How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
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.