Welcome to Three Kinds of Now. As the front cover (below) says, I’m offering you three novellas from the world of The Shattered Moon. Three novellas, to be a little more precise, which cover events happening around the same time, but in divergent timelines.
This Introduction, and the first instalment of the first story, will be free to read (at least for the foreseeable future).
There’s no special reason to read the stories in any particular order, but I’ve ordered the introd below according to the order in which the timelines diverge. There’s a link to the appropriate first instalment in the heading of each intro.
"So much in life depends on happenstance, it seems to me. If we had attempted the crossing of the mountains at any other point. If Squire Duncal and Lady Pichenta had not been passing by the slave-market on that particular morning. If they had not one day played host to a young man with a passion for astronomy—who just happened, unbeknown to me, to be the heir to an Earldom. So many points at which, if any one thing had been different, everything that follows would have been different."
Jerya in 'The Skilthorn Congress'
Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken has long resonated with me. It’s one of two poems that I read when my partner and I became ‘official’ once UK law (finally!) allowed us to have a civil partnership ceremony. To me, as to many people, the poem seems to illuminate how small choices or even chance events can make a great difference over time.
Three Kinds of Now is an exploration of just such difference. These novellas explore three scenarios which see Jerya’s life unfold in radically different ways, though none actually correspond with the specific 'ifs' mentioned in Jerya’s speech at Railu’s wedding, quoted above.
All three stories are set eighteen years after the events of Three Kinds of North, so Jerya is now thirty-seven. In the canonical timeline (sounds pretentious, but what else can I call it?), this would be three years after The Skilthorn Congress, and in later books we’ll find that Jerya has settled into the life which that book presages. It’s fair to say that in none of these three stories does her life look remotely like that.
As you will see…
I’d like to think these novellas make sense on their own terms, but realistically they’ll be a lot easier to understand if you’ve read the novels to which they relate, especially Three Kinds of North and The Sundering Wall. If not, at the very least, you’ll certainly be wondering, 'what’s a Dawnsinger?’
That’s a question raised in the first paragraph of Three Kinds of North, and the unravelling of a complete answer occupies a good deal of the novel. TL:DR? Well, the name itself is a bit of a clue, and there are a few more in the book blurbs on my website (where you can also link to the first chapter). I’ll just add that this is not a fantasy, though I’m quite happy if it feels like one, especially in the early stages; there’s no actual magic to be found. Magical thinking, on the other hand, might be a different matter, and there may be an occasional manifestation of Clarke’s Law.
"There’s no telling things like that, might-have-beens and if-onlys. No knowing, but you can't help wondering all the same…"
Jerya in 'The Woman of Delven'
In all three stories there are allusions to the choices or incidents which shaped Jerya’s life in this particular way. But let’s just lay them out here anyway, in chronological order.
The Woman of Delven
In The Woman of Delven, Jerya’s arrival in the College of the Dawnsingers resulted in a very different outcome. Perriad did not decide to take a chance on admitting a nineteen-year-old Novice, but sent her away forthwith. Does this require much explanation? We know from Vows and Watersheds that she’s not entirely stable, so if she showed signs of a mercurial nature ten years earlier it's hardly surprising. And it was always a finely-balanced decision anyway. As it transpired in Three Kinds of North, Perriad began to take a more favourable view after hearing that Jerya had in effect taught herself to read; if that bit of the conversation had gone even slightly differently, it might have tilted her decision the other way. Even when she does decide, it's only provisional: "Ah, well, we may as well at least take a proper look at you."
Having accepted the premise that she made a different decision, the rest follows naturally. Jerya knew no one in the city but Rodal; of course she would seek him out, however awkward and shamefaced that first reunion may have been. This in turn means that the feelings which kindled between them on the journey, and which they’d both striven to suppress, could now flicker into life again. It also seemed to me logical that they would linger a while in the city rather than heading back to Delven immediately. Jerya would have some reticence about showing her face again after the high hopes raised by her Choosing. Perriad's casual words, 'well, you mustn't blame yourself,' became a kind of mantra as she strove to convince herself she was not at fault—a mantra which assumed such importance that years later she named one of her daughters in a subtle tribute. In this version of history, at least, Perriad is not the villain of the piece.
The Dawnsinger
The divergence of the roads came a few months later in the timeline of The Dawnsinger. Jerya remained in the College, advanced to Novice, and became lovers with Railu much as described in Three Kinds of North; and she was equally outraged by the decision to send Railu to Delven. Was she also equally disturbed by the revelation, at Kendrigg, of the truth about the power (or otherwise) of the Dawnsong? I couldn't work this into the story, but I think she was.
So why was her ultimate response different? I imagine a conversation, between her and Railu and probably Analind, maybe one or two others. It would probably be another late-night session fuelled by wine or ale, like the one in Three Kinds of North in which they dissect Jerya's 'ludicrous' question about the authorship of one of the Guild’s most precious relics. This could allow Railu to make a speech resembling the one she gives in Chapter 1 of The Sundering Wall, where she says, 'The Song is not a lie', and then, 'The Song does have power… for those who Sing it.'
Jerya would certainly be impressed by this, and if delivered at the right moment and endorsed by the rest of her friends it could 'make all the difference'. It's only the double dose of indignation about the 'lie' and about Railu's fate that drove her to the desperate extremity of crossing the mountains. With one of these sources of anger defused, she might be more inclined to direct her ire at Perriad specifically, rather than feeling alienated from the Guild as a whole.
Perhaps Jerya also consulted Yanil, the closest thing she had to a mentor.
This effectively means that none of the events of The Sundering Wall, or the closing few chapters of Three Kinds of North, now happen. The Duke of Selton makes a now-genuinely-First Crossing at the same time as recounted in Vows and Watersheds, but the consequences play out rather differently, with the tussle between Evisyn and Perriad for the Primacy deferred a full eight years. And this sets up a scenario in which Analind is still one of the first from the Sung Lands to visit the Five Principalities, but Jerya doesn't get the chance.
The Slave
The fork in the timelines is later again in The Slave, falling squarely in the middle of The Sundering Wall. It's Railu, not Jerya, who gains her freedom; it's easy to imagine the Squire and Lady choosing to reward Railu for giving them a son; maybe the real question is why they didn't do this in the 'canonical timeline'. (Don't ask me, ask the characters). In consequence, Jerya never became their secretary, let alone Embrel's governess, as she did in Vows and Watersheds.
The hinge moment here could be one of several. Perhaps the conversation between Jerya and Duncal in which she first lets slip that she can read never happened, or unfolded differently. In the 'canonical' version she only decides to mention books as a distraction because she's suddenly realised that Railu may be pregnant, and 'all she could think of was steering Duncal away from the subject'. If that conversation didn't happen, it's plausible that over time she becomes convinced it’s better to conceal her literacy, and limits her reading to times when she won't be discovered.
The story makes one other bold assumption: that Railu and Skelber still meet, albeit later than in The Skilthorn Congress. The story does give a brief rationale for this, in Skelber's comment, "I started out thinking I'd be prosecuting another dangerous quack, and ended up thinking I'd met one of the finest healers I'd ever come across." We know from The Skilthorn Congress that Skelber's job at the time is in the department of Ethics and Enforcement, which includes tracking down and prosecuting unlicensed or fraudulent practitioners. If someone had passed on reports or rumours of a practitioner who was not only unlicensed but female, this would certainly require investigation.
There's plenty of potential in this bit of backstory, and I can imagine it'd be fun to explore it further. One day…
Three Kinds of Jerya
All three stories required me, as a writer, to envisage Jerya's character developing in very different circumstances. The 'canonical Jerya', who becomes a Countess, is not necessarily any more likely than any of the others; all the moments of divergence discussed above had to transpire in a specific way, and several others beside. Her first meeting with Hedric had to go a certain way; both of them had to safely make their respective returns from the Sung Lands; and even then, they could have wound up as plain Master and Mistress of Kirwaugh. Hedric only inherits because his cousin Ferrowby messed up his own chances just when the old Earl was on the point of making a new will. That might still have been an interesting story, but would it have been quite as much fun as giving Jerya a title and a stately home and even having her sparring with a Prince?
The roads diverge, and diverge again, and yet again.
I think Jerya's character in The Dawnsinger is a logical development of what we see for most of the course of Three Kinds of North. This Jerya is probably, of all of them (even, perhaps, the canonical version), the one who's most at ease with herself, the one who feels she has truly found her place in the world. Not that everything is rose-tinted; she retains a lingering sense of anger, and some guilt, over what happened to Railu. And her unease over the misrepresentation of the power of Dawnsong has never completely evaporated. This is why she's so ready to embrace Evisyn's vision of a more open Guild; open to the people of the Sung Lands as well as to regular contact with the Five Principalities.
I can't believe that the Jerya of The Woman of Delven is quite so content with her lot. She's married, and a mother of six, which is certainly a lot for anyone to take on, but she still has a taste for the forest and the moors. Surely she secretly yearns, too, for the life of the mind, of which she got the merest fleeting glimpse on her ill-fated arrival at the College. Her relationship with the Dawnsinger, Hariset, gives her a little of this, but also reminds her of all that she has missed out on. Her initiative in teaching the village children to read, and specifically in striving to ensure girls get equal opportunity to do so, provides her with another sense of purpose. But it's pretty clear that she's projecting hopes onto her daughter without any way of knowing if Perieth really is the stuff of which Dawnsingers are made. (This begs another question: how does anyone know this? This is a major responsibility carried by the Peripatetics: how do they make these decisions, with all their consequences both for the Guild and for the individual girls who are Chosen?
And finally… I can't help wondering what everyone makes of the Jerya we encounter in The Slave, and I'm very happy to have your comments. I have to say that when I started writing this story I really hadn't expected it to turn out quite this way. But then that's the interesting thing about being a pantser rather than a plotter (for more about this, see this Post.)
Clearly, this is a more wounded version of Jerya. In the canonical timeline, her wildly impulsive decision to leave the Guild and cross the mountains ultimately works out pretty well for her; and, eventually, it pans out okay for Railu too, though Jerya never entirely shakes off a feeling of responsibility for what happens in the interim, both Railu’s pregnancy and her prolonged enslavement. Even at the end of The Skilthorn Congress, at Railu's wedding, it's not entirely a case of 'happy ever after', but in the end at least they both find themselves living lives that offer the kind of challenges they're ready to embrace.
In The Slave, it's Jerya, not Railu, who's endured extended enslavement, with very limited opportunities for fulfilment of any kind. I think it's inevitable that she's spent a lot of time brooding on the consequences of her great act of defiance at the climax of Three Kinds of North. It's not that there's no defiance left in her, but it tends to surface in small and usually unproductive ways, like stubbornly calling Railu 'Mistress' even when Railu herself is so uncomfortable with it. You could even say that Jerya's decision not to take up the Petition of Revocation, when those around her are so keen that she should, is in itself an act of defiance, albeit at her own expense. Perhaps, after all, it's the Jerya we know, still asserting herself, defying expectations, in whatever way lies open to her.
Well, that's part of it, but Jerya is a complex creature (aren't we all?) and her motives aren't always clear-cut, even to herself. The self-assurance that sustained her through her turbulent months at the College, and then carried her forward across the mountains, has been steadily sapped in the eighteen years since. Perhaps, in a new environment, with a new young charge, she can rebuild herself, but it'll probably take a lot of care and understanding from both Sumyra and Railu.
In any case, I couldn't leave Jerya in a completely hopeless situation. She's refused the Petition of Revocation, but Railu insisted on securing Analind's affidavit, so that possibility remains open. Also, Skelber and Railu will have the option, in about two and a half years, to free her by manumission without any need for court proceedings. Perhaps by then Jerya will feel ready for another new chapter.
And that might be another story…