#cain ballari

[a2zillustration]

Has anyone else out there read The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson? You should read it, and then talk to me about it.

[mzhydera]

So, I finished The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson a few days ago and I can’t stop thinking about it, 5/5 ⭐️ One of the best books I’ve read this year. So, anyways, here’s my version of Cain Ballari

[teartra]

Any Cain Ballari fan out here or should I suffer this journey alone?

[parate-regis-corvi]

Cain Ballari, the Fox contender

[echoes-of-a-life-well-lived]

The Raven Scholar was fantastic and not at all what I expected!! I need the second book ASAP!

[cowboylikeyouu]

just finished reading the raven scholar, fucking loved it and i have a lot of thoughts, but as someone with a hawkeye pfp i feel like my only duty is to inform you that, except for the fact that he sucks at archery, cain ballari is literally clint barton reincarnated. right down to the fucking initials.

this alone should be proof enough.

[abigailspinach]

Neema rubbed the pumice over her body, sanding the oil from her skin as the fish weaved around her. As she scrubbed, the oil began to float on the water. If she wasn’t quick, her skin would reabsorb it. She jumped out and crossed to another pond close by, rinsing off the last of the oil as best she could.

The scrubbing had worked. The drug was still racing through her system, but she held the reins. She no longer wanted to fly to the Hidden Realm, or lick Cain’s face, or burn the world to ash. She wanted to go home, and sleep for a hundred years.

She looked about for her dressing robe. “It was steeped in the oil,” Cain said, emerging from the darkness. He tossed her a pair of overalls and some gardening shoes, liberated from a tool shed. She put them on. Behind her, in the pond, the fish writhed and thrashed as they succumbed to the drug.

“How do you feel?” Cain asked her.

“Sad.”

“The fish?” he guessed.

“The fishes.”

Sitting on the ground, she shoved the boots on, before coming to a stop. The laces were too much for her. Cain kneeled down and tied them for her. “Someone just tried to kill you.”

Neema didn’t think so. Whoever dosed her bath oil couldn’t have known that Benna would tip in the whole bottle. “Generic,” she guessed, using her private name for him without noticing. He had access to her quarters and the money to pay for the drug. “Assistant. Former.”

“You do have a knack for making enemies.”

“We enemies?”

She’d lost her verbs in the fish pond.

“Neema,” Cain sighed. He had his head down, she didn’t hear him. The laces were done. He put his hands under her armpits and lifted her up, then prodded her towards the path. She stumbled forward, woozy and exhausted, but not dead, so that was something.

[abigailspinach]

Good point. I need more Lady Rogues

Any female "lovable rogue" characters?

I'm reading Antonia Hogdson's The Raven Scholar at the moment, and it's a delight. Neema Kraa is an intriguing and complex heroine, but so far (about 150 pages in), Cain is stealing the show. Cain is the Fox, the flim-flam man, the unpredictable rogue, yet somehow you can't help thinking he has a heart hidden somewhere under the trickery. Before that, I enjoyed Chakraborty's The City of Brass, which features Dara, another character of this kind, a slippery trickster who nonetheless helps heroine Nahri find her place. (If he turns out to be Pure Evil, please don't tell me. I still need to read the next two books.) Then of course we have Hoid, dancing his way across Sanderson's Cosmere.

Lovable rogues, "scoundrels with golden hearts" as Robert Graves calls them in Claudius the God, are everywhere in the fantasy genre. Yet as I enjoy these characters, I can't help noticing that they never seem to be female. I've tried to think of a female rascal who is charismatic and funny and has a heart deep down underneath, but I'm coming up dry. And the female characters who move alongside these devil-may-care, light-on-their-feet rascals tend to be thrown in shade by their light; however complex they may be, they can (if the writer isn't very careful) come across as "boring" in comparison.

Are there examples of female "lovable rogues" -- charismatic, funny, light on their feet, good deep down? And why do there seem to be so few?

Please, NO CONTEMPORARY SETTINGS.

Edit: Thanks, everyone!