“My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.”

“Please, Orma, I’ve already gotten you in so much trouble—” “That I can’t possibly get into more. Take it.” He wouldn’t stop glaring at me until I’d put the earring back on its cord. “You are all that’s left of Linn. Her own people won’t even say her name. I—I value your continued existence.” I could not speak; he had pierced me to my very heart.”

“I spent that many years thinking I was alone. Then you prance into my life, nearly giving me a paroxysm, and now you deign to tell me there are more.”

“He was impugning my virtue. I ought to have been offended, but for some reason the idea tickled me. That could be my next career: instrument of torture! Seducing prisoners, and then revealing my dragon scales! They would confess out of sheer horror.”

“I rose to standing, like Lars upon the barbican, the dark city spread at my feet. Lights twinkled in tavern windows, bobbed at the Wolfstoot Bridge construction. Once I had been suspended over this vast space, hanging and helpless, at a dragon’s mercy. Once I had feared that telling the truth would be like falling, that love would be like hitting the ground, but here I was, my feet firmly planted, standing on my own. We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.”

“Peaches and Cheese”:The vagabond sun winks down through the trees,While lilacs, like memories, waft on the breeze,My friend, I was born for days such as these,To inhale perfume,And cut through the gloom,And feast like a king upon peaches and cheese!I’ll travel this wide world and go where I please,Can’t stop my wand’ring, it’s like a disease.My only regret as I cross the high seas:What I leave behind,Though I hope to find,My own golden city of peaches and cheese!”

“Who will kiss you? Who will rock you to sleep?" His voice was slow, drowsy."You never did," I said, trying to tease him. "You were more father to me than my father, but you never did that.""Someone should. Someone should love you. I will bite him if he will not.”