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201 pages, Paperback
First published November 16, 2021
“It’s also possible that I’m just resigned to being a very bad anthropologist. Which is a shame. I might be the last one left.”
“The fact that bringing a sorcerer into a neighbouring land was probably not in accordance with her mother’s foreign policy had since crossed her mind, but at speed because she had actively chased it to the borders and watched until she was sure it wasn’t coming back any time soon.”
“I am only now, at the wrong end of three centuries after loss of contact, beginning to realise just how broken my own *superior* culture actually was. They set us here to make exhaustive anthropological notes on the fall of every sparrow. But not to catch a single one of them. To *know*, but very emphatically not to *care*.”
“Is that not what magic is? Every wise man, every scholar I have met who pretended to the title of magician, that was their study. They sought to learn how the world worked, so that they could control and master it. That is magic.”
“How much worse to think yourself wise, and still be as ignorant as one who knew themselves a fool?”
‘Lynesse Fourth Daughter….off to do something that is What Princesses Do when there are monsters and demons and wizards in the world. Something that was surely not actually what they did, back in the days her myth-cycles originated in. Because myths miss out all the sordid realities and preserve only What we wish we’d done, rather than How we actually did it.’