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Teaser Tuesday: What is Magic Like for the Unmagical?

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 13:53:35 +0000

Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - 06:53

While the Alpennia series has focused largely on characters who have significant mystical talents, Floodtide gives us a larger window into how "ordinary" people experience the magic that pervades the world. I've made previous reference to the climax of a Great Mystery feeling like a shiver down your spine, and to how even those who don't have measurable mystical talent can contribute power to the working of a mystery. Because the experience of those with greater talents can be so dramatic, there's no internal conflict in ordinary people between having these experiences and considering themselves untouched by magic.

This is Roz's contradiction: that she regularly performs house-charms and believes that they have effects, that she has a sensory response to the workings of magic around her, and yet that she considers herself to have no magical talent. If pressed, she might quibble over the definition of "talent," just as Serafina initially believes she has no mystical talents despite her extraordinary sensitivity to visions. From another angle, one might suppose that she categorizes her experience during "church mysteries" as different in kind from how Celeste's charms affect her. But as the story moves toward its conclusion, Roz seems to be on the edge of integrating her understanding of how she experiences magic.

* * *

When I was a girl in the Orisule school and the sisters celebrated her name-day mystery, I imagined the saint holding her starry cloak out around all of us girls, like she was watching over us and protecting us. All I could think was how wonderful it would be to feel that way always.

All through those long days and nights working the fever charms, my magic feeling never really went away, though being tired and hungry, I didn’t pay it much mind. Now I wasn’t sure I wanted to feel like that all the time. Maybe it was better if it was rare and special.

But when Maisetra Sovitre spread her arms out like that and put a hand on our shoulders, everything got jumbled up together in my head: all my memories of the picture of Saint Orisule, and all the times working with Celeste on charms, and how being with Nan had given me that magic feeling too and that was why I’d never thought it was a sin, and it all shivered through me at once.

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Teaser Tuesday: That Unreal Feeling Traveling Through the Dark

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 21:28:58 +0000

Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - 14:28

Have you ever been on one of those road trips where you're driving all night and it feels like there's nothing left in the universe but you and the road? When time loses all meaning? When past and future merge into an endless now? Now imagine you're in a boat, moving through the flooded streets. That was the feeling I was aiming for in this passage.

Today's blog was a little delayed in getting posted because the activities for the Sirens Studio sessions started early and I'd managed to sleep up to my alarm, thank goodness. I've written up the next FAQ blog for later in the week as well, then I'll be set until next Tuesday. Sirens is a different experience this year -- I really do know a lot of other attendees this time, not only from last year, but from connecting at other events over the year. I'm swinging back toward thinking maybe I'll come back next year.

* * *

By the time it was full dark, we’d worked a path from the rivermen’s street across the warehouse district with its tenements and taverns. Then we set up lanterns at either end of the boats and kept going. I could only imagine how small a part of the lower city we’d seen so far.

Throughout the night we moved along dark waterways that had once been streets, looking for watchers who signaled where to tie up for our next stop. Then there would be another crowded room, just like the last one.

...

It was easier after dawn when it was light again, though there’d been hours when I thought it would never come. I stopped remembering faces. I stopped remembering almost everything, at least, how it connected together. There are bits and pieces I still recall. It’s like one of those paintings that has so many little details it looks like real life, but it’s flat and fixed, with nothing moving. I remember how, more and more, the word had run ahead of us. Especially at night, as the oars splashed slowly down the street, feeling for the depth of the water to make sure we didn’t run aground, there would be a string of lanterns held up to light our way and show us the safe path.

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Teaser Tuesday: Pretending the World is Normal

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 14:34:52 +0000

Tuesday, October 15, 2019 - 07:34

When the world turns upside down, those who are thrown together can feel like all barriers and differences have been erased in the common struggle. At least, it can feel that way to those who don't worry as much about consequences once the crisis is past. I picked this scene because it illustrates Roz and Iuli's different takes on potential consequences. Iuli thinks she can make everything right once the crisis is over. Roz knows that some people are held to stricter standards of accountability than others. Iuli is certain that Roz's highest aspiration is to return to being her maid and confident that she can make it happen. Roz...has other ideas. And yet old habits die hard, and Roz's reflex is to look after her, as if nothing had changed.

* * *

Maisetra Iulien had been quieter than usual that day, just asking what was needed. She only brought out her sweet-talk to assure Mefro Dominique there’d be no trouble from letting her stay. I couldn’t say she was right about that. I remembered how sharp Maisetra Sovitre’s words had been forbidding me to come here. Would she blame Mefro Dominique for not sending her back? Or would she understand it was beyond any of us to change Maisetra Iulien’s mind?

It was a habit for me to do for her as we got ready for sleep, hanging her dress up as neat as I could and plaiting up her hair.

“Oh Roz,” she said, “you needn’t. You aren’t my maid here.”

I made a little noise. I meant it to be a never-mind, but it came out like a sob.

“Don’t worry, Roz. I’ll put in a word for you when this is all over. I don’t know how much good it’ll do. Cousin Margerit may lock me in my bedroom again when all this is over. But I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have taking care of me to face a Rotenek season.”

It was nice to hear her say it. But I thought she was right. Not even Princess Anna putting in a word for me could get me hired back at Tiporsel House now.

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Teaser Tuesday: Dungeons but no Dragons

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 14:01:09 +0000

Tuesday, October 8, 2019 - 07:01

One of the hazy images that came to me when I was first plotting Daughter of Mystery was a system of nearly forgotten catacombs under the city of Rotenek. I think the original image was in connection with Margerit and Barbara fleeing when the mystery guild was betrayed. That vision of the scene was discarded, but I kept a vague fondness for the idea of underground passages. The image merged eventually with the developing idea of the chanulezes and the thought that some of them had been covered over and nearly forgotten. Old European cites have layers and layers of forgotten history, shut behind doors, covered by new foundations, walled away when inconvenient. When Roz and her friends needed a different way to return to Saint Rota's well, that image of underground passages returned.

And, like Chekov's gun, the existence of a set of tunnels and forgotten access points lying underneath the main Plaiz between the palace and the cathedral just may be relevant in another book or two. Or three.

* * *

Maisetra Iulien said later that it would have been more of an adventure to find our way all on our own. But it seems to me adventures are enough work, and you should take help when you can. No one does great things all by themselves, except maybe in Maisetra Iulien’s stories. Look at Celeste’s charm work. She’s the one with the knack to put together a charm against the fever, but she never would have tried using the well water except for Mesner Aukustin wanting to explore the chanulezes and Liv providing the boat. And she wouldn’t have had dared to finish the charm, except for Liv’s nephew needing the cure. Even I’d done my part, carrying the chest of charm-goods for her, so I wasn’t going to grudge the cellarer his bit.

The iron-banded door took three of us to drag it open once we’d cleared out the rubbish in the way, found the right key, and oiled the lock into life. The passage went on and on until it felt like we must have crossed under the whole city. But in the end it led straight to a door with a simple bar, like it was only meant to be opened by someone from inside the palace. When we pushed it open, there was a rush of damp air and the hollow mutter of the current in the hidden chanulez. The water was higher, most of the way up the steps to the well, but sweet water still flowed down from the fountain into the dark.

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Teaser Tuesday: "Don't expect me to answer to your cousin for this"

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 22:13:24 +0000

Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - 15:13

Possibly the hardest thing in trying to write a stand-alone story within an existing series is trying to find the tricky balance between writing for the readers who don’t know any of these characters, and establishing the right dynamics for pre-existing characters who still need to “act in character” even in front of readers who don’t know what “in character” means for them.

Not all of the prior viewpoint characters have cameos, and Antuniet only gets this one, where she is stern and exhausted and yet the person most likely to be sympathetic to wild quests for the sake of experimental magic. And—for Iulien’s sake—it helps that she probably feels the least impulse to be over-protective of adventurous young women.

* * *

“We?” I asked.

Maisetra Iulien looked sideways at the tall woman and I could see that dangerous spark in her eyes, like she’d had when she first talked about exploring the chanulezes. Or that first day I met her when she’d run away from home in boy’s clothes. “You’ll need to come with me. I could scarcely go running around in the palace basements with a man I’m not related to and keep my reputation unless I have a chaperone with me.”

Mesnera Chazillen frowned at her but I could tell her mind was upstairs with her baby. “Don’t expect me to answer to your cousin for this.”

“Please?”

I wasn’t sure if Maisetra Iulien needed her permission or just wanted her blessing, but Mesnera Chazillen sighed and turned to open up the wooden case she’d set on the table. “Here. If you’re going to be running around with fever in the streets, at least I can give you this. It’s no protection but if you get sick it may help. We just worked out how to make them reliably.” She tucked a small, smooth stone as clear as crystal into Maisetra Iulien’s hand and then offered one to me as well. She looked down at my muddy skirts. “Ainis, perhaps you might lend this young person a clean dress so she looks respectable enough to be a proper vizeino. Go to the palace gates on the north side of the grounds. Tell the guard I’ve sent you to fetch something from my workshop. Iulien, you know the way. After that, you’re on your own.”

I looked at the stone in my hand. It felt cool—not just in my hand, but I could feel the cold in my belly and all along my spine. I tucked it away in the pocket under my skirt.

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Teaser Tuesday: You Just Might Find You Get What You Need

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 14:43:02 +0000

Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - 07:43

Quite some time ago, I pulled out the passages I wanted to use for the teaser series and set them up in a separate file. That way I didn't need to hunt around for something every week and there was no risk of messing with the master file by accident. But that means that for the last few months I've been setting up the teasers while looking at snippets of text in isolation. This past Saturday, I did the review of the final page proofs, which is as close as I've come so far to reading the final novel straight through. (Not quite the same, since I had to keep my awareness on things like formatting and punctuation, rather than reading immersively.) So it's all fresh in my mind at the moment in that way where I simultaneously know how much more there is to go and yet feeling like the story is rushing straight to the finish. I hope other readers feel the same way!

Celeste--like Margerit--takes a fairly mechanistic approach to charms and mysteries. It's inevitable, I think, when you have that rare talent for being able to visualize the process of magic. But in Floodtide, rather than contrasting with a more spiritually-oriented relationship to mysteries, Celeste is contrasted with Roz's matter of fact acceptance of charms as just "something you do because you don't want to think about what might happen if you didn't do them." That makes it a little more pointed on the occasions when Celeste experiences undeniable encounters with the more numinous side of magic. Like when she comes back from participating in the tutela of Saint Mauriz and shares with Roz that the saint spoke to her during the ceremony. Or--on a more practical side--when an essential component for her experiments in charms against river fever turns out not to be used up after all.

* * *

“It’s Liv,” I stammered, not sure how to start. “They’ve got fever and I said I’d do what I can.”

Celeste was right behind her and I added quickly, “Just what you can give me to take. Anything that doesn’t need a charm-wife. I didn’t promise her anything except that I’d come.”

“What have you done, Rozild!” Mefro Dominique said, but not like it was a question.

“Come on up,” Celeste said.

I took off my muddy shoes to go upstairs, where her erteskir was packed tightly between the bolts of fabric and work baskets, and watched as she sorted through all the compartments and drawers of her chest of charm-work.

“This will help for heat in the blood,” she said, putting a candle wrapped in a strip of cloth into a basket. You remember how we used it trying to build the fever charm? Tie it around the neck then light the candle.” She gave me two sealed packets. “These herbs will help even without charms. Tell them to make a tea with it. And—”

Celeste gave a gasp and lifted a small stoppered bottle out of the very bottom of the chest.

“It was all gone. I used it all up. I swear to God I looked and looked.”

It was some of the water from Saint Rota’s well. One bottle overlooked when she’d been sharing the blessing charm around at the beginning of the flood. Celeste closed her eyes and held it tight, moving her lips like she was praying silently.

“Roz, it’s a sign. I’m meant to try one more time.”

I wanted to protest. But I remembered Liv crying. And if Saint Mauriz had told her to go, who was I to say no?

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Teaser Tuesday: Sometimes it Creeps Up on You

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 17 Sep 2019 15:02:44 +0000

Tuesday, September 17, 2019 - 08:02

Disasters aren't always sudden and extreme -- sometimes they creep up on you slowly, like the water rising along the steps of the plaiz one at a time. Sometimes disasters consist of tedious waiting as the news dribbles in from those who are harder hit. Sometimes disasters are mere inconveniences to be avoided until they ebb away again. Floodtide in Rotenek has always shown different faces to different people. In the previous Alpennia books, we've mostly seen the "inconvenience" side. Floodtide as a holiday excuse to leave the city.

Knowing the shape of what was to come after the events of Mother of Souls, it was important to me to show the other side. The people who had no where to go. Who had to carry on with their lives, no matter whether the river only left a mess or carried away lives and livelihoods. The people who watch the aristocracy and monied classes hurry out of town in their fine carriages and resent that ability to escape.

Even the upper crust of Rotenek can't always pick up and leave with no warning and no preparation. An unexpected floodtide can democratize disaster. But for a little while yet, the two cities continue their separate ways...

* * *

At Tiporsel House, they talked about floodtide like it was a holiday. The maisetra was always down at her school, making a place for the families of her students who’d been flooded out. Mesner and Maisetra Pertinek left town to go visiting. They wanted to take Maisetra Iulien with them, “to be safe from fever” she told me after she’d refused to go.

“I can’t think that the fever would be worse than sitting around in a parlor listening to all the Pertinek cousins reminiscing about things I don’t know anything about,” she said. “I wish Cousin Margerit would let me go down to Urmai. I want to do something.”

There was plenty to do in the flooded parts of the city, but that wasn’t work for a proper young lady. There wasn’t anything for a proper young lady to do with no parties or visiting. That meant no one asked why I was still giving half-days to Mefro Dominique, when anyone with sense would know we couldn’t be dressmaking right now. I came home bone-tired every afternoon and it was all I could do to keep awake after supper until I saw her tucked into bed. For now I kept going back and forth between worlds—the one where floodtide was a holiday and the one where it was a disaster.

* * *

We're now two months out from the Floodtide release date. I've just plunged into the whirlwind of setting up publicity, arranging for review copies, and making sure the book gets the best launch possible. Just as a reminder, here's some key information about pre-orders, availability, and whatnot.

Pre-orders: Currently you can pre-order the hard copy at Amazon (possibly other online retailers but I haven't checked them all), but pre-orders of both the hard copy and the ebook won't be available from the publisher (Bella Books) until one month before release, i.e., mid-October. If you like buying hard copies from a bookstore, now is the time to check with them and ask if they've ordered it.

Ebooks: Bella Books has a policy of restricting ebook sales to their own site for the first month after release. (I have no control over this.) But if you buy from Bella and especially if you set up an account with them, you get access to all formats (epub, mobi, pdf) in DRM-free format with the ability to re-download anything you've bought in the past if something happens to the file. Otherwise, ebooks should be available through other venues in mid December.

Review copies: Bella is now using NetGalley for review copies. I haven't learned all the details yet, so I don't know whether reviewers have to be individually authorized or simply have accounts in good standing with the right book preferences. NetGalley should have the book a month in advance, so around mid-October. If you're on the list of reviewers I'm putting together, I'll be sending out a notification when I've confirmed it's available there. Bella does not provide hard-copy ARCs (Advance Reading Copies).

Release Party: It looks like I'll be doing a virtual release party in November, given that Chessiecon (my usual November convention) has been cancelled this year, and given that I don't know of any local bookstores that will be stocking the book. So expect to see me doing some serious online blow-out activities, including a few giveaways. So keep an eye out and join the celebrations!

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Teaser Tuesday: Disasters and Bells

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 10 Sep 2019 19:57:21 +0000

Tuesday, September 10, 2019 - 12:57

Even in this modern age of broadcast communication and instant messaging, there are places in our lives where simple, loud, public sounds carry essential meaning. Most of the time, we experience them only in “test” mode—checking on their functionality and accustoming us to the particular form of the alert and the expected response. In my own everyday life, there are fire drills at work, the monthly ammonia-release alert siren test, the interruption of tv or radio shows with the Emergency Broadcast System horns and message, "This is a test. This is only a test..." There are a few that aren’t “test mode”: the bells of a level railroad crossing, even the fog horn at the local marina.

Thinking about all those, perhaps Rotenek’s floodtide bell seems more familiar. It shares characteristics with the churchbells that mark the hours or sound funeral knells, but despite the close association with the church of Saint Nikule, the purpose is civic and secular: a way of communicating the threat of environmental peril to those who aren’t watching the river closely. It’s a close cousin of the flash flood warnings we get in California when the winter rains come, or the net-yet-realized dream of an alarm system that would give a few minutes warning of earthquakes.

Except for purely mechanical systems such as railroad crossings, behind every alert system is a person who must make the decision of when to invoke it. What happens when that person makes the wrong decision? Or waits too long to decide? Where is the balance point between trusting to authority and the chaos of impulse?

***

[Note: ellipses are bits of omitted text that are a bit spoilery for something that isn’t essential for this excerpt.]

The tower had been part of a warehouse once long ago, but all that was left was the tower and the arcade along the front where the charmwives sat. The bell didn’t belong to the church, even though it was the priest who rang it. It belonged to the city and the merchants. To all of us. There were other bells in the tower besides the floodtide bell: a deep one for thick fog on the river, to warn barges where the channel turned, or to sound an alarm during the fires a year past. There was no door or lock on the stairs to the bell tower for that reason.

[…] After a slow creak, the first peal rang out sweet and high over the Nikuleplaiz, followed by the double tone. Around me the stones shivered. Nothing else sounded like it. You could tell the floodtide bell even with other chimes ringing.

Once the first notes rang out, my ears were full of the sound. […] I counted off the peals. Nine. Ten. There were voices and shouts from the plaiz below. Through the window of the bell tower I could see two of the deacons come out on the church steps to stare. Fifteen. Sixteen.

I had counted to twenty-four when I saw men in the uniforms of the city guard come into the Nikuleplaiz on the far side, walking determinedly across the cobbles toward the tower. […]

If the floodtide bell belonged to the church, it would have been no business of the Guard. And of course if the priest had rung the bell, that would have been authority enough. […]

The sweet peals of the bell trailed off to echoes and were still. But […] I could hear other bells taking up the floodtide call. Someone might send a command to silence them, but for now the two-tone cry spread throughout the city, “Alarm! Alarm!”

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Teaser Tuesday: Doing For

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 14:58:29 +0000

Tuesday, September 3, 2019 - 07:58

The character trope of the "personal assistant" -- the person in a subordinate position whose job consists of providing support and devalued labor for a character with more pubic agency -- is tricky to portray. Particularly in an intensely class-stratified culture when that role is not typically freely chosen from among other options. Given her family's background and her work history, Roz sees the position of lady's maid as a desirable goal, but that isn't meant to erase the ways in which being a household servant are exploitative, exhausting, and often degrading.

And yet...in fiction, there's an undeniable appeal to the special bond and experience that comes when your job is to go all out to make someone else's life easy and beautiful and enjoyable, to be the invisible hands that turn out someone else's life as a work of art. There have been occasions in my life when--on a temporary and limited basis--I had roles like that, whether in supporting a manager on a project, or within historic re-enactment events play-acting the role of servant in a context where I was also providing real, logistical support to my fictive employer. I've felt that appeal--with the knowledge that it was within a limited scope and the person I was "doing for" had no power over my life as a whole.

Further, one can be in a subordinate, supportive role and have the agency to perform that role as a piece of artistry, or begrudgingly as a chore to be endured.

Roz is torn between aspiring to perfect the skills of a real lady's maid--to become an artist with her maisetra's life as the medium of her art--and the more concrete and enduring art of the dressmaker. Neither of them is a certain path. Both are skill sets she has yet to master in full. But in this scene I've tried to show some of the appeal of the former.

* * *

Tiporsel House was still all upside down when Maisetra Iulien’s father arrived. I’d almost forgotten about that. Futures seemed so far away. I know it doesn’t belong to me to say so, but he was a sour-looking man, all puffed up with his own importance. I didn’t like the way he talked to the maisetra, like she was a child. I could tell Maisetra Iulien loved him the same as I loved my father, but I could tell why she might have wanted a look at the wider world, without him standing over her.

Dressing became a chore every morning and evening. It wasn’t that Maisetra Iulien had so many gowns to choose from, but she’d try them all on and toss them on the bed and try again until I was ready to send her down to breakfast in her chemise.

“This one makes me look too young! He’ll think I’m a child who shouldn’t be allowed out of the house. That one makes me look too sophisticated. Look at the décolletage. It’s not my fault my bosom has grown this year.”

“Then wear it with your fichu,” I suggested. “And you should put the ear-bobs away until evening. I know girls wear them for everyday in the city, but Mefro Dominique says it isn’t done in the country, and that’s what your father will expect.”

I’d been asking Mefro Dominique a lot of questions about what was and wasn’t done since Maistir Fulpi had come. I could have asked Maitelen, but she was so worn down from looking after the baroness. Maisetra Iulien was in such a dither, I needed somebody’s word that weighed more than mine to keep her from wearing anything foolish.

Maisetra Iulien looked up and said, “What would I do without you, Roz?”

“I’m sure you’d do well enough,” I replied as I put the earrings back in her jewelry box. “Now let me do up your hair. You’ll feel better once this business is settled.”

I’d learned more hairdressing and was proud of how I turned her out, but it was a very long week.

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Teaser Tuesday: Sometimes You Just Need an Info-Dump

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 27 Aug 2019 13:47:50 +0000

Tuesday, August 27, 2019 - 06:47

As Floodtide approaches the events that form the climax of Mother of Souls, I can't escape the need to fill the reader in on a bunch of activities that my protagonist Roz is not only unaware of, but is mostly uninterested in. Roz knows, in theory, that her employer is the royal thaumaturgist and that means she makes up mysteries for Princess Anna. But the details? Not something that touches her directly. And the part being played by Luzie Valorin's magical opera is entirely outside her everyday experience. And yet, for the climax of Floodtide to make sense, the reader needs to know at least the general shape of the magical weather system and what's being done to combat it.

There are two points of contact that Roz has with those larger doings that the story can use as a door for the reader. One is a fairly minor part of the big story: Iulien's contributions to shaping the Tanfrit libretto. It is regularly established that Iulien "has a way with words"--whether it's writing of entertaining fiction, composing evocative poetry, or simply being persuasive. It isn't technically a "magical" ability, but the efficacy of magic is built up from a lot of non-mystical building blocks: logic, symbolism, structural repetition, and above all, careful choice of vocabulary. Roz knows that Iulien is contributing her writing talents to some Great Work because Iulien will inevitably chatter about it incessantly.

But for an efficient sketch of the larger shape of events, there's no substitute for Serafina Talarico's role. She has unexpectedly returned to Rotenek specifically because of those larger events, and Celeste is deeply invested in the fact of that return and what it might mean for Serafina's future plans. And on the other side, Serafina's role as mentor gives her a natural reason for explaining the whole to Celeste at a higher technical level than ordinary conversation would require. Roz may not understand the details, but we're allowed to eavesdrop through her.

All together, we have the perfect context for a concentrated info-dump.

When that summer was past, people remembered it as feeling strange and out of balance. For me, the real strangeness started the night we heard about the baroness, and it became worse after Maisetra Talarico came.

She was as good as her word and came down to the dress shop the next afternoon. From the moment I said Maisetra Talarico was back, Celeste was hanging in the front door of the shop looking up the street, even though we didn’t know when she might come.

Mefro Dominique made tea and I fetched some sweet buns from the baker’s and we even closed the shop—though that wasn’t a hardship in high summer—so we could hear about her adventures and why she came back.

“I was traveling through the mountains,” she began, “and I had a vision. I knew I must return to tell Maisetra Sovitre about it.”

She didn’t tell us everything that first day, but as the summer went by I learned more about the doings at Tiporsel House from Maisetra Talarico than I did from household gossip. There were comings and goings all the time: important people coming in the door or sometimes landing from the river. At first they’d gather in the baroness’s bedchamber when she wasn’t allowed to come downstairs yet, and later in the parlor, with the doors closed and all the staff shut out. We knew it was important because for anything less the maisetra would have bitten your head off if you worried the baroness about it. But it was Maisetra Talarico who told us what it meant.

“There is a curse on the land,” she began, and we all gasped like you would for a ghost story. “We knew the curse lived up in the mountains. The snows of three winters are locked up on the peaks. That’s why your river hasn’t flooded. It isn’t only the snow. The curse is spreading. Not only here in Alpennia but everywhere.”

She waved her arms and I tried to imagine what might be happening in other lands. People talked about the land feeling cursed, but what did that mean? If someone cursed your chickens, they stopped laying. But what happened if the whole land was cursed?

“What can we do?” Celeste asked, like she was ready to put her hand in.

I scoffed. “We can’t do anything!”

I meant people like her and me, but Maisetra Talarico told us a little about what they were trying to do to lift the curse.

“We’re making the tutela of Saint Mauriz into a stronger shield. And Maisetra Sovitre is building her new mystery to be even better. The mystery guilds are all working to put their strength together. Every little piece we can think of.”

“Like the songs that Maisetra Iulien is writing?” I asked. She was proud of doing her part, but I wasn’t sure how it fit into the mysteries.

Maisetra Talarico nodded but she looked worried. “I think the songs will be important. We’re building a mystery into an opera—a story that tells what we want the magic to do. There’s a woman who can set mysteries in music. The right words make the mystery even stronger.”

It made sense they’d asked Maisetra Iulien to help with that, because she had that knack of putting words together to make you feel what she wanted you to feel. It was a kind of charm. I’m not talking about just coaxing and sweet-talking people to do what she wanted, but her stories and poems had that way of making you see what she was talking about and feel what the people in the story felt. The words stuck with you. I still had bits from the Lautencourt book stuck in my head, as solidly as my nightly prayers.

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Teaser Tuesday: That's not how the story's supposed to end!

Heather Rose Jones — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 01:16:23 +0000

Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - 07:00

I confess it: I love playing a long game in planting foreshadowing and setting things up. The failure mode is having some readers complain that I stick in random events and people as if they were meaningful and then drop the thread unresolved. You can't take every single reader aside personally and assure them, "Trust me, it's going to be relevant. Just hang on."

In The Mystic Marriage, Iulien Fulpi gives Margerit a notebook to read...and Margerit sets it aside and misplaces it. It drops out of sight--both literally and figuratively--and the thread isn't picked up again until Mother of Souls, when an anonymous novel is published that contains some clear, though coded, implications about Margerit and Barbara's relationship. The joke is that Iuli didn't understand the truth of what she wrote. She just felt that two people who were so clearly in love as those two were, by rights ought to be characters in a romantic adventure novel.

The book becomes the catalyst for some unfortunate events, but is also the door for Iuli to be let into their secret. It shouldn't be any surprise that Iuli accepted their relationship joyfully. After all, she'd already concluded that they ought to be married. At least in their fictional guises.

But The Lost Duke of Lautencourt isn't done with being a catalyst for character awareness. It might feel like Roz is being hopelessly naive at not realizing that Maisetra Sovitre and the baroness were a couple. But that is because we're looking at her not only with the knowledge that they are, but with modern people's assumptions and understandings about domestic arrangements. And this is where it's tricky to lead readers into thinking like an early 19th century working class girl.

There were class-based differences in assumptions about women's emotional relationships with each other. European society in general was going through several century-long swings between assuming that all women were capable of erotic feelings for other women, and assuming that erotic desire in women (regardless of object) was inherently lower class. Within that context, it's perfectly plausible for a housemaid who is quite aware of her own desire for women to assume that middle and upper class women "wouldn't do that sort of thing," that their affection for each other is purely platonic.

So Roz is in for a bit of a revelation when she happens upon Iulien's own copy of The Lost Duke of Lautencourt in the wake of the news of the attack on Barbara, when she recognizes Iulien's characteristic writing style, and when she understands who the characters are meant to be.

This is a bit of a long excerpt, but since it's all about the novel it isn't giving away much in terms of spoilers for Floodtide.

* * *

I don’t have much time for reading. We’d take turns passing around tattered books, bought cheap at the bookstall because they’d been discarded. Charsintek didn’t like them but she never forbade it. Sometimes Celeste and I would take turns reading from the fashion journals while we worked. But now reading was something to keep me awake while I watched over Maisetra Iulien.

If it had been a hard book, I don’t think I would have kept at it, but it was the sort that put pictures in your head. The words were fancy in a pretty sort of way, like the ones Maisetra Iulien used when she was telling me stories. In fact, the more I read, the more I could hear the story in Maisetra Iulien’s voice and I was more and more certain it was one of her stories. I mostly skipped through looking for the name Lautencourt but sometimes it would pull me in and I’d read pages at a time.

It was exactly the sort of adventure Maisetra Iulien loved, about a beautiful woman who inherited a fortune, and a bad man who wanted to marry her for the money. She was an orphan and her guardian wanted her to marry the bad man because he was going to be the Duke of Lautencourt. That didn’t make sense from what Maisetra Iulien had said before. The Duke of Lautencourt was supposed to be the hero. But he wasn’t the duke yet. There was another man who might be the old duke’s heir but no one knew where he was. The woman refused to marry the bad man and her guardian set it up so he would kidnap her.

You didn’t need kings and castles to put that sort of thing in a story. Women got forced to marry men they didn’t like all the time. It didn’t need kidnapping, just being caught alone with him so that you had to say you were betrothed or you were ruined for life. That’s one thing armins were for, after all: to guard a girl’s reputation. It was why Maisetra Iulien wasn’t supposed to go anywhere without me or Maistir Brandel or both of us. It was why she was never ever supposed to be alone with someone like Mesner Aukustin, because he’d never be allowed to marry someone like her who wasn’t noble. She’d just be ruined with nothing to gain from it.

The rich girl in the story didn’t have an armin, but just as the bad man was about to carry her off, another man showed up and rescued her and begged her to let him serve as her armin. That’s not how it works at all. You don’t hire someone with no name and no reputation—that’s no better than being with a stranger in the first place. And it was clear that he loved her. There was this place in the story where he says, “I would die for you. You mean more to me than my life and my salvation. I would go to the ends of the earth to bring you your heart’s desire.”

I think I would have melted if someone said that to me. If it was someone I loved, that is. I read that bit over and over until I could say it by heart. And the girl loved the armin too, but she knew they’d never let her marry a nobody.

I skipped through a lot of the story that was about balls and clothes and such nonsense. I suppose it might be fun to read if you thought you might have such things, but I wanted to know what happened to the girl and the mysterious stranger and I wasn’t sure how much time I’d have to find out.

So I went to the end and read bits backward to figure out what happened. I still didn’t know what the Duke of Lautencourt had to do with the maisetra and the baroness. Then everything fell into a pattern. It was a pattern I hadn’t even imagined. I should have guessed how the story would end because fairy stories like this always ended that way. The mysterious armin was really the lost heir, and he fought a duel with the bad man for the sake of the lady’s honor, and killed him, and then everyone found out who he was. So the armin became a duke and married the lady and they were happy together for the rest of their lives.

I’d gotten so tied up in the story that I’d almost forgotten why I was reading it. When I remembered, my stomach knotted up all sick-like. Because if Baroness Saveze was the Duke of Lautencourt… Baroness Saveze had been the maisetra’s armin before she found out who she really was and became a baroness. That meant that the maisetra must be the rich lady in the story. And it made sense because she was rich. The maisetra and the baroness lived together in the same house and even slept in the same bedroom. I’d never thought anything of it because people did that, you know? Maisetra Fillert’s daughters shared a bedroom with their cousins when they came visiting. I’d never had a bed to myself until here at Tiporsel House and that was because Charsintek didn’t want me getting in trouble. But Maisetra Iulien had said, “The Duke of Lautencourt saves his true love and they live happily ever after.” And the baroness was the Duke of Lautencourt. And Maisetra Sovitre was her true love. And they were supposed to get married and live happily ever after.

I knew the maisetra and the baroness were friends who loved each other, but I’d never thought about them being in love. Not like me and Nan. I never imagined them lying in the big fancy bed they shared doing the things a man and woman who were married did. The things Nan and I had done. Maybe it should have made me feel glad to think the maisetra and I were alike that way, but instead I was frightened. It was one of those secrets Tavit warned me about. The kind that were dangerous to know and even more dangerous for people to know you knew. I thought about how the maisetra had hired me, even knowing why I’d lost my last place. Maybe that had been a part of it—thinking that we were just a little bit alike—but it wouldn’t go any further than that.

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Teaser Tuesday: A Parting Gift

Heather Rose Jones — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 01:12:05 +0000

Tuesday, August 13, 2019 - 07:00

Although it's a motif that needs to be used sparingly, I enjoy the times when I can show the same event or interaction from different points of view. In Mother of Souls we see Serafina shopping for a small statue of Saint Mauriz to give Celeste as a parting gift. It's an expensive keepsake: more than Serafina can afford to spend and more valuable than anything else Celeste owns (though this aspect is only hinted at). From Serafina's viewpoint, we see her trading the pearl necklace she was given as a parting gift from a lover for the intricate carving that she gives in turn as a parting gift to her...student? Friend? Surrogate daughter? They're still working out what they mean to each other when Serafina feels she has no other options than to return to Rome. We see only the briefest glimpse of Celeste's response.

In Floodtide we are allowed to see that other side.

* * *

I’d thought to find Celeste lying in bed, so when I didn’t see her there I wondered if she’d slipped out during the morning while we were working. Then I heard a catch of breath and saw she was sitting on the floor up against the wall next to the erteskir where she kept her candles and charms.

She was holding something in her lap. I couldn’t quite make it out in the dim light until she set it gently on top of the erteskir and scrambled to her feet. It was a little carved statue of Saint Mauriz. A fancy one—the sort you might expect to see on a table at Tiporsel House. Maisetra Sovitre had a lovely statue of her name saint in her bedroom, along with a gilt crucifix and a Madonna painting.

“That’s beautiful!” I said, touching the base to turn it so I could see better. The saint was carved out of some sort of dark wood—darker even than Mefro Dominique’s skin—and his halo shone like it was real gold. I wondered where Celeste had gotten something that nice. The answer came when she threw her arms around me and wept.

“She’s gone. She’s gone to Rome and she’s never coming back.”

So I knew Maisetra Talarico had been here and given her the saint as a farewell present. I don’t think I’d ever seen Celeste cry before. I’d seen her mad or sad, but not like this. She’d dried enough of my tears over the last year, so I held her as tight as I could without saying anything. At last she moved a bit and we sat on the edge of the bed, side by side.

“Why did she have to go?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” There was still a little catch in Celeste’s voice. “It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing I could have done.”

I thought about putting my arm around her shoulders again and got a funny feeling in my stomach, but that moment had passed, so I pointed at the little statue on the table of the erteskir. “You’ll have that to remember her.”

She leaned over and picked the statue up and handed it to me. I was real careful, holding it only by the base. I could see the details now even though the lamps weren’t lit during the day. Ebony, I thought, because in Maisetra Iulien’s stories things were always carved from ebony. You could see the features of Saint Mauriz’s face and the tiny tight curls of his hair. Bits of it were painted, but his armor was laid over the wood in thin metal plates. I couldn’t guess whether it was tin or silver, but I decided it should be silver. And the halo was real gold—or at least silver-gilt, like in the stories. It was much too fine a thing for a dressmaker’s shop. It wasn’t the sort of gift you gave someone you were just friends with.

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Teaser Tuesday: Living Under Threat of Disaster

Heather Rose Jones — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 01:10:17 +0000

Tuesday, August 6, 2019 - 07:00

Between the time between when I established floodtide as a facet of life in Rotenek and now with the book with that title is moving towards publication, the effects of weather fluctuations have become a lot sharper in people's awareness. The massive persistent flooding in the American midwest this year is shocking, but less in the general news than more focused floods due to hurricanes and the like. Technological attempts at long-term flood control in places like the Mississippi basin have not always produced the benefits they promised...or have simply moved the damage from one location to another.

The river's behavior in Floodtide is not entirely natural, but the city treats it as simply part of the natural variation in behavior: unpredictable and to be endured. The engineering controls focus on human behavior. Those in the potential path of a flood--whether because they can't afford a house in the safer parts of town, or because they're willing to trade hazard for the prestige of the Vezenaf--shift their belongings to minimize damage. Those who can afford to do so leave town.

When the river shows signs of rising, you act. You can't wait to see how high it comes. Hence, the public service provided by the floodtide bell. And those who know the river best don't need to wait for that warning. Most years, the precautions are wasted effort, but you can't expect the Rotein to show mercy to the complacent.

The details associated with the floodtide declaration are all my own invention: measuring the rise of the river by the water-steps (which have been nicknamed after the apostles), declaring a flood when the water reaches the feet of the statue of Saint Nikule, and the symbolic declaration of the floodtide holiday when the river doesn't rise that far by wetting the statue's feet. They all feel like the sort of hybrid folk-civic-religious rituals that arise over the centuries.

It's facile to say that if a place has regular disastrous flooding, maybe you shouldn't put human habitations there, but habitability has always been hopelessly entwined with bodies of water. The placement of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi river wasn't an unfortunate oversight--the river was what made the city exist. Much closer to me, personally, the Sacramento river has seasonal flooding due to Sierra snowmelt that is mitigated by the use of reserved floodplains (no building allowed) and an extensive levee system in the agricultural areas of the delta. I used that familiarity for some of the "emotional truth" of my stories, but throughout Europe, major cities have always risen up on significant rivers, whether large enough for navigation or simply for water supply. And that has always made them vulnerable to periodic flooding. I have a research folder of images of floods in older European cities to use for reference and inspiration when visualizing the effects in Rotenek.

* * *

[Liv] pushed off and prayed to Mama Rota as she kissed the river. Then she made a face and tasted the water again. Instead of keeping close to the edge, Liv pulled out into the middle of the river like she meant to cross or to catch the current to go all the way down to Urmai. Liv pulled one oar in and let us drift briefly as she dipped her hand in the water and brought it up to taste again.

“It’s coming,” she said. “Don’t know how high or how long, but it’s coming.”

“Floodtide?” I asked.

She nodded as she put the second oar back in the water and angled back toward the north bank again.

People were muttering about it in the Nikuleplaiz over the next few days. The rivermen had seen the signs in a streak of color toward the middle of the current. Mefro Dominique took Liv’s word and rather than sewing, we spent two days carrying all the stock upstairs from the workroom.

“It isn’t often the water rises high enough to fill the streets,” Mefro Dominique said. “It’s only happened three times while I’ve lived here. But if it does, we won’t have time to move things.”

So the fine fabrics were tied into bundles and carried up to the bedroom. The baskets of ribbons followed them, and the printed magazines with their fashion plates and anything else the water might spoil, until the upstairs rooms were stuffed like a warehouse and the downstairs was bare except for the worktable and the dresses we were sewing.

The muddy streak in the middle of the river grew wider and the river crept up one step toward the statue of Saint Nikule then part of another. Three days went by without the water rising farther. Whoever it was that decided to declare floodtide must have figured it was all we’d get, so Father Mazzu went down to the edge of the steps and dipped a bronze bucket on a little chain into the water, then took and poured it over the saint’s feet.

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Teaser Tuesday: The Shrine of Saint Rota

Heather Rose Jones — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 14:47:49 +0000

Tuesday, July 30, 2019 - 07:00

Since last week's teaser, the editorial revisions on Floodtide have been completed--the quickest and most painfree editing process I've ever experienced! It'll be nice not to have that hanging over me during my upcoming travel to Worldcon.

I'm not going to lie: I love to embed intellectual "Easter eggs" in my stories that may pass under the radar of 90% of my readers and only be fully appreciated by maybe 1%. I never want anyone to feel excluded by those hidden treats, but I do want to reward close attention and familiarity.

I think I mentioned in a previous teaser that at one point in the plot noodling for Daughter of Mystery I had a vision of my characters winding through underground passages that had fallen out of the awareness of most citizens of Rotenek. The episode ended up not fitting into that book, but it was part of my background vision of the city and at some point I realized it had a role to play in the eventual concluding book. But that meant laying down the groundwork well before that point.

When I needed some sort of "hidden resource" as a MacGuffin in Floodtide, given that I was already thinking in terms of water symbolism, the thought of a long-lost spring somewhere under the city felt promising. An ancient fountain that had been covered over by the changing needs of city planning--not a deliberate secret, just forgotten and unused.

It made complete sense for that hidden spring to provide the reader with backstory for the legend of Saint Rota and a key to her origins. As I mentioned in the teaser about river deities, Rota was originally the local water goddess or the Rotein river. (People may have guessed that the Rotein is a sort of parallel development of the Rhone. Not the Alpennian name of the real-world Rhone, but a fictional duplicate of the river with a different course.) She might have managed to linger in popular imagination purely by oral tradition, but what if there had once been concrete evidence of her existence available for reinterpretation and adaptation as a Christian saint?

* * *

At the top of the steps a fountain stood against the wall. The fountain didn’t look like much: just a half-round base about six foot across. Behind it, on the wall, was a carving with a picture of a woman and writing scattered around her. Below the woman, water tumbled out of a hole into the basin. There was another spout at the front where it spilled down a channel cut into the middle of the stone steps and into the chanulez. I would have thought the water would be green and slimy without anyone to clean the fountain, but it was clear enough to drink.

...

“Who is she?” Celeste asked, looking up from the water in the basin to the carved stone behind it.

In some ways, the lantern made it harder to see, because of all the shadows it threw off. You could tell the stone was supposed to be a lady with a long flowing dress. It wasn’t a very good statue, though. I don’t think they’d have paid a sculptor like that to do saints in the cathedral. Maybe it had been better at first but the stone had worn away. You could tell she was holding a branch of something in her hand. And there was something round near her feet—maybe some sort of beast—but I couldn’t tell what it was any more.

You could still read the letters, though. Maisetra Iulien leaned closely with the lantern and started reading them out one at a time. “R…O…D…A…D…E…D…”

“No,” said Mesner Aukustin and took the lantern from her again to go around the other side of the fountain. “It’s an old Roman stone. I’ve seen some like it in Akolbin. You read it all the way across. RODANAE DED…and then MA— The rest is too faint to see. Chautovil would know how to read it. He thinks I should study the ancient Romans more. But Rodanae is a name—Rodana—and Ma-something, that would be the man who set up the stone.”

“Rodana?” Celeste said wonderingly. She whispered, “Mama Rota?” And then more loudly. “It’s Saint Rota. It must be. When people talk about water from Saint Rota’s well they usually just mean the river. But it’s a real well. A real well that flows into the river.” Her eyes followed the flow of water from the rim of the basin down to where it led into the chanulez.

“Are you sure?” Maisetra Iulien asked.

Celeste made a quiet noise. I could tell she thought it was a silly question but didn’t dare say so to a maisetra.

“It’s a holy well. My eyes can tell me that.”

* * *

And of course I spent entirely too much time researching exactly what the Roman dedicatory inscription to a river goddess would look like. The inscriptions were frustratingly compact for standard formulas. I've given the readers more of a hint with the partial "DED..." (for "dedit" or "dedicavit") where a real inscription would probably just have "D". And while the partial name of the person who set up the inscription (MA...) could be many things, I've allowed for the (erroneous) guess that it might be Mauritius, the region's patron saint.

I envision the plaque layout something like this, with X's where the image is, and unreadable or omitted letters in brackets:

[DEAE] XXXXX RODA
NAE XXXXXX DED[IT]
MA[??] XXXXXX [????]

This isn't the first time I've played around with ambiguous inscriptions, of course. Tanfrit's gravestone was rather fun to design as well, and it still has some secrets to tell that will keep until I tell her story.

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