was then before it had all been built up, with the lovely stretches of blue sea and the sand beaches and the stretches of pine woods and the mountains of the Esterel going out into the sea. He remembered it as it was when he and Zelda had first found it before people went there for the summer.”

“Scott told me about the Riviera and how my wife and I must come there' the next summer and how we would go there and how he would find a place for us that was not expensive and we would both work hard every day and swim and lie on the beach and be brown and only have a single aperitif before lunch and one before dinner. Zelda. would be happy there, he said. She loved to swim and was a beautiful diver and she was happy with that life and would want him to work and everything would be disciplined. He and Zelda. and their daughter were going to go there that summer. I was trying to get him to write his stories as well as he could and not trick them to conform to any formula, as he had explained that he did.”

“First there was the sky, high, pure and of a darker blue than he had ever seen. And then there was the sea, a lighter, immensely luminous blue that reflected blue into the air, the shadows and the sails; a sea that stretched away immeasurably when the surge raised the frigate high, showing an orderly array of great crests, each three furlongs from its predecessor, and all sweeping eastwards in an even, majestic procession.”

“I had no idea where I was going, but at that point, walking straight into the sea didn't seem like such a bad idea. For months I'd been torturing myself, wondering if Archer kissing me had just been part of his act. But he was right, he hadn't kissed me. I had kissed him, and he'd just...responded.God, I was a moron.Archer caught up with me,but I kept looking straight ahead."Mercer-""Look,forget it," I said. "Just show me whatever it was you dragged me out here to see.""Fine," he replied, his voice clipped.We walked down the beach in total silence. In the moonlight, our shadows stretched out before us, almost touching.”

“Today, Aaron decided, he would begin to grieve in earnest. He would walk the lonely beach, mocked by gulls, uncaring, his every step a stately rebuke to the malign forces that had blighted his fate. His was the tragedy of a man who couldn't have his own way, and he intended to make known his anguish in the solemn solitude that only a stretch of sand, a suspiring sea, and a beetling cliff could provide.”

“The Hawk of Essex looked out toward the sea and thought for a moment that he had stepped back in time. As it had more than two years before, a Viking war fleet was bearing down on his shore.He called to his wife, who was, after all, Norse and whom he knew had a good grasp of things. "Would you agree that Wolf and Dragon are reasonable men?"Krysta lifted their son from the basin in which she had been bathing him, grinned at the baby's eager kicks, and wrapped him snugly in a blanket before joining Hawk at the window. "Eminently reasonable."He looked again over the sea. "Something has stirred them." Buckling on his sword,he went to find out what it was.”