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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