You Speak Of Destiny As If It

Looking At Them Now, Thought Jim, You'd Never Believe They Weren't In Love With Each Other, And Not With A Hopeless, Doomed Obsession Like Poor Isabel Meredith. This Was What Love Ought To Be Like: Playful And Passionate And Teasing, And Dangerous, Too, With Sharp Intelligence In It.

Read Like A Butterfly, Write Like A Bee.

And Then Serafina Understood Something For Which The Witches Had No Word: It Was The Idea Of Pilgrimage. She Understood Why These Beings Would Wait For Thousands Of Years And Travel Vast Distances In Order To Be Close To Something Important, And How They Would Feel Differently For The Rest Of Time, Having Been Briefly In Its Presence. That Was How These Creatures Looked Now, These Beautiful Pilgrims Of Rarefied Light, Standing Around The Girl With The Dirty-face And The Tartan Skirt And The Boy With The Wounded Hand Who Was Frowning In His Sleep.

There Is Another Consequence Of Any Belief In A Single God, And That Is That It Is A Very Good Excuse For People To Behave Very Badly.

Corruption And Envy And Lust For Power. Cruelty And Coldness. A Vicious Probing Curiousity. Pure, Poisonous, Toxic Malice. You Have Never From Your Earliest Years Shown A Shred Of Compassion For Sympathy Or Kindness Without Calculating How It Would Return To Your Advantage. You Have Tortured And Killed Without Regret Or Hesitation; You Have Betrayed And Intrigued And Gloried In Your Treachery. You Are A Cess-pit Of Moral Filth.