A Song of Little Raven Sample

Nobody gets to say goodbye.

Tam Odel has spent twenty-two years being politely invisible. A prince the court looks past, raised by the two women who loved his mother, in a castle that has forgotten it was built for shelter. He sleeps badly most nights and dreams of a word he can never quite make out. And on the night of the Kindling, when eleven candles die and his refuses to, everyone stops looking past him at once.

What follows is a flight into the winter woods, to a camp with rules written in other people’s grief. Where wood must be split, a mule has opinions, children explain what the adults won’t, and a black-eyed woman teaches him that power is mostly the discipline of not using it. And at dusk, a raven comes to the beech tree, listening.

Tam carries his mother’s song and a dead man’s gift, and no idea what either is worth. The council knows exactly. That’s why they’re coming.

A fantasy about inheritance, hospitality, and the names we carry. Where revolutions run through kitchens, attention is a form of resistance, and the smallest messenger carries the heaviest word.

Corbie Wake writes and draws from a kitchen near a river, in a family that carried its songs a long way to get here. Her ravens, mushrooms, and small ciphered plates appear as stickers and drawings under the same name. A Song of Little Raven is her first novel. Its sequel, The Badger’s Bolero, is underway.