"It's not very much blood."
"It's enough to cause questions. They love to ask questions-and every¬one pays attention to blood."
Briony opened the pantry door and they slipped back out into the cor¬ridor, quiet as phantoms. The throne hall was also oddly quiet-tomb-silent, as though the immense old building had been holding its breath while it listened to the whispering voices in the pantry.
1
Exiles
,
If, as many of the Deep Voices believe, the darkness is just as much a
something as is the light, then which came first after Nothingthe dark or the light?
The songs of the oldest voices claim that without a listener there can be no
first word: the darkness was until the light became. The lonely Void gave
birth to the Light of love, and afterward they made all that would bethe good and bad, the living and unliving, the found and lost.
— from One Hundred Considerations, out of the Qar's Book of Regret
IT WAS A TERRIBLE DREAM. The young poet Matt Tinwright was declaiming a funeral ode for Barrick, full of high-flown nonsense about the loving arms of Kernios and the warm embrace of the earth, but Briony watched in horror as her twin brother's casket rocked and shook. Something inside was struggling to escape, and the old jester Puzzle was doing his best to hold down the lid, clinging with all the strength of his scrawny arms as the lid creaked and the box shuddered beneath him.
Let him out, she wanted to cry, but could not-the veil she wore was SO tight that words could not pass her lips. His arm, his poor crippled arm! How it must pain him, her poor dead Barrick, having to struggle like that in such a confined place.
Others at the funeral, courtiers and royal guards, helped the jester hold the lid down, then together they hustled the box out of the chapel.