Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones

Maybe the candle she blesses will bring luck to your business and the beer won’t go sour. Maybe that little bundle of cloth and thread will keep your husband from straying. Maybe the old woman who sells charms in the marketplace is a fraud, but maybe her work has real power. When you live at the bottom of society, when you have no power and very little money, every scrap of advantage and hope is meaningful. Luzie Valorin writes operas that raise powers she can neither sense nor understand.īut for Floodtide, the newest Alpennia novel, I wanted to focus on much smaller magics. Antuniet Chazillen can just barely make out the mystical currents in her alchemical experiments, but she can feel the power in the gemstones those experiments produce.

The first time Margerit Sovitre is consciously aware of participating in a miracle, she’s helping with a saint’s day festival and sees flowers bloom under her hands before their time. They celebrate religious rituals that sometimes have mystical effects. They participate in mystery guild ceremonies that are nearly indistinguishable from religious rituals. The protagonists of my first few books are most familiar with high magic. But what if the right person, with the right skills, in the right context, using the right formulas… what if they could make stuff happen? And what if – maybe – they couldn’t always tell how they’d done it? Or even if they’d done it?įor the stories I wanted to tell, I needed ambiguous magics–things that you performed whether you knew they worked or not because… well, just because. When I started developing the place of magic in the Alpennia series–long before I had any idea it would be a series – my basic principle was “stuff works.” What if (I asked myself) all the traditional practices, the rituals of folk religion, the charms and divinations, the prayers and curses, what if they all worked the way people expected them to? Maybe not consistently.

I love how fantasy can open a window into the realities of life, and in this fascinating guest post, Heather explains a little bit about why and how she chose to focus on the smaller, day-to-day magics of women in her new book. I was lucky enough to hear her read from Floodtide at WorldCon over the summer, and I was instantly drawn into the little magics explored in it – charms to help with laundry, for example. I’m a huge fan of her Alpennia series, and really looking forward to reading the newest standalone in it, Floodtide. Heather Rose Jones is a fantastic author whose historical fantasy books centre queer women and their lives and adventures.

Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones