Midnight Never Come

Meet the Author

MARIE BRENNAN holds an undergraduate degree in archaeology and folklore from Harvard and is now pursuing a PhD in anthropology and folklore at Indiana University.

INTERVIEW

Why did you choose the Elizabethan period as your focal point for Midnight Never Come?

At a guess, I’d have to say my interest started with Shakespeare; I’ve always loved certain of his plays. (Surprise, surprise.) But it grew past that about ten or twelve years ago, when I read Shakespeare of London by Margaret Chute; that book approaches him as a working member of a company rather than as a great literary genius, and it may have been my first introduction to the world of Renaissance London. I fell in love pretty fast. It’s a fascinating period all over Europe, really — ferocious religious tension and conflict, and yet despite that (or because of it?) such a vibrant time culturally. It offers the prospective author a lot to play with.

And Elizabeth herself is interesting because even in her own time, they deliberately built her up as this iconic figure, as a means of legitimizing her rule as a Protestant and a woman on the throne. It explains a lot of her cult following even today. I’m not as much of an idolater as I used to be; these days, I’ve done enough research to recognize her flaws. But I still have a lot of respect for her, and for the people around her. There are a lot of great names from her reign: Walsingham, Burghley, Ralegh, Drake, Dee, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and so on.

Plus, I like the clothes. Though I could do without the extremes of fashion: oversized cartwheel ruffs, enormously padded sleeves, and all the rest. Give me a streamlined Elizabethan look, thank you. (Which is more or less what I put the fae in.)

This novel grew out of your experience with a role-playing game. How did that drive you to create the novel?

Some time ago, White Wolf published a game system called Changeling: The Dreaming, which is about playing faeries in the modern world. I ran a game of my own in that system during 2006, but it ended up being pretty non-standard, starting with the fact that it went through six hundred and fifty years of English history — backward. (I called it “Memento,” after the similarly-structured movie of the same name.) The Elizabethan segment of the game, originally set in 1589, grew like kudzu; it sprouted backstory starting in the mid-fourteenth century and repercussions going all the way to 2006, and more to the point, it wouldn’t leave my mind. Specifically, Francis and Suspiria wouldn’t leave my mind.

So I did some narrative surgery, lifting that part of the story out of the broader context of Changeling and Memento, and reworked it as a novel. A few key points of the plot are drawn from the game, but since we had only three evening sessions in which to play it, I had to do a lot of expanding, and things don’t happen exactly the way they did the first time. I also had to do some work to remove the Changeling-specific elements, but not as much as I expected; when you get right down to it, both the game designers and I were working from the same source, namely, real-world faerie lore. If you still see some similarity, that’s why.

What types of media influenced this story?

Shekar Kapur’s movie Elizabeth left a strong imprint in my mind (and I’m delighted to see he’s made a sequel). I recognize the liberties he’s taken with history, but Cate Blanchett makes a fantastic Elizabeth, and Geoffrey Rush ain’t bad as Walsingham, either. The Onyx Court owes a lot to that film; Kapur’s vision is very rich and dark.

I also think Invidiana’s the conceptual daughter of Maleficent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, though I’d written the whole novel before I noticed that.

Music was a huge part of writing this book. Since I made “soundtracks” (i.e. mix CDs) for my game, I started off with some songs already chosen; I also made playlists for different moods — the mortal court, the Onyx Court, confrontations, romantic/sad scenes (funny how those two go together), church scenes, and tavern/city scenes. Those were playing on shuffle while I wrote, and then in the end, for the first time ever, I went the extra step and made a “novel soundtrack.” You can see the full listing on my website, and if you have a good film score collection, you can reconstruct most of it for yourself.

What can you tell us about your faerie research?

Without realizing it, I set myself a big challenge at the outset: keeping it English. Most of the faerie fantasy I’ve read, especially the modern urban fantasy, takes a globalizing approach, where a redcap and a kitsune and a leshy might all rub shoulders. That approach has a lot of fun potential, but for a story set in the sixteenth century, I decided I wanted to preserve regionalism as much as I could.

Which turns out to be harder than you might think: many of the most famous bits of faerie lore (like the sidhe, or the Seelie and Unseelie Courts) turn out to be Irish or Scottish. If you strip those away, then the next biggest category is probably Welsh. Strip that away, and you find yourself looking at Cornwall and Yorkshire. We’ve got precious little surviving faerie lore from central and southern England. But although it’s a lot of work, I’m glad I did it; my own setting felt more real to me because I could talk about continental fauns and muryans from Cornwall and redcaps along the Border, and how the Goodemeades are from the North originally, because that’s where stories of brownies come from.

I’m deeply indebted to the folklorist Katherine Briggs. Not only does she have two very useful books on general British faerie material (British Folk-Tales and Legends, and The Faeries in Tradition and Literature), she wrote one called The Anatomy of Puck that’s specifically about the lore of Shakespeare’s time. I couldn’t have asked for a better resource.

What about the historical research?

There was a lot of it.

I ended up with nearly three shelves of the small bookcase in my office devoted to nothing more than the books I was using to write this novel. Biographies, books about London, some literature from the time period, architectural histories… the list seemed endless. Like an optimistic fool, I believed at first that a time would come when I would say “okay, that’s it for the research” and be done. God only knows where I got that idea; maybe my subconscious was in denial. Research never ends. There’s always two or three more books that will be the last, you swear. I think I was reading William Tighe’s dissertation on the Gentlemen Pensioners while I was in revisions.

But the good news is, it’s fun. I can’t remember where I came across this line, but someone once said history was a cross between a disaster movie and a celebrity tabloid; I love that description. The further I got into the biographies, the more people came to life, with all kinds of quirks and warts and behaviors that make you think, humans haven’t fundamentally changed. The surface details, sure, but where it really counts, they’re not so different from us.

So I guess what I would say is, it’s a tremendous amount of work, but the payoff is worth it. As long as you enjoy history, anyway, and if you don’t, what are you doing writing a historical novel? There are easier ways to go crazy.

How was writing this book different from others?

Not since the first novel I wrote (which was not Witch) has a project eaten my head so thoroughly. Part of it, I’m sure, was the necessity of research; when I wasn’t writing, I was eyeball-deep in nonfiction. I’ve done spot research before — reading up on poisons for Warrior, for example — but never on anything like this scale, because I was never representing a real time period and place before. But I think it was more than that.

Like I said above, certain key events in the plot came from the game Memento. That served as a kind of outline for me, and normally, I’m not an outlining kind of writer. Between that and my own growth in the craft, I found myself going through this book less asking myself, “how is this going to get resolved?” and more “how can I make the resolution of this more awesome?” Add in the richness of the history and backstory, and the greater number of pieces on my mental chessboard… you get the idea. Pretty much every aspect of this book, down to the words I used to tell it, really challenged me. And you don’t meet a challenge firing on only half of your cylinders. I said in a post on my journal that this was the fourteen-year-old boy of books: it ate everything I fed it and demanded more.

Would you write a historical fantasy again? If so, what time period?

I’m pondering this very question right now, actually.

If anybody had asked me right after I finished the draft, I would have screamed “HELL NO” and dived for cover under the bed. But people were smart and didn’t ask me. Now that I’ve had some time to recover, the answer is “maybe, if I get an idea that grabs me.” I found it deeply satisfying, slipping my story into the cracks and open spaces of history, and as I said, the research was fun. But, as I also said, it was a huge amount of work, so it isn’t the kind of thing that I’d enter into lightly.

The question of time period is pretty wide open. If I were smart, I’d do more with the Elizabethan period, so I can make use of the research I’ve already done. Unfortunately, I’m not smart, and so I’m likely to skip off to a different century entirely. Running Memento introduced me to a broad swath of English history; I might latch onto any part of it. Of course, then there’s the rest of the world — who says it would have to be England? But I boggle at the thought of setting something in a country where the best research materials wouldn’t be in English. Knowing me, I’d feel like I ought to get fluent in Arabic or whatever before I try to write the thing.

But all that is dancing around the question. Honestly? Right now the nineteenth century is trying to look enticing. I’ve got a couple of ideas, unrelated to each other, that would all benefit from me knowing more about that era — even if some of them are modeled on that culture rather than being set in it. Only time will tell which ones will struggle to the top of the heap in my head and make it out into the light of day.

These questions were collected from Marie Brennan’s online fan community. If you would like to read more about Marie Brennan and the world of Midnight Never Come, please visit her Web site at www.mariebrennan.net.

A Preview of Warrior

Rain pattered steadily through the leaves of the wood and dripped to the ground below. Two figures slipped between the trees, all but invisible in the darkness, silent under the cover of the rain. The one in the lead moved well, but the one trailing him moved better, ghost-like and undetectable, and he never knew she was there.

Three men waited for him, crouching in a tight clump under an old elm and shivering in the rain. He came up to them and spoke in a low voice. “She’s alone. And looks like she’ll be bedding down soon enough. If we wait, she should be easy to take.”

Hidden in the trees just a short distance away, the woman who had been following him smiled thinly.

“I still don’t like this,” one of the other men hissed. “What if she’s got spells set up or something?”

The woman’s jaw hardened, and the amusement faded from her face.

“She ain’t a witch,” someone else said, with the tone of a man who’s said it several times already. “You saw her in the alehouse. She damn near cut that fellow’s throat when he called her one. And Tre would have said if she’d been singing when he looked in on her.”

“She wasn’t,” the spy confirmed. “Just talking to her horse, like anybody does. And besides, witches don’t carry swords, or play cards in alehouses. She’s just a Cousin.”

“We’re wasting time,” the last of the men said. “Heth, you go first. You make friends with the horse so it don’t warn her. Then Nessel can knock her out. Tre and I’ll be ready in case something goes wrong.”

“Some help that’ll be if she is a witch,” the fearful one said. “How else did she manage to get five Primes in one hand?”

The leader spat into the bushes. “She probably cheated. Don’t have to be a witch to cheat at cards. Look, there’s four of us and one of her. We’ll be fine.”

Ten of you wouldn’t be enough, the woman thought, and her smile returned. Not against a Hunter. Not against me.

Mirage didn’t object to being accused of cheating at cards, especially not when it was true. She did object to being called a witch — or a Cousin, for that matter. And she objected to being driven out to sleep in a rain-drenched wood, when she’d been hoping for a warm, dry inn. Now these idiotic thugs were planning on jumping her?

They deserved what they were going to get.

She slipped away from the men and returned to her campsite. Surveying it, she calculated the directions Heth and Nessel were likely to come from, then arranged her bedding so it would look as though she were in it. The illusion was weaker from the other direction, but with the fire in the way, any scouts on the other side shouldn’t be able to see anything amiss.

Then she retired to the shadows and waited.

The men took their time in coming, but Mirage was patient. Just as her fire was beginning to burn low, she heard noise; not all of the men were as good at moving through the forest as Tre. Scanning the woods, she saw the spy nearby, already in place. She hadn’t heard him get there. Not bad.

Quiet whispers, too muted for her to pick out. Then one man eased up next to her horse.

Ordinarily that would have been a mistake. Mist was trained to take the hand off any stranger who touched her. But Mirage had given her a command before leaving, and so the mare stood stock-still, not reacting to the man trying to quiet the noises she wasn’t making.

Mirage smiled, and continued to wait.

Now it was Nessel’s turn. The leader, who had slid around to the far side of the fire, gestured for him to move. Nessel came forward on exaggerated tiptoe, club in his hands. Then, with a howl, he brought the weapon crashing down on her bedding.

Tre went down without a sound half a second later. Fixed on the scene in front of him, he never noticed Mirage coming up behind him.

“She’s not here!” Nessel yelled in panic.

Mist, responding to Mirage’s whistle, kicked Heth in the chest and laid him out flat. Mirage stepped into the firelight next to the horse. “Yes, I am,” she said, and smiled again.

Nessel, a credit to his courage if not to his brain, charged her with another yell. Mirage didn’t even bother to draw a blade; she sidestepped his wild swipe and kicked him twice, once in the chest and once in the head. He went down like a log. Mirage, pausing only to give Heth a judicious tap with her boot, leapt over the fire in pursuit of the last man.

He fled as soon as she appeared, but it wasn’t enough of a head start. Mirage kept to an easy pace until her eyes adjusted once more; then she put on a burst of speed and overtook him. A flying tackle brought him down. She came up before he did and stamped on his knee, ending any further chance of flight.

Then she knelt, relieving him of the dagger he was trying to draw, and pinned him to the ground. “What did you think you were doing?” she growled, holding the dagger ready.

He was trying not to cry from the pain of his injured knee. “Gold,” he gasped. “Only that. We weren’t going to kill you. I swear!”

“I believe you,” Mirage said. “And for that, you live. Provided you learn one little lesson.”

He nodded fearfully.

“I,” Mirage said, “am not a witch. Nor am I a Cousin. I have nothing to do with them. Can you remember that?” He nodded again. “Good. And be sure to tell your friends.” She stood and tucked his dagger into her belt. “I don’t like people making that kind of mistake.”

Then, with a swift kick to his head, she knocked him out.