“They slept little that night, making their newfound love like people for whom the world is running out. Fern did not think of her Task, not because she had abandoned it, but because she felt it would present itself for her attention when the moment was right, and until then she had an intermission, a suspension of hostilities, given by whatever gods there were. They lay in the cave while outside the tide rose and fell, and she thought that in this life and maybe in all lives she would remember that love sounded like the sea, and the beat of her heart was waves on a beach, and she would hear its echo in the nucleus of every shell.”

“Lougarry was waiting over the brow of the hill, lying so still in the grass that a butterfly had perched within an inch of her nose. The stems bent and shimmered as she rose to her feet, and the butterfly floated away like a wind-borne petal. Fern wondered if , like Ragginbone, the she-wolf possessed the faculty of making herself at one with her surroundings, not invisible but transmuted, so close to nature that she could blend with it at will and be absorbed into its many forms, becoming grass blade and wildflower, still earth and moving air, resuming her true self at the prompting of a thought. It came to Fern that we are all part of one vast pattern of Being, the real world and the shadow-world, sunlight and werelight, Man and spirit, and to understand and accept that was the first step toward the abnegation of ego, the affirmation of the soul. To comprehend the wind, not as a movement of molecules but as the pulse of the air, the pulse of her pulse, was to become the wind, to blow with it through the dancing grasses to the edge of the sky...”

“I am his lover. They had made no promises, no vows; this was an interlude which might end with the next sunset or ebb with the changing tide. Yet she knew, with a certainty that belongs only to the young, that this was for always. Whether she had a year, or a week, or just a few hours, she would make it last forever.”

“And she knew she was not sure, she would never be sure, because uncertainty is the essence of the human condition, and death is the one barrier beyond which we cannot see. There is no hope but faith, no knowledge but the acceptance of ignorance.Yet still she hoped that one day she would know.”

“They walked along in silence, that silence just before parting where everything has been left unsaid and it is too late now to say it. Fern felt as if her stomach was full of words, words burning to be spoken, but her lips refused to unclose and the words remained inside her, seething, like a bad case of indigestion. ”

“To know of the existence of evil, true evil that corrupted the world, had forever altered her heart and mind. If she had chosen a different path, she wouldn't have slept another night. Her head would have been restless as she thought only of the horrors that might be creeping outside her door, waiting to rend her flesh. She would not live a life as the hunted; she would be the hunter.”

“Worst of all, she realized, Zohrane was without fear, and fear is the braking system of intelligence.”