Paksworld

First two chapters of the revised POV are done…or rather, they are done enough that they went off to two readers, with some process questions in addition.

If those chapters do what I hoped, and the answers to the process questions indicate a clear path for the next few POV chapters, I won’t need to do much to some of them…the scene is set.   Some spoilerish details follow.

Yes, I did say spoilerish, so if you hate spoilers, it’s time to backtrack out of here.

OK?  OK.   There were some mysteries around the margins of the original Paks books that I wondered about at the time.  But the way I write, I rarely discover answers until I am writing and then sometimes they go from hindbrain to fingers without ever really reaching consciousness–I recognize that something major has happened when I see it on the paper (or screen, these days.)

Among the mysteries tickling my brain for 20+  years has been “Why were Kieri and his mother attacked?  Was it really random brigands?  Just coincidence?  Was it someone’s plot?  How did that someone know where and when Kieri and his mother would be there?   If it was a plot, whose?  What was the real purpose?   Why could not a full elf–a queen, the daughter of the ruler of an entire elvenhome–not protect herself and her child?   If other elves can move in and out of the elvenhome kingdom, why couldn’t/didn’t she?”  Etc. , all the way up to “How did that sword show up in that glade at that time and where had it been in the meantime?”

Well…the answers to those and other questions are showing up.   Kieri’s mother’s relationship with her mother…his sister’s relationship with their mother and grandmother…other elves’ relationships with one another…some old, old, old history…though that’s still veiled.  (I want to know now!  So I can avoid having to rewrite a large chunk of each book!  But my plot-generator doesn’t work that way.)

In Oath of Fealty (less than 90 days to go, yay!)  we learn that the Lyonyans preserve the bones of the dead–the royal dead in the royal ossuary.   In book two, we learn that the king or queen visits the ossuary at least twice a year, Midsummer and Midwinter, for the length of time it takes a candle to burn down, to give the royal dead a report on how things are going.   Elves, as some of you will recall from the original Paks books (esp. Oath of Gold) do not bury or burn their dead, or preserve the bones.    Although Lyonya is supposedly jointly ruled, the Lady has never visited the ossuary.   If you hear the word “yet” hovering in the air, that’s because it’s hovering in my mind.  I can’t believe that’s actually going to happen…it certainly hasn’t happened yet (there’s that word again) but I haven’t expected several things that did happen.