30 Days of Books: Day Twenty-One

Day 21 – Favorite romantic/sexual relationship (including asexual romantic relationships)

Eddi and the Phouka in Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks. I’m not usually a fan of romantic relationships, because in order for me to like them, I have to first like the male character, and then like the female character, and then be convinced that they would be even better together. Most writers…don’t even make the second, never mind the third.

But I’ve always loved Eddi and the Phouka, since I first read the book (and reread it, and reread it, and reread it), while I was studying abroad in Ireland. I think maybe it’s because it’s only one of three romances of Eddi’s, and it’s clearly the most stable and potentially longlasting, for all we only see the beginning of it. But it’s the Phouka’s declaration of love that’s always gotten me.

“How do you know it’s love? Maybe you haven’t learned anything after all.”

She expected a joke, an impassioned protest, an airy denial. Instead he looked gravely into her face and replied, “I’ve no surety that it is. I know only the parts of what I feel; I may be misnaming the whole. You dwell in my mind like a household spirit. All that I think is followed with, ‘I shall tell that thought to Eddi.’ Whatever I see or hear is colored by what I imagine you will say of it. What is amusing is twice so, if you have laughed at it. There is a way you have of turning your head, quickly and with a little tilt, that seems more wonderful to me than the practiced movements of dancers. All this, taken together, I’ve come to think of as love, but it may not be.

“It is not a comfortable feeling. But I find that, even so, I would wish the same feeling on you. The possibility that I suffer it alone — that frightens me more than all the host of the Unseelie Court.”

How can you not love that?