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