Ladies-in-waiting, on the other hand, are consummate insiders. They're all about sewing and fashion and gossip ... what girls do, or at least what girls have traditionally done. Now, you might believe that such girl-type activity is useless and weak, but I guarantee that every single person reading this paragraph has at one time been deeply wounded by gossip, and mighty few of us have been wounded by swords.
Ladies-in-waiting might seem silly and mean, but they're more than that: they're powerful. If you read even a little bit of the history of ladies-in-waiting, you'll find amazing stories. Confidantes, conspirators, antagonists ... It's all there. So why aren't they in fiction? Write, people, write! Go to your keyboards! Start typing! We need to explore those female insiders! We must shape that power—demonstrate how it can be used for heroes, and good!
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Author Commentary: Male Succession >
For readers who missed the nuance buried within both the Encyclopedia entry and my discussion of said entry allow me to clarify here the whole business of kings and queens and regnants. ("Regnant," being an adjective, doesn't actually have a plural, but for the moment we're going to roll with it.)
For most of human history, the ruler of a country has been male. Whenever anyone thought about this long enough to notice the sexism, they'd defend it on the grounds that the leader of government was also expected to lead the military (as through today: the president of the United States is commander in chief), and a woman couldn't, you know, be a soldier—particularly a queen, whose most important job was spawning baby kings. Montagne's response to this ideology can be seen in Queen Compassion's quip that "any strumpet can brace a shield": since Montagne's military operates solely defensively—versus armies that attack and conquer—a woman can lead it just as effectively as any man.
Thus (Montagne being the exception to this rule; we're now discussing the norm) whenever a king of a country died, the crown would pass to the next available male, even if he was the youngest sibling or an infant or a cousin or a distant idiot nephew. Hence Rüdiger IV, who took the throne of Lax even though he had nineteen older female cousins; that's traditional succession in a nutshell.
European history has a few glaring exceptions, such as Queen Elizabeth I, who received the crown given the dearth of male alternatives—her father having pretty much wiped out the other bloodlines—and because everyone assumed she'd soon marry. (Psych!) But the vast majority of rulers have been male, and everyone understood that the ruler's queen was in reality a queen consort, meaning that she didn't have power herself. There were, again, exceptions; William and Mary ruled England jointly as king regnant ("regnant" means "reigning") and queen regnant. But a queen was a consort unless otherwise specified, and a king, obversely, was a regnant unless otherwise specified. In fact, the husband of England's Queen Victoria (the Brits by the 1830s had evolved out of the whole it's-gotta-be-a-guy thing) was Prince Consort Albert; she wanted to make him king consort, but Parliament wouldn't allow it—as a foreigner he could have "prince" or nuthin'. The husband of the current Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, has never even had his "consort" title formalized. I could go on, but suffice to say that queens regnant are really, really rare, and king consorts are even rarer.
How many Wisdom's Kiss readers know this, or care? Close to zero, I suspect. And trying to explain all that detail within Cuthbert's encyclopedia entry was not the easiest task. But, dork that I am, I love this sort of history. It also has a fairly important role within Wisdom's Kiss: by elevating her husband from prince consort to king regnant (a rather trifling distinction given that the poor guy was already dead), Queen Providence established a legal precedent that the male spouse of a Montagne queen could also hold power. This was the loophole that Wilhelmina sought to exploit. By forcing Temperance's abdication, Wilhelmina was ensuring that when Dizzy was crowned queen, Dizzy's new husband, Roger, would also be crowned king regnant, or coruler. How long Dizzy would have survived after that point ... I'm guessing only long enough to produce a baby Roger to continue the Farina bloodline.
See also Queen Mothers
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Author Commentary: Loopholes >
"Loophole" sounds totally contemporary, right? Something you'd hear on Law and Order: Special Wall Street Fat Cats You-Lose-Your-House-but-We-Don't-Go-to-Jail Unit. It's a concept invented by scheming, corrupt modern minds, not the moral, God-fearing people who used to live back, you know, when people were God fearing and moral...
No.
The original term "loophole" (deriving from the Dutch lûpen; no connection to "loop" as in "circle") meant a slit in a wall through which defenders could look out and/or shoot arrows. This definition first appeared in print in England around 1590. But within a hundred years, the concept had evolved to its current figurative sense: a weakness or ambiguity—especially in a legal document—that someone metaphorically lying in wait could shoot through and/or attack with.
For some reason I find this immensely comforting, that Englishmen 300 years ago were just as conniving and manipulative and niggling as they are today. Also, in Wisdom's Kiss I try not to use modern (by which I mean post-1800; it's my own distinction) words. One of my few exceptions to this rule is "food poisoning" ("the willies" is another). It turns out that there really isn't an old-fashioned word for food-borne sickness, I guess because no one back then ever figured out the connection. Food (hopefully noncontaminated) for thought.
An explanation on the details of Wilhelmina's loophole may be found here More Author Commentary >
Author Commentary: Queen Mother >
Historically, most rulers of monarchies have been kings, and their wives have most often been not queens but queens consort. When a king dies, the crown passes not to his widow but to his heir, usually the closest male relative. The queen, however, still retains her title. To distinguish this queen from the new king's queen consort—or even, rarely, from the newly crowned queen regnant (you really need to read the "Male Succession" commentary to understand what I'm talking about)—the English many centuries ago developed the title "queen mother." A queen mother is a widow of the late king and also mother to the current ruler; one can be a queen's mother but not the formally titled "queen mother" (the mother of Queen Victoria, for example, had never been queen herself so titlewise it was nuts to her).
Thus, it is a bit disingenuous that Ben in Wisdom's Kiss dubs herself queen mother, as she was ruler of Montagne, not queen consort to its king, and held the throne until she abdicated in favor of her daughter. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a real-life example of such a queen-to-queen transfer of power—I'm sure one exists, I just haven't been able to find it. Also, I didn't look very hard because this is a fantasy novel. That's the great joy of fantasy: you get to make stuff up and no one can correct you because it's your world, darn it, and you're the one who concocts all the rules! (Evil laugh!)
Ahem. So, the question was whether Ben should be called "queen mother" or "queen dowager" or some other term that I've either forgotten or never knew in the first place. But I love the charming fustiness of "queen mother," and I love its association with England's most recent (and tremendously beloved) Queen Mother, the mother of the current Q.E. II, who lived to 101 and had such marvelous hats. If that's how you want to picture Ben, be my guest.
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Author Commentary: Castles >
I don't think it's a secret that I adore castles
And you know what all my favorite castles have in common? They're fake. Well, okay, they're not fake as in "made out of plastic," but they're definitely fake as in "never looked like this way back when," back in the Middle Ages when folks really used castles. Castles such as Burg Eltz, Vincennes, and Pierrefonds were "restored" in the nineteenth century, the latter two by the architect Viollet-le-Duc, whose professional philosophy was to make buildings look the way he thought they should—the kind of guy who'd say "I know what Monticello n
eeds: light bulbs!" And Neuschwanstein was built from scratch in the 1870s by Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria.
I used to love castles because they looked like fairy tales. Then I learned that fairy tales as we know them today were basically invented by the French in the 1600s. >Charles Perrault, who wrote "Cinderella," "Puss in Boots," "Sleeping Beauty," and "Little Red Riding Hood," doubtless visited Château de Vincennes—although he probably didn't take the Paris Metro to it, as you can today (climb the steps and there it is—wowsa), and the château back then didn't look quite so fancy.
Fairy tales exploded in popularity in the nineteenth century—at the exact same time that all these castle were being restored. Coincidence? Not by a long shot. These castle (re)designers used for inspiration anything they could find: existing ruins, medieval illustrations, fairy tales. Really big fairy tales, sometimes: Mad King Ludwig based Neuschwanstein on the operas of Wagner.
If you're an architectural historian, reconstructions don't count, so you'll never get to study these castles in a medieval architecture class. But make no mistake: these castle are history. They're an expression—a very expensive, decades-of-construction expression—of an intense romantic passion. Charles Perrault's stories describe an idealized society where knights fought for ladies' honor and cats could talk and chivalry ruled the forest. This society never existed; it certainly didn't in medieval Europe, when castles were lice-infested prisons. But that doesn't mean we can't fantasize. These castles don't look like fairy tales; they are fairy tales. Fairy tales that we can visit, and dream in.
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Author Commentary: Solstice Terrace >
You know that spot you're supposed to listen to, that thing you feel in your heart, or sense in your gut? My agent gets a tickling feeling between her shoulder blades (so she says). The witch in Macbeth had a prickling in her thumbs. Well, I don't know where my spot is exactly, but I've learned to listen to it. And for years I'd get a thing—you know, a prickling-somewhere thing—whenever I pondered this one scene I'd thought up, a scene featuring a young woman and a young man, handsomely dressed, standing together on a lush green terrace against the setting sun.
This may have originated in our family's own terrace project, one of those interminable construction debacles that leave you convinced that not only will you be dead before it's finished but that your children will dead and rotting as well ... But I don't think that's where the idea came from. For one thing, this other terrace image thrilled rather than exhausted me, but more important, that terrace edged a cliff of hundreds and hundreds of feet, not our measly four-foot drop. That terrace looked over a void so vast, the mountains were only shadows on the horizon. And the sun was setting and the light was gold, the grass was green and the couple was courting. And it thrilled me.
Problem was, I didn't quite know what to do with this ... picture. Where to set it. I had kind of been hoping to do another book featuring the Kingdom of Montagne, which I'd created for Princess Ben, but Chateau de Montagne didn't have any terraces...
Or should I say it didn't have any terraces yet. Sophia, the architect queen of Princess Ben, would have been perfectly capable of erecting a terrace—of erecting pretty much anything. It was a great concept, actually, such a powerful woman erecting a massive balcony overhanging the cliffs of Montagne simply so she could see the sunset. That would be very, very Sophia. Soon I had it all figured out; I even wrote it into an early draft of Queen of All the Heavens.
It seemed rather a pity, though, to create this great architectural detail and then leave it there, wasting all the drama of the drop, the vista, the balustrade ... Couldn't I put it to use later in the story, perhaps combine it with something else?
At some point, ashamedly late in my writing, I realized that Tips needed to show his stuff. The poor guy was stuck with two lovesick, bickering girls; he needed to be—they needed to see—we needed to see—a hero. Thus the sword fight with the gardener, recounted in delectable if probably inaccurate detail by Felis, and by Dizzy from her own perspective. Now I had a use for the Solstice Terrace as Tips battled an evil schemer with the balustrade as heart-stopping backdrop. Perhaps I could even somehow finagle the Globe d'Or into this sword fight, and combine all three magnificent elements! Imagine it, the great and magnificent Globe d'Or rising silently over the balcony, slipping out of the void as the sun sets it aglow, tendrils of mist curling noiselessly about its basket...
What I find curious is that the thrill came first, my visceral reaction to the architecture—to the backdrop. But it took years (literally) of hard work and dead ends and editing to fabricate a story worthy of that backdrop—to make it equally thrilling for everyone else. Perhaps my mystery body part understood what the Solstice Terrace was capable of long before my conscious intellect caught up.
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Author Commentary: The Empire of Lax >
Wisdom's Kiss emerged in part from my fairy tale Princess Ben, which features a young Princess Ben struggling to protect Montagne from rapacious neighboring Drachensbett. I knew little about the fictitious world beyond these two kingdoms, nor did I care; the conflict was between a small, oppressed nation and the larger belligerent force over which it ultimately triumphs. >
In besting Drachensbett, though, Montagne—which is to say the adventure story involving Montagne; Montagne's residents would doubtless delight in peaceful monotony—required a new adversary. (See my discussions elsewhere on villains and antagonists.) Farina worked nicely (if "nice" and "Farina" can be used together, which they probably can't), but a greater authority was needed as well, with an agenda ill-disposed to both Farina and Montagne, something that had some power but not too much, with an overarching yet oddly ineffectual political structure, so that everyone was jockeying and elbowing as peers rather than subordinates. >
In other words, something akin to the Holy Roman Empire.
Before starting Wisdom's Kiss I knew pretty much nothing about the Holy Roman Empire other than the classic history joke that it was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire. (I said the joke was classic; I didn't say it was funny.) But I'd been reading Colin McEvedy's New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History and the Harper Collins Atlas of World History, and I found them utterly fascinating. North-central medieval Europe wasn't an empire the way Rome, say, was an empire; it was more a collection of squabbling, power-hungry little states all desperately trying to undermine each other while also weakening the poor schlub elected (yes, elected) emperor.
Lax is kind of like the United States of America, with a central leader governing a bunch of states of various sizes, structures, and ambitions. Unlike the USA, however, the states within Lax consist of kingdoms, duchies, counties, earldoms, baronies, independent cities (a critical feature of the Holy Roman Empire), and who knows what else, many with their own armies, and most with income structures based mostly on soaking whoever's hapless enough to pass through their little chunk of real estate. Sometimes these kingdoms and duchies and such revolt, overtly or more insidiously, and the emperor—a position that in Lax is hereditary, luckily; so there's not as much scrambling and backstabbing about who goes next—has the thankless job of trying to hold this all together. Rüdiger IV does a pretty darn good job, though he gets no credit for it, either in other crises, or from his biographers. In fact, I'm surprised his model hasn't been attempted in real life: venting aggression via circus competition seems just as macho and dangerous as warfare but a lot less expensive, not to mention safer for sundry innocent bystanders.
See also the Gazetteer on Lax and Rigorus
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Excerpts from Princess Ben
Dangers of Magic >
Ben's Misbehavior >
Edwig >
Elemental Spells >
Doppelschlâferin >
Ancienne >
Wizard Tower >
A Note from the Author: Wisdom's Kiss grew in part from this earlier book and my musings about the old woman narr
ating Princess Ben. Who was she now? What would she be like as a grandmother? Although Wisdom's Kiss is in no way a sequel to Princess Ben, the two books do share several characters, place names and magical elements. Awareness of one will certainly enhance your enjoyment of the other, but that's true of almost all stories: the more you know, the more you relish the references. The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig delights us because we're all so familiar with the other version.
Enhanced Materials Menu
Princess Ben Excerpt: Dangers of Magic >
Both Ben and Dizzy are quite hesitant to employ magic, not only from the untimely death of Queen Providence but also because of the violent punishment of any practitioners, or even suspected practitioners. Nonna Ben has long experience with the hazards of both witchcraft and broom flight, as this passage demonstrates.
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