The Ghost King

To Diane, of course, the love of my life who has walked through these years beside me and my dreams, and I beside her and hers.

But there is someone else who gets a big thank you for this book—five someones actually. This calling I have found, this purpose in my life, takes me places. It is my duty to let it, to follow it. Sometimes those journeys are not to places I want to go. Sometimes it hurts. When I finished Mortalis, the fourth book of my DemonWars series, during a terrible time in my life, I stated that I hoped I would never write a book like that again (though I considered it the best piece I had ever written), that I would never again have to go to that dark place.

When I started The Ghost King, I knew I had to go there, yet again. These characters, these friends of twenty years, demanded no less of me. And so I have spent the last months watching three videos, songs of my past from the band and songstress that have walked beside me for most of my life.

Stevie Nicks once asked in a song, “Has anyone ever written anything for you? And in your darkest hours, do you hear me sing?”

Ah, Ms. Nicks, you have been writing songs for me since my high school years in the 1970s, though you don’t know it. You were there with me during those lonely and confusing days in high school, those awakening moments of college. I watched the sun rise over Fitchburg State College, sitting in my car and waiting for my class to begin, to the sounds of “The Chain.” You were there with me during that blizzard in 1978 when I found the works of Tolkien and a whole new way of expressing myself suddenly came into view. You were there with me when I met the woman who would be my wife, and on the morning after our wedding, and at the births of our three children.

You went with us to hockey games and horse shows. To your concert at Great Woods went my family, and my brother even as he neared the end of his life.

And you were there with me as I wrote this book. “Sisters of the Moon,” “Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You?” and “Rhiannon,” all three, the songs that took me through my darkest hours and now let me go back to that place, because my friends of two decades, the Companions of the Hall, demanded no less of me.

So thank you, Stevie Nicks, and Fleetwood Mac, for writing the music of my life.

— R. A. Salvatore