The Blacktongue Thief (Blacktongue, #1)

by Christopher Buehlman

We blacktongues have a knack for rising high in low places.

But like many of the world’s best insults, it could be a grudging honorific.

Fighting means making mistakes and just trying not to make the last one.

“When you eat your bread, thank the cat,” he said in Holtish so all could understand, even though it was a Molrovan saying. It meant that for the grain to stay safe, mice had to die. It meant don’t be a child.

I thought about threatening them with an arrow, but I would have felt nearly as bad about shooting a child as I would have about shooting a dog.

One of the great truths of magic is that it is profoundly unfair.

Only the strong, the rich, and the dying think truth is a necessity; the rest of us know it for a luxury.