This book is for my father,

John Morgan,

for carrying me past the seaweed.

“I think you look on death as your friend, ” she murmured. “That is a strange friend for a young man to have.”

“The only faithful friend in this world, ” he said bitterly. “Death is always sure to be at your side.”

—Poul Anderson,

The Broken Sword

When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse, and check his pupils to see if he’s ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him. Ringil had already tried the first course of action with Bashka the Schoolmaster and to no avail, so he put down his pint with an elaborate sigh and went to get his broadsword.

“Not this again,” he was heard to mutter as he pushed through into the residents’ bar.

A yard and a half of tempered Kiriath steel, Ringil’s broadsword hung above the fireplace in a scabbard woven from alloys that men had no names for, though any Kiriath child could have identified them from age five upward. The sword itself also had a name in the Kiriath tongue, as did all Kiriath-forged weapons, but it was an ornate title that lost a lot in translation. “Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers in the Wake of Warriors” was about as close as Archeth had been able to render it, so Ringil had settled on calling it the Ravensfriend. He didn’t like the name especially, but it had the sort of ring people expected of a famous sword—and his landlord, a shrewd man with money and the potential for making it, had renamed the inn the same way, setting an eternal seal on the thing.