“His touch warmed my whole body. I was longing to throw my arms around him and hold him close, but the magic of this moment was like a single, lovely strand of cobweb, fragile and delicate. One wrong move and it would snap beyond mending.”

“Now he understood what it was to be a man: that it was to be weak as well as strong, to be foolish sometimes and wise sometimes, to know love as well as to kill. And he had learned that there were other paths for him, other gods who called in the deep places of the earth, in the lap of wavelets on the shore, in the breath of the wind. He had learned that there were other kinds of courage. He knew, with deep certainty, that the islands held a new path for him. He need only move forward and find it.”

“We cannot know the future. All we can do is face it bravely. We should take heed of those we love and respect. But in the end, we make every decision alone.”

“You know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bold; that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life.”

“What I do . . . the path I tread . . . it brings some choices that test me hard.”

“Trust is a thing you know without words.”

“I wonder how it takes you, that moment when everything turns to shadows.”

“You've only just discovered you have a heart. Let it beat a little.”

“The error was not yours, Somerled," Eyvind said quietly, moving to the doorway. "It was mine. I failed to teach you the one lesson you could not do without: how to be a man.”

“I wonder how it takes you, that moment when everything turns to shadows. - Somerled.”

“Look forward, not back," the Hag said. "All is change. Do not regret. Instead, learn.”