″‘Father!’ Jasnah shouted.
Gavilar hesitated as he stepped out onto the balcony, looking back at her. The balcony broke beneath him. Jasnah screamed, dashing through the room to the broken balcony, falling to her knees at the edge. Wind tugged locks of hair loose from her bun as she watched two men fall.”
“The thought of drove him on, but he ran no more than a hundred feet, when he staggered and pitched headlong. It was his last panic. When he had recovered his breath and control, he sat up and entertained in his mind the conception of meeting death with dignity.”
“The whole wood seemed running now, running hard, hunting, chasing, closing in round something or—somebody? In panic, he began to run too, aimlessly, he knew not whither.”
“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.”
“I hadn’t expected physical pain. A burning sensation in my chest as if a large smoldering boulder had somehow lodged there overnight. A king of drawn-out slowly unfolding panic. The exact opposite of excitement.”
“But as the scissors snip-snapped through her hair and the razor shaved the rest, she realized with a sudden awful panic that she could no longer recall anything from the past. I cannot remember, she whispered to herself.”
“He was frightened. If he hadn’t been so frightened, he could have made the lion disappear, or he could have wished himself at home with his father and mother. He could have wished the lion would turn into a butterfly or daisy or a gnat. He could have wished many things, but he panicked and couldn’t think carefully. ‘I wish I were a rock,’ he said, and he became a rock.”
“Then I panicked. I dropped the hammer and shot up that enormous tree like a monkey. I didn’t stop until I was as high as I could possibly go, and there I stayed, quivering with fear. ”