How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
She walked to her left and found a gate, opened it and went through, closing it carefully behoid her because she could see that wall and gate were there to keep the rabbits out.
This vaguely surprised her. The man they were looking for surely had no need of such things. He could point out a line with his finger, and no creature—except perhaps an even more powerful magician, and the rabbits didn't look that—could come beyond it. (11.53-54)
Tilja is surprised that Faheel has a garden wall to keep out creatures that might eat his fruits and veggies. After all, he's a super-powerful magician, so what's the point of having such a mundane and practical thing like a wall when he could use his powers to the same effect? What Tilja hasn't realized yet though, is that Faheel is a man before he's a magician—which we'll see in the normality of the rest of his home.
Quote #2
"Well, I think I am the man you are looking for. My name is Faheel."
Already, with a sinking heart, Tilja had guessed this was so. So old, so feeble and unsure of himself. So quiet and peaceful too. How could he wield powers enough to hold back the might of the Empire from the Valley for twenty more generations? Was all their long and dangerous journey for nothing? (11.83-84)
When Tilja meets Faheel, she's really disappointed. How can this old geezer possibly help her? He barely looks powerful enough to stand up, let alone magick an entire Valley. Needless to say, Tilja's in for a surprise.
Quote #3
"I don't understand," she said. "It's just something a traveling magician gave me to keep my hair up. Somebody else had to do that for me. If I touched it the magic didn't work. But since I came here something seems to have woken up, and it's much stronger than the plain hair-tie magic. I can feel it even when it's me holding it." (11.91)
Faheel says that the magical hair-tie the Ropemaker gave Tilja has pretty strong magic. Tilja's surprised—it's just a scrunchie that some gangly guy gave her to keep her hair out of her eyes, right? But when Faheel asks about it, she realizes that there might be more than meets the eye to this hair thing.
Quote #4
Again he turned and led the way through the garden. Tilja looked around her with surprise as she walked beside him. Like Faheel himself, this was not at all what she had expected. A magician's garden should have been extraordinary, surely—extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily neat, every plant not only wonderfully strange but doing precisely what it was supposed to. Instead, Faheel's garden, though certainly beautiful, was beautiful only with a kind of heightened ordinariness. There were gardens almost like this in the Valley [...]. (11.98)
Once again Tilja is shocked that Faheel isn't more extraordinary—he looks like a guy she could've seen in her own backyard, not like any magician she imagined. But perhaps his great power lies in his own apparent ordinariness—or behind it. Tilja hasn't come across magicians of Faheel's magnitude before, so what she imagines isn't necessarily what she wil find.
Quote #5
"The unicorn!" she whispered. "And the dog! When we landed from the raft! They shone like that! And the lion at Goloroth! I didn't see its color, but the way its fur sparkled in the moonlight… and that means the cat—the one that helped me on the walls of Talagh… do you think the donkey… when Silena came to the way station? She said something about it not being only my doing." (11.139)
After thinking there were a bunch of nice pets helping her out, Tilja realizes that the strange, magical animals that have helped her along the way were actually the Ropemaker in disguise. So much for him just being a really tall dude with a huge headdress—it turns out he actually had Tilja's back all along.
Quote #6
Something was puzzling her, something she'd seen only just before, but for a moment couldn't quite lay her mind on. Frowning, she glanced back at the officer giving the command, young, slight, beardless… a blink, and the thing became obvious… all of them! The head scarves, their smallness compared to the men, the very way they stood and carried themselves… a whole regiment of them!
With a flash of intuition she realized what they were for.
"They're women!" she gasped. "They can go through the forest! The Emperor's going to use them to retake the Valley!" (12.32-34)
At first the Emperor's guards seem like normal men. But they're actually women disguised as men—so the Emperor can send them through the forest (which usually makes men zonk out) and retake the Valley. Tilja sees that the Emperor will stop at nothing—not even such deceit—to achieve his ambitions.
Quote #7
For a moment Tilja didn't recognise either of them. Then she saw that the shorter one was Lananeth, and from that made the leap to seeing that the other was Zara, the Lord Kzuva's magician. But the change in them was shocking. There was that unnatural stillness and smoothness about them which all powerful magicians seem to have—that look of a statue brought to life. (16.82)
When Tilja sees Lananeth and Zara at the Lord Kzuva's house, she's shocked by their appearance—she doesn't even recognize them, since they now look like stone statues. She doesn't know what to make of this initial impression, but through observation and deduction, realizes a spell has been cast on them and saves them. Without Tilja's shrewd work, these magicians would have likely remained stuck together—at the mercy of the Watcher Varti—forever.
Quote #8
"We're Ortahlsons and you're Urlasdaughters. We aren't like anyone else. We can tell each other, can't we?"
[...]
"All right," she said bitterly. "I'll tell you. The answer is, I don't know. I haven't been told. Because I can't hear what the cedars say. I don't know the way to the lake. My little sister, Anja, does. You'll have to ask her." (3.148-150)
When talking with Tilja, Tahl automatically assumes she has her family's magic—he states that she's got to be magical, just like he is. When he learns that Tilja doesn't have the family magic, and she responds in a way that shows how hurt she is that she doesn't have power, he learns a valuable lesson. Tahl realizes the negative effect assumptions can have on the person about whom one makes a judgment.
Quote #9
"They're the fourteeners, all right," said a voice. "Get the old bag back up on the horse, and we'll go." (7.52)
Sometimes (okay, a lot of times) mistaken appearances can be unhelpful. Alnor and Meena disguise themselves as Qualif and Qualifa, Lananeth's servants, to get into Talagh unscathed. They get along just fine… until bandits think they're citizens with moolah and rob them.
Quote #10
"The other one up on the wall must've been Meena," said Tahl. (8.156)
After Zara meets the crew, they wonder who the mysterious magician was with Moonfist, Silena, and Dorn on the walls of Talagh. Tahl assumes it must've been Meena—as far as he knows, there was nobody else up there. Except for a cat... who might just have been some guy called the Ropemaker following Tilja (and his destiny) in another form... and Tilja's lucky to have him there, as she later sees with Silena.