“Grey dawn was seeping into the sick room [around Christmas 1867, Munch was almost dying then and spitting blood when he was 13; but he recovered]. I lay in the middle of the bed with my hands outside the bedclothes, looking straight ahead. Now I was in a pact with God. I had promised to serve him if I survived, if he allowed me to escape the tuberculosis. Now I could never be as before.”

“Our lovemaking was always risk and promise-for if he held my life in his hands when he lay with me, I held his soul, and knew it.”

“He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he'd once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless…. I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.”

“He cannot stop imagining his bloody hands or himself lying mortally at the bottom of that bathtub, which, for now, serves as his refuge, as his escape from the World, from that which is outside, but which, Any day now, I could decide to go in.”

“For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him?”

“Memories of ice and Trent surfaced, and I wrapped my arms around my middle. I had saved him, and he had saved me. What was wrong with us?”

“Before you came into my life, I believed that God had abandoned me. Now I know that He has blessed me beyond measure.

~Sir Bannor”

“Master Kingston, I see the matter against me now it is framed; but if I had served God as diligently as I have done the King He would not have given me over in my gray hairs.”

“It's important." I could hear him moving around, adjusting things, before he came to sit beside me. "Okay," he said. "Take a look."”

“When he wanted, he could radiate charm and sincerity, but I often wonder in these later days if anything about him was as it seemed. I think now he was a man fighting constantly to escape the bars of an invisible cage.”