KATHARINE KERR
THE BLACK RAVEN
Book Two of the Dragon Mage
COPYRIGHT
HarperVoyager
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Voyager 1999
Copyright © Katharine Kerr 1999
Cover design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Katharine Kerr asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780006482604
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007378159
Version: 2019-12-10
DEDICATION
For my grandmother, Elsa Petersen Brahtin 18991985
The courage in her life amazed me
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Note on the Deverry Sequence
Prologue: Winter, 1117 Bardek
Part One: Winter, 1117 Deverry
Part Two: Deverry
Epilogue: Spring, 1118
Keep Reading
Appendices
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
A NOTE ON THE DEVERRY SEQUENCE
It occurs to me that readers might find it helpful to know something about the overall structure of the Deverry series. From the beginning of this rather large enterprise, I have had an actual ending in mind, a set of events that should wrap up all the books in dramatic conclusion. Its merely taken me much longer to get there than I ever thought it would.
If you think of Deverry as a stage play, the sets of books make up its acts. Act One consists of the Deverry books proper, that is, Daggerspell, Darkspell, Dawnspell, and Dragonspell. The Westlands books, A Time of Exile, A Time of Omens, A Time of War, and A Time of Justice, make up Act Two, while Act Three will unfold in the current quintet, The Dragon Mage, that is, The Red Wyvern, The Black Raven, the volume you now have in hand, and its sister, The Fire Dragon. The Gold Falcon and The Silver Wyrm will bring the sequence to its end at last.
As for the way that the series alternates between past and present lives, think of the structure of a line of Celtic interlace, some examples of which have decorated the various books in this set. Although each knot appears to be a separate figure, when you look closely you can see that they are actually formed from one continuous line. Similarly, this line weaves over and under itself to form the figures. A small section of line seems to run over or under another line to form a knot.
The past incarnations of the characters in this book and their present tense story really are one continuous line, but this line interweaves to form the individual volumes. Eventually soon, I hope the pattern will complete itself, and you will be able to see that the set of books forms a circle of knots.
Katharine Kerr
PROLOGUE
Winter, 1117 Bardek
Always the sorcerer must prepare for hindrances and set-backs. Before any working of great length and import, he must spend long nights in study of the omens, for if the Macrocosm can find a way to defeat him, it will, preferring in its laziness the natural order over any change wrought by our arts, no matter how greatly that change will be to its benefit.
The Pseudo-Iamblichus Scroll
Marka, dearest? Keeta said. Im sorry. Theres something wrong with him.
Marka tried to answer, but her throat filled with tears. Her youngest son, not yet two years old, sat on a red and blue carpet in a patch of sunlight that spilled through the tent door. He was frowning at the edge of the brightness; over and over again he would reach out a pale brown hand and touch the shadow next to it, then draw his hand back and frown the harder. Tight brown curls hung over his forehead; now and then he would bat at them as if they bothered him, only to forget them again in an instant.