Blackwing (Raven's Mark #1)

by Ed McDonald

I hooked my thumbs through my belt, let him see how absolutely few fucks I gave about his threats.

Spirits knew I needed the money. More than I ever had before. But there are promises you make to yourself, vows you place your pride in. Some things are worth the struggle.

“I understand your urgency,” I said at length. “You might be onto something big. I get it. Maybe you are. Or maybe you’re wrong, maybe your calculations are off. But if you print that stuff, what do you think it would do to the people?” “They have to know,” she said sternly. As unbendable as an iron bar. “People don’t need to know shit,” I said. “Even if it’s true, which I fucking well hope it isn’t. You can’t say things like that to ordinary people. They don’t have the brains for it.” “Have you no respect for your countrymen?” Lindrick said stiffly. The irony of his question was not lost on me, given what I’d done to him yesterday. “People are sheep,” I said. “They do as you tell them. They believe what they want to, or whatever frightens them the most. If they don’t like it, they reject it or they ignore it. It’s natural. Can’t blame them for it. Can’t tell them they’re stupid, either. They don’t understand that they’re sheep. How could they? The sheep don’t realise the shepherd is smarter than they are.” “You sound like the Nameless,” Ezabeth said, frosty as midwinter. “Yeah, well,” I grunted. “I spent some time around one or two of them. There’s a point you realise those bastards, whatever they are, they’re more than you and me. Not just a little, but a lot more. Where we think in days and months, they think in centuries. Play a long game. Maybe that comes with immortality. Maybe it’s just part of whatever it is that they are.”

It was decided. Nobody ever wants to go into the Misery, but sometimes you just got to follow the trickle of fate’s piss.

“Money turns the earth, as they say, but you’re right. It’s of little importance to me. I don’t even keep it. But I would have thought that you would understand. You being of Blackwing, after all.” “You’ll have to spell it out for me.” “What does anybody truly want in life? There is only one currency worth trading in. Control. Power. The farmers try to tame the earth, bend it to their will. The nobility bend the peasants, and in turn are bent to the will of princes. All bow before the Nameless, and even they wrestle against the Deep Kings. And for what? So that they can tell the peasants how to wall their fields and grow their beans? We all desire to control the world around us. I am little different from your master.”

“I ain’t bringing that mad witch,” he said. His voice shook. Officials like to believe their uniforms give them some kind of authority, hide behind them, imagine that they shield them from the world. That only works if other people are playing the same game.

It is the way of the world that good people try to do the right thing for the wrong people’s wrong reasons. The grey-haired man looked to be one of them.

“An individual can be slain. An idea is less easy to put down,” Otto said. “By declaring Ezabeth mad, they not only stopped her wagging tongue, they invalidated her findings. They did the same to poor Gleck, though I rather suspect he had actually started to lose control of his faculties by the time they committed him.”

Politicians—only the Nameless can fuck things up worse.

Part of me was advising that I might as well tell her now. I knew torture. Plenty of personal experience, only I’d always been on the other side of the irons. I don’t claim to be a good man, and in a war, bad men do the worst things. What were the Tanzas to me? She wasn’t my woman. Would never be my woman. Dantry was a good kid, but I’d done my part by him. More than I needed to. This wasn’t my fight. It was always my fight.

Ezabeth Tanza had undone me. It hadn’t been much of a hope, just a childish fantasy, but she’d shown me something that I wanted more than just another bottle. I’d never truly thought that I could have her, hadn’t allowed myself that delusion. But for a time it had felt good to dream of something, to long for something that was far out of reach. For a time, I had felt alive again. Now she had no use for me, and that was gone, and I stood on a dark wall in Valengrad, sodden through and crying a decade’s worth of pain and self-loathing and frustration into a thrashing storm that cared nothing for it. It had to come back. The emptiness, the void inside me. It had to fill the space that she had occupied. I needed that hole in my heart to be myself again. Part of me wanted her to hurt as I hurt. I hated myself even more for that.

It was over. I couldn’t believe it, but it was over. This war, everything I had known. All things turn to dust when the years have passed, but we never think to see that turning in our own lifetime.

“We’re all going to die if we don’t get help,” I said. “Ants will be born, ants will die. The colony collapses, but the species perseveres,” Crowfoot said. “Your whole life, every experience you have had or ever will have, is just a gust of wind across the plain. Fleeting, momentary, barely more than a dream and less well remembered.”

But before he’d left us, Nall had failed to foresee the short-sighted greed of the princes. The great mistake of man is to believe that other men can live up to the ideals that we set them.

Some men are born to charm ladies and spread their irresponsible seed across the land. Some exist to create the great works of art that inspire dreams and drive creativity for generations. Others are born to till the fields, put bread on the table, and raise their sons to till the fields, put bread on the table, raise sons of their own. I was born to end lives.