And his budding internal conflict nicely complements all the external conflict. Not only is he a fun character, he doesn’t know as much about what is going on as the other characters, helping shield the reader from details more impactfully revealed later. The story is told entirely in the first person from Kinch’s perspective. They intentionally add the apprentice of a powerful sorcerous and unintentionally add a fearsome assassin with the oddest hiding spot along the way. She also has need to cross half the continent to a country that has been invaded by giants. Galva is a knight who doesn’t have a horse, but she has something better-a giant warbird. It is that debt that leads him to attempt to waylay the wrong woman on a remote road and to accompany her on her quest after. Which has left him with many, many useful skills (including the ability to cast a few cantrips), but also with a mountain of debt. Not just any thief, a guild-trained thief. It is already on my short list for best books of the year, and would be even if I actually had time to properly keep up with my reading. There is epic fantasy-scale worldbuilding with pulp sensibilities, magic and mayhem, death and despair and hope. And we do indeed get a giant warbird (if not quite so much as we might hope or dream), but The Blacktongue Thief is so much more than that. Buehlman had me at “stag-sized battle ravens.” That alone was enough to make me jump at an ARC of The Blacktongue Thief when offered one by the publisher.
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