o'saerre'Kain'hena
Snakecharm takes place four months after Hawksong ended. Narration shifts from Danica to her mate, Diente of the serpiente, Zane.
Zane Cobriana took the throne after losing three brothers, a sister, and his father to the war. He swore on the day he was declared heir that he would stop the bloodshed, at any cost: and he succeeded.
Or did he?
Open warfare has ended, but hatred takes longer to die. Even in this new realm of peace, nothing is easy. Troubles arise. Traitors appear. Among the most trusted hides a criminal from another land, and to seek him, that realm sends a mage whose power is as old as myth.
Sometimes, to protect those we love, we must lose them forever.
Origin of the Story: There were a great many changes made to Hawksong during revision, but two of the earliest large changes (made between the first and second drafts, after only two people had read the first draft) involved changing the identity of the avian assassin, and deleting the epilogue.
Erica Silvermead was originally responsible for the attempt on Zane's life; Karl didn't even exist at this point. However, I had two problems with this scenario. For one, it was blatantly obvious, as the scrawls of "IT'S ERICA!" and "SHE'S EVIL!" in the margins of the manuscript I leant out for feedback indicated. Second, it didn't work in my head. It didn't fit. I knew there was something going on with Erica, but this wasn't it. Her being an assassin didn't explain things like how a sparrow- a breed normally too slight to join the higher ranks in the army- was talented enough to win a way almost instantly into the lofty Royal Flight.
Also, Hawksong's first draft's epilogue dealt with Zane and Danica's child. Now, I knew from Birds of Prey that there are certain physical complications to avians and serpiente breeding. It also occurred to me rather swiftly that there would be political and social complications. Saying "let it be so" doesn't fix problems that have gone on for a millennia. That child couldn’t just be tossed into the mix; more needed to be done before she could possibly be born.
So I began Snakecharm. At first, Danica was going to continue to narrate, but she kept passing out or not being present for important events. The second attempt was from A'isha's point of view, but that didn't work either. So it wasn't until the third try that I began writing as Zane. Perhaps using him should have been obvious, but in my defense, Zane was my first male protagonist. And he's terrible to write; he's emotional and flighty and says what he thinks, so paragraphs kept coming out like, I thought about X. I said, "X."
I think I had about four chapters before I got the Hawksong manuscript back from a friend of mine named Sydney, nicknamed Syf. Well, she was distressed by the fact that several characters shared names with our friends, but she didn't get a character. She demanded that I write her in as "a drop dead sexy vixen," as "an absolute dictator" and as someone that "everyone loves." As you might imagine, getting all of those right was something of a struggle, but in meeting those conditions, Syfka was born.
I had worked with falcons before, but I had only dealt with flunkies, not the royal house. For a while, Syfka was nicknamed Vixen, because of a force-changed fox form she had, but that trait was cut to better fit with her lofty position in the royal house of Ahnmik. However, the thought brought the idea of force-changing and stolen forms into my mind.
So I had my primary plotline: the lost falcon. If only I knew who s/he was. I was nearly to the scene where Kel reveals herself before I knew that she was actually a falcon, and the whole Rei/Sebastian thing took me completely by surprise. Yet, when I wrote it, it fit in my head. Erica's odd traits made sense; how quickly Rei gave up Danica to Zane made sense, as well as how young he also joined the Royal Flight. Erica's passionate, nearly irrational hated of the serpiente also made sense, especially once I discovered her previous relationship to Anjay Cobriana (more on that in Falcondance.
I had finished writing Snakecharm, luckily, before we were doing serious editing of Hawksong, or else it never would have worked. I still had the opportunity to reference the falcons in that first book, to explain their relationship to the avians and their connection to the am'haj poison; I could also introduce Sebastian, so he wasn't coming out of nowhere.
Snakecharm FAQ & NOTE:
FAQ1: Why is the Snakecharm hardcover size different than all the previous books, including Hawksong? Answer: Because Marketing & Design, a department at Random House over which I have no control, decided it should be. I apologize for the jump in price. I know that many of you already scrape to buy the $9.99 hard cover books; I would not have chosen this if it had been my decision. If you like for your books to match, you should now be able to get a set of trade paperbacks that are all the same size.
NOTE: (Thanks to Sean Nikolas for bringing this to my attention) Depending on which printing you have, there may be confusing errors in the Snakecharm family tree. They should be corrected in later printings.