The Raven Tower

by Ann Leckie

Stories can be risky for someone like me. What I say must be true, or it will be made true, and if it cannot be made true—if I don’t have the power, or if what I have said is an impossibility—then I will pay the price.

But what is the story that I am telling? Here is another story I have heard: Once there were two brothers, and one of them wanted what the other had. Bent all his will to obtain what the other had, no matter the cost. Here is another story: Once there was a prisoner in a tower. And another: Once someone risked their life out of duty and loyalty to a friend. Ah, there’s a story that I might tell, and truthfully.

Feathery creatures, like flowers, anchored to the ocean floor, waving in the current, straining the water for the tiny lives that drifted past.

This, then, was my first sight of gods—not counting myself of course—though I did not know it. It had been so frightening, so abrupt and surprising, that for the first time I began to look around me with purpose, to try to understand what had just happened. In later eras there would have been humans to tell me what I was, who might have recognized me as soon as they encountered me, as indeed the first humans I encountered did. But there were no humans yet.

I suppose I could have moved. Could have roamed over the earth, as those other gods did. But somehow I never wished to, never felt the impulse to do it. I wished only to sit under the sun

I wanted to know what those other gods were, but I did not want to do what they did.

This priest knew to be patient. She knew from experience, hers and her predecessors’, that it could take a very long time to teach language to a god.

It was not essential, I thought, to use one particular set of words or way to say them, but rather to use the words that were right in that particular moment, in those particular circumstances.

The Raven of Iraden is not from Iraden. That would be a strange thing to say in that first language I learned to understand. In Iradeni there are two words—one for belonging to or being a part of, and one for coming from somewhere.

But perhaps the fact that the same word is used to speak these different things means that the ideas—belonging to, coming from—do blur together. Perhaps. And I’ve sometimes wondered if speakers of Iradeni have noticed that “belonging to” and “being a part of” aren’t necessarily the same thing. Sometimes they are, certainly, but not always, and I wonder if I notice that only because this language is so different from my first, and I have had such a long, uninterrupted time to consider it.

Perhaps, though change was inevitable, the specifics of that change might be something one could manipulate. Perhaps one could not prevent change entirely, but one could try to guide events so that things would be better, if not for you, then for some future being or beings whose welfare mattered to you.