“Everybody was strange. In a fit of frustration, she scratched out strange and wrote the word CRACKPOTS in big letters.”

“Perhaps I can stay by the fire and mend your socks and scream if I hear any strange noises.”

“They sat on the outcropping of stone and at bread and fruit. Kasta watched the long grass moving around them. The wind pushed it, attacked it, struck it in one place than another. It rose and fell again. It flowed, like water."Is this what the sea is like?" Kasta asked, and they both turned to her, surprised. "Does the sea move the way this grass moves?"“It's like the sea,” she said.Giddon’s eyes on her were incredulous.“What? Is it such a strange thing to say?”“It’s a strange thing for you to say.” He shook his head. He gathered their bread and fruit, then rose. “The Lienid fighter is filling your mind with romantic notions.”

“It was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly.”

“She knew her nature. She would recognize it if she came face-to-face with it. It would be a blue-eyed green-eyed monster, wolflike and snarling. A vicious beast that struck out at friends in uncontrollable anger, a killer that offered itself as a vessel of the king's fury.But then it was a strange monster, for beneath its exterior it was frightened and sickened by its own violence. It chastised itself for its savagery. And sometimes it had no heart for violence and rebelled against it utterly. A monster that refused, sometimes, to behave like a monster. When a monster stopped behaving like a monster , did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?Perhaps she wouldn't recognize her own nature after all.”

“And," he continued, his strange smile gleaming, "as I see it, our hearts are not so different in size. I murdered my father. You murdered yours. Is that something you did with a large heart?”

“Fire sat unbreathing. A life that was an apology for the life of his father: It was a notion she could understand, beyond words and thought. She understood it the way she understood music.”