A painting, depicting haunting scenes of a ruined palace and a scarlet-haired goddess in front of a fiery city, arrives unheralded in an art gallery with a cryptic note saying, “The world needs to see this.” The painting begins to change the lives of the woman who is the gallery's curator and that of an ancient man of the fey Aetherial folk who has mysteriously risen from the depths of the ocean. Neither human nor fairy knows how they are connected, but when the painting is stolen, both are compelled to discover the meaning behind the painting and the key it holds to their future.
Can I swap my Black Hat for your
White Hat?
by Freda Warrington
There are all sorts of reasons
for writing fiction, but for me the main ones are the characters and their
interactions and relationships. As my new novel GRAIL OF THE SUMMER STARS comes
out from Tor, I’m sitting here musing about my protagonists and how they travel
from A to Z, changing and growing and making mistakes along the way. Most
books, especially in genre, have heroes and villains – but do things always
have to be black and white? All through the twenty-odd novels I’ve written so
far I have played with – oh dear, how can I avoid the phrase “shades of grey”?
– gradations along a scale. Shades of grey sounds better, but you know what I
mean.
Grail is the third of my
Aetherial Tales series, following on from Elfland and Midsummer Night. Each
novel can be read as a stand-alone, but they are all set against the same
background. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of beings who look human but
aren’t – elves, demons, vampires, angels and so on – and my Aetherials are not
precisely any of those, but my own version of an “other-race”. The setting is
the contemporary human world, but they can also wander into their own
Otherworld, also known as the Spiral.
Sometimes my players leap into my
head fully formed. At others, I have to work harder at finding out who they
really are. Sometimes I know they are basically good people at heart – for
example Rosie, the down-to-earth heroine of Elfland, and Mistangamesh and
Stevie in Grail. At others, I know they have a villainous streak – the
attractive bad boy Sam, for example, or his father Lawrence, or Rufus – the
cruel, mischievous brother of Mist – who must be stopped before he does
something daft like destroying the world…
But do heroes always do the
correct thing, and remain heroic to the end? Are baddies – like Sauron, or Lord
Foul the Despiser – doomed to stay relentlessly bad? Much of the fascination I
find in my characters is exploring them as human (or human-ish) beings – not
angels or demons but a mixture of conflicting motives. In my Blood Wine vampire
series (the first, A Taste of Blood Wine, republished by Titan Books) many of
the vampires revel in what they are, while others try to live by some sort of
moral code – but none of them could be categorized as goodies. They are not
half-hearted, “vegetarian” vampires. They all need human blood.
In Elfland, Rosie is a basically
good, kind person, yet she ends up making horrific misjudgments that bring pain
and tragedy to those around her. In Grail, Mistangamesh – trying to untangle
the mysteries of his ancient Aetherial heritage – is a placid, kind,
compassionate (not to mention gorgeous) man at heart, but he’s forced to be
ruthless in order to avert a potential apocalypse. At least, to try.
In my fantasy worlds, my baddies
are rarely bad for the sake of it. They are usually doing what they think is
best, or right, or for the good of others – rather as I’m sure Hitler or the
Spanish Inquisition thought they were doing what was best for the world! Rufus
(in Midsummer Night and Grail) is an exception. A long-lived Aetherial, who
uses his seductive powers to torment humans and Aetherials alike, with a track
record of murder and mayhem behind him, he is hell-bent on being as evil as
possible for the sake of it. But he didn’t get like this for no reason. Events
in his early life made him angry and resentful (poor soul!) and, unfortunately,
thirty thousand years of existence have not helped him to grow up! Perhaps he
really is beyond hope, but in Grail, one way or another, he must grow up and
face the consequences.
Then we come to Albin – a
sinister character who has hovered ominously in the background of all three
books, whose story completes a major arc in Grail. Albin is a cold pale
Aetherial in an ice white tower. He is heartless, devoid of love and
compassion, and utterly devoted to his puritanical cause of cutting off the
Otherworld from the Earth. He’s convinced that his extremist beliefs are the
only answer for Aetherial-kind, a sociopath who would even sacrifice his own
family to achieve his aims. Some characters truly are beyond hope and there’s
nothing to do but fight and destroy them…
Or is there? The road to hell is
paved with good intentions, as they say. Characters convinced of their own
goodness stare in disbelief at the carnage they’ve created. Even the most
hard-line villain may see that his plans can come to nothing, and his only way
forward is to fall on his sword – metaphorically or literally. In my fantasy
worlds, the paths my characters take, however difficult, may be crystal-clear.
Often, however, the black hats and the white hats may be swapping around like
musical chairs as they work through onion-layers of good and evil until they
find out what really lies at the centre…
Author Note
