The first book in the First Law fantasy trilogy. A fantastic medievalesque epic in the line of stories where it is a bit hard to know who is good and who is bad. The protagonist has just enough faults to make him both human and charming, albeit a rugged sort of charming found in those that typically aren’t affected by the norms of society.
Notable Excerpts
Once you’ve got a task to do, it’s better to do it than to live with the fear of it.
There was a kind of horrible justice to it, West supposed. The great and the small were treated exactly alike.
Broken hearts heal with time, but broken teeth never do.
The world will not end if I sit here a moment longer. There is no rush. No rush.
“A champion never knows what he might be called on to fight with.”
”…Axes and maces and so forth are lethal enough, but they hang on the belt like dumb brutes…But a sword… a sword has a voice…Sheathed it has little to say, to be sure, but you need only put your hand on the hilt and it begins to whisper in your enemy’s ear.”
He wrapped his fingers tightly round the grip. “A gentle warning. A word of caution. Do you hear it?…Now…compare it to the sword half drawn…It speaks louder, does it not? It hisses a dire threat. It makes a deadly promise. Do you hear it?…Now compare it to the sword full drawn.”
Bayaz whipped the long blade from its sheath with a faint ringing sound… “It shouts now, does it not? It screams defiance! It bellows a challenge! Do you hear it?…Yes, a sword has a voice. Axes and maces and so forth are lethal enough, but a sword is a subtle weapon, and suited to a subtle man…”
Every man has his excuses, and the more vile the man becomes, the more touching the story has to be.
…you have to have fear to have courage.
“If a man seeks to change the world, he should first understand it.”
The more you learn, the more you realise how little you know. Still, the struggle itself is worthwhile.
“Knowledge may be the root of power, but each new thing I’ve learned has left me worse off.”
Ignorance is the sweetest medicine
But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.
A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time, and had never got anywhere. He had no interest in that arrangement.
As commander of a battalion his trade had been to fight the enemy with steel. As a staff officer, it seemed, his role was to fight his own side with paper, more secretary than soldier. He felt like a man trying to push a huge stone up a hill. Straining and straining, getting nowhere, but unable to stop pushing in case the rock should fall and crush him. Meanwhile, arrogant bastards who were in just the same danger lazed on the slopes beside him saying, “Well, it’s not my rock.”