I’ve got one in the hills that you never have metĪnd though he is young, he will murder you yetįor the hour is coming you’ll answer your debtīuehlman is a horror writer, as I understand it, making his first foray into fantasy. One is your prisoner, and none is your slave I’ve got one on the gallows, and two in the grave My five Upstart sons are all bloody and brave Chesterton would too their wars are merry and their songs are sad: Fine musicians and riders, too, back when horses ran on the plains.Īs a hillbilly with hundreds of years of frontier cultural heritage stretching from Appalachia in its backcountry days to the Scottish-English border region, I can’t help but like the Galts. Galts are natural archers and good at throwing anything from a stone to a spear to a rotten squash. No good at taking orders, blacktongues, we’ll never be invading anybody-but we’re hell on our own soil. It took the Holtish fifty years to subjugate our lands, and they’ve spent the three centuries since regretting it. I suppose unexpected trouble describes Galt generally, at least as we’ve been found by our conquerors from Holt. Galts, with their rumored elvish heritage, are known for their literally black tongues. Along with his profession, his ethnicity provides the title of the book. 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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