Ravenminder (Ravenminder #1)

Chapter 1

The raven arrived as it always did.

Just before sunset, to the prison at the edge of the world.

It stayed high above the black rock fortress, silent as it soared past marching guards. They were always in pairs of two, for one could never be too careful around the prisoners of Rendegard.

Past the turrets and domes, the raven flew, until it reached the southernmost side.

There, the world opened wide.

The prison’s rear wall nearly dropped off into the Sundered Sea.

A black rope bridge jutted out over the water. It was so ancient, the entire thing swayed in the breeze, and if one stepped on a board too worn from time and salt air, they might fall to the razor-sharp cluster of rocks far below or tumble into the sea.

A mercy if they drowned before they were eaten alive by the sea wyverns.

The raven cawed, skirting a bit higher as two colossal black fins surfaced above the whitecaps before slipping beneath the churning waves once more.

The bridge ended on a looming black rock isle.

It was Rendegard’s most secure block of cells, upon which stood a single tower.

The raven cawed with joy as it came into view, for it had flown long and hard against the night winds and was eager for a chance to rest its wings.

It circled, beads of condensation rolling off its dark feathers like morning dew as it landed.

It shook the wetness from its feathers, then hopped from the windowsill into the warmth of the highest room in the tower.

The one that belonged to the birds.

The Aviary was a stinking, stained turret, and one of many others just like it across Lordach. A place for the birds to fly to and from, delivering messages about the only thing that mattered these days.

The war.

‘You’re here late,’ said the young woman who sat waiting.

She was small in frame, a dark-haired wisp of a thing who bore the title of Rendegard’s Ravenminder.

She was the keeper of the messenger birds, at the furthest point south one could go before Lordach ended and the expanse of the Sundered Sea began.

The Ravenminder sat slumped at a table in the center of the tower, amidst piles of worn parchment and handmade quills, and overturned inkwells that had spilled their contents upon the wood like blood.

Her dark hair was a tangled mess of knots and stray bird feathers, and her grey eyes were as dull as river stones. She was, in every sense of the word, forgettable … save for the trio of raised black scars upon her right cheek.

Strange, then, that the Ravenminder bore a name as lovely as Ezer.

It had once belonged to a brave and beautiful demigoddess. The very one that hung the moon in the night skies above her tower.

Ezer yawned and plucked a bit of worn parchment off her scarred cheek, stuck there thanks to the drool.

She looked down at the letter and sighed.

Uncle Ervos, it began. I’m writing to inform you that another month has passed, and yet your sorry, good-for-nothing a—

Ezer crumbled the parchment and tossed it aside.

A pathetic start to a letter, for her insults had never boasted class. Not that she’d actually intended to send it. Her uncle had only ever written back to her once in the two years since he’d left for the war.

She’d sent word to the front in Augaurde countless times, asking for his status. Inquiring whether he was dead or alive for so much time had passed since she’d heard from him. Of course, she sensed in her gut that he was alive, certain she would feel it if Ervos had passed.

Their fates were tied.

And Ezer had always been a victim of the cruelty of fate.

She sighed deeply, blowing a bit of hair from her tired eyes. Ervos had never even told her where he’d been stationed.

She’d written to the garrison in Tomar, and then Stervist. Then Regalia, and Peddler’s Gate, and the troupe at Highgarden. Each camp, spread evenly across the north, holding the line against the dark.

The list went on and on, and not a single godsdamned garrison had word of Ervos.

She supposed silence was better than a confirmed death, for it was Ezer’s job, as it was all the Ravenminders like her, to receive the lists of the fallen. To send those names out of her tower, onward to the doorsteps of those who would discover their loved ones dead and gone.

Two years of receiving those lists, names hastily scribbled upon parchment, and Ervos had never been on one.

He hadn’t defected, for she knew he’d die before he ever turned to the enemy’s side.

So why hadn’t he written more? And why couldn’t she find him?

With another sigh, Ezer wiped the drool from her face, and did her best to smooth her wild curls.

Ervos wasn’t her true uncle, not by blood. Anyone could take one look at the giant and see that. He’d discovered Ezer as a babe, the sole survivor of her village after a shadow wolf attack. There was no one left to claim her. Nor was there anyone to give her a name, so he had done it himself.

Ezer, he’d chosen. Because she was found beneath the light of the full moon.

Ervos was once the Ravenminder here, just like his father before him.

A talented one at that, for he was a gentle giant that loved the ravens.

But he had a betting problem. He drank too much, and practiced his card-play too little, to the point that even Ezer could beat him by the time she turned ten.

Ervos had gotten in way too deep with borrowing coin from the prison master. He hadn’t paid any of it back before he’d been whisked away to the warfront, drafted like so many others.

She’d never forget the day the summons came.

All able-bodied men and women were to go and serve, fighting against the Acolyte’s dark army in the north.

She was abandoned.

Like so many other underaged children. Left to face the world without a guide.

‘I don’t suppose you brought word from my uncle?’ Ezer asked the raven. ‘A giant of a man, crop of bright red hair?’

The raven only cocked its dark head left and right, as if wondering why she still hadn’t removed the tiny scroll from its leg.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you would have.’

She wiped her hands on her leather apron and stood from her worn stool. Chains clinked between her ankles as she walked, kicking up shavings and the smell of dust.

The shackles had long ago rubbed her ankles raw and covered them in scars, despite the pieces of worn fabric she’d managed to wrap beneath them in hopes of saving her skin.

She’d requested salve – for the poor birds’ feet, an easy lie – and managed to use it on herself enough times to heal the skin.

But the scars beneath would remain.

The ones that went soul-deep, covering the pain of Ervos’s abandonment. And now someone had to pay off all his debts.

Of course it fell to his ward to do it.

Ezer would have been boarded upon a wagon heading to one of the gods’ temples in Tovar.

It was there that she’d be crammed into a room overflowing with other young girls to be watched over by elderly maidens with rapping canes and constant orders to bow her head and pray for mercy to the five gods above, and to the countless demigods beneath them, while they sewed uniforms and gathered baskets of food to be sent to the warfront.

Ezer was no good with a sewing needle.

She wasn’t much for prayers.

And she was even worse with following rules.

She supposed having to take Ervos’s place wasn’t all bad – the only gift fate had ever given her – because Ezer loved the midnight birds.

Nobody wanted to be near a raven these days. They were seen as bad omens, too similar to the monsters the Acolyte’s army rode to war.

But Ezer saw them for what they were.

Cunning, clever little beasts. Survivors, in a world so ridden by death.

‘Prison master came knocking three times for word of you,’ Ezer said now to the raven, as she ran her ink-stained fingertips across his silken feathers.

He was wet from the fog, and smelled something fierce, but she didn’t balk at him.

Nor did he balk at her.

Ezer was not beautiful.

She’d always known it, and perhaps that was why she loved the birds. They didn’t fear her, not even for the enormous trio of scars that marred the entire right side of her face and had speckled her right eye with flecks of darkness.

They were awful, the scars. Three slash marks of gnarled skin that had healed wrong, so each was raised upon her face. And so dark they looked like stripes of black paint.

The scars had been there for as long as she could remember, stretching diagonally from her temple to her chin.

People often thought her cursed because of them.

And perhaps she was.

She didn’t even know who her mother and father were.

She didn’t know their names, nor their faces. Ervos, to his credit, had searched for years, but in the end, he came up empty.

Such was the way of war.

She had little memory of the beasts that marred her … but sometimes, if she closed her eyes, she saw a dark and shadowed snout. Sometimes, she saw the flash of teeth beneath the moonlight and remembered the sound of her mother’s scream.

A sound that had cut off like a snuffed candle.

A slammed door.

A bird screeching before it flew away into the night.

‘Is that what brought you here past sunset? It’s dangerous to be out after dark, you know,’ Ezer said, as the raven closed its eyes and leaned in to her touch. ‘They say the moon makes the wolves hunger for blood.’

Its inky black beak clinked against the old ring she wore upon her thumb.

It was all that remained of her mother, a tarnished silver hammered with five tiny symbols to signify the gods – one god for each element.

She often stared at the ring and wondered which of the Five her mother prayed to most. ‘Not that the gods paid any mind to her when the wolves came,’ Ezer mused aloud.

The raven ruffled its feathers. ‘Well. At least you made it here safely.’