The Blacktongue Thief (Blacktongue, #1)

by Christopher Buehlman

For the last few years, I’d been telling myself a marvelous fiction that, despite my laziness and love of being outside, one day I would get around to bending my neck over arcane books and learning deep magic; that being a thief was just a temporary diversion from my true calling; that with the right teachers and training, I could one day be a formidable wizard. That’s not how seeing Fulvir’s library made me feel. What it made me feel was that I was an impostor, a decent thief, perhaps, but a mediocre spell-botcher who would be adequate on his best day and a dangerous liability on the others. Sure, I could break a fall, put a geezer to sleep, hold my breath underwater three times longer than you, but really, the people who wrote and cast spells from the books Fulvir had amassed made me look like a knee-pants barefoot serf’s bastard who chopped the heads off wheat with a stick and thought himself a knight.