How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
She started up it, and soon found herself wondering whether there wasn't a stair because it was not in the nature of the cliff to carve itself so, but it was doing what it could to help, all the same. There was always something to climb, provided she trusted it. (11.51)
Against all odds, Tilja has found her way to Faheel's island and is climbing the cliffs to reach him. She needs to find a way to climb up them, but despite the unlikelihood of such things happening, there are footholds that appear just as she needs them.
Quote #2
Tilja felt an extraordinary impulse to interfere. What possible harm would it have done to leave Faheel for a moment, step across the room, pluck the dice out of the air—her touch moving them into the flow of time—and lay them down as triple sizes on the floor for the men to find when they were woken? Only the urgency of what they were doing stopped her. (12.25)
When she finds the frozen men in the middle of playing a dice game, Tilja is tempted to play God and give them good fortune. She's got power over these soldiers, and wants to do something good for them—Tilja has the ability to be Fate, rather than act as an instrument of Fate, which is extremely tempting. It's a nice change for a girl whose entire life has been set out for her so far.
Quote #3
Only on the long descent to Songisu did it cross Tilja's mind that the Ropemaker, after all, hadn't been waiting for them in the hills. She felt strangely unworried about this. Of course there was still time. Though she hadn't known it, he had been with them on their way south, in the shape of one animal or another, all the way across these northern plains, ever since they had landed from their raft. He would be waiting for them there. (16.44)
Once again, Tilja has a strange feeling that everything's going to be okay. The Ropemaker hasn't caught up to the group yet, as Faheel had promised. They still have time to rendezvous with the Ropemaker and give him the ring, though. Til's guided by some higher force—let's call it fate.
Quote #4
But every mile they walked Tilja became more and more oppressed and withdrawn. A new and terrible fear had begun to obsess her. What if Moonfist had already found and destroyed the Ropemaker? Then, when at last she took out the hair tie and laid the ring beside it, only Moonfist would come. No, she told herself, I won't believe it. There's still time. He'll be here, somewhere, waiting for us.
Just after they had left the way station on the third morning after the Pirrim Hills she stopped to watch a golden cockerel scratching in the dusty by the road. It was almost the right color, but not gawky enough, she decided, and was about to move on when a man came up and spoke to her. (16.58-59)
Tilja starts freaking out that Moonfist will get to Ropey before she and her friends can, and will destroy her pal-to-be. After worrying herself into a tizzy, Tilja consoles herself by refusing to believe that things will go wrong—she's trusted in fate so far, so she puts her faith in it again. Things will work out, she tells herself. And that keeps her going.
Quote #5
"You know what," said Meena slowly. "I'm getting a feeling about all this—what's been happening to us since we left the Valley. And before, I daresay. It's felt like just one thing after another, no connection, but it wasn't. It's been all connected, like it was meant to happen. And the same with those three women at Ellion's house. They haven't just come there all on their own. They're supposed to be there. I don't know what for, no more than they do, but that's what's happening." (17.6)
For the first time, someone other than Tilja recognizes fate's hand at work here. Meena's starting to realize that she's been guided on this journey. Coincidences—the right thing happening at the right time—are few and far between. Everything has occurred just the way it was meant to, which implies that the story will wrap up satisfactorily (which is also implied in the epigraph), and the Valley will be saved.
Quote #6
What came in the end was a little mouselike creature. She saw it first as a pair of glistening eyes at the edge of darkness. She froze. It crept forward, nose twitching. Now Meena saw it, and whispered to the others to sit still. Very slowly she leaned and crumbled part of a chestnut into the animal's path. It hesitated, then came on in short, nervous darts. When it reached the crumbs it sniffed at the largest one, picked it up between its forepaws, sat back on its haunches and nibbled rapidly. The firelight sparkled off its fur. There was something odd about its movement, a kind of gawky deftness, as if it had not really been born as a whole mouse, but had been somehow assembled from several other mice. Like the unicorn, the dog, the lion…
You have eaten our food, Tilja thought. Now you must deal well by us.
She smiled and waited for what it would do next. (17.81-83)
Just a few minutes earlier, Tilja was freaked out that the Ropemaker wouldn't show up, or that Moonfist might catch him before he could help them. Finally something approaches—it's the Ropemaker in mouse-y form. After doubting that fate will assert its presence in her life, Tilja's belief is reconfirmed when Ropey shows up after all. Her journey is back on track.
Quote #7
"I'm going to stay with you, I promise," she croaked.
"No, you're not—not if you're needed here, soon as you're old enough. I've been watching you changing, Til, more than you realize, I daresay. It's like he was saying about his magic when he started--it was what he was for. It'll be a waste of you, having something like what you've got in the Valley, where there's nothing for you to do with it. It'll eat into your heart, knowing what you could be doing. Right, aren't I—like it would be for you, mister, not being able to do your magic?" (19.13-14)
Tilja promises to stay with Meena when they get back to the Valley, but Meena insists that she return to the Empire someday. Her destiny is there, not in the Valley where her power would go to waste. Tilja is fated to do so much more than that, and Meena encourages her to follow the path set out for her by her powers. She should go where she is needed and is useful.
Quote #8
To get away, he had apprenticed himself to a traveling ropemaker. This man knew a few simple magics, bindfasts and so on, which the Ropemaker had learned—"Picked 'em up as if I knew 'em already," he said. "Knew at once this was what I was wanted, what I was for." (18.24)
The Ropemaker wants to get out of his little village, so he learns magic. He says that he thinks it's what he was always meant to do because it all came to him so easily. Do you think he was just good at it, or was he really fated to be a magician?
Quote #9
"But one day one of them is going to need to go to the Ropemaker and ask him to help the Valley, just as we went to look for Faheel." (20.127)
Tilja knows that the Valley's magic will have to be renewed in twenty generations, so she tells Anja that one of her descendants is going to have to travel through the Empire and seek out the Ropemaker. From her own experience, Tilja has learned that such repetition is necessary, so the destiny of whichever of Anja's descendants has to undertake this journey is already settled… if she wants to save the Valley (hey there, free will).
Quote #10
Six years ago she had almost died, crossing it, though then she had carried food and water. Now she had nothing. But she did not turn back. Death would be better than the life she had been living. This time, though, the desert seemed to let her through as it if had chosen to do so. It provided her with two freak thunderstorms and a water hole large enough to support a colony of birds which, having no predators, laid their eggs on the ground. (Epilogue.3)
Generations after our tale ends, Saranja Urlasdaughter comes home to Woodbourne. She has shunned her family and her duty as an Urlasdaughter, but fate still guides her back. The desert magically provides enough food and water for her to get back to Woodbourne. Hmm... do we have another quest to the Ropemaker on our hands?