“She believed in me. Where I had doubt and fear, she had faith.”

“Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?”

“So many lessons she had refused to learn because they had been taught to her by her mother. She recalled Bienvenida's claim that the devil was one's own fears called forth by self-doubt. Only now did she accept those words as truth. For too long she had relied on God to grant her peace, reluctant to believe that He, in His wisdom, had endowed the world and its creatures with the powers each needed to survive. It was these powers which she had spurned so many years before which her soul had ached for with a constancy that prayers had not soothed.”

“What a failure her life had been. Would she have lied to God if she’d had more faith, been more righteous? How could she possibly have a son at her age? And yet, if she had believed all along . . .”

“She hated that little voice inside her head. Like the Seelie Queen, it planted doubts where there shouldn't be doubts, asked questions that had no answer.”

“But so far their love had proved deeper than their doubts, their faith in each other more unshakeable than the fear.”