“I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him.”

“Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.”

“Twenty-seven.”His brow puckered, and he blinked over at her. “Twenty-seven hundred years, right?”If he were speaking to Taliyah, yes. “No. Just twenty-seven plain, ordinary years.”“You don’t mean human years, do you?”“No. I mean dog years,” she said dryly, then pressed her lips together. Where was the filter that was usually poised over her mouth? Strider didn’t seem to mind, though. Rather, he seemed stupefied. Would Sabin have had the same reaction were he awake? “What’s so hard to believe about my age?” As the question echoed between them, a thought occurred to her and she blanched. “Do I look ancient?”“No, no. Of course not. But you’re immortal. Powerful.”

“Every seven years our bodies change, every cell. Every seven years, we disappear.”

“Do you know the saying Chan Vaen edan Kote?'I tried to puzzle it out. 'Seven years... I don't know Kote''Expect disaster every seven years,' he said.”

“His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds.”