“Why are you here?” Lady Deorwynn demanded. “Where is Marciana? Did you bring her back, or do the Naestors want to keep her?”
“I do not know where she is,” he said with a shrug. “But she is the one who burned Cruix Abbey. She razed it to ashes. She has become.” He scratched the edge of his mouth with a finger. Then he looked at the scrolls and papers scattered about the desk. He took one of them up and then tossed it aside. “Another will arrive in the morning,” he said. “Your enemy is finally dead. She gasped her last yesterday after struggling with a terrible fever. A few drops of poison on her lips.”
Lady Deorwynn’s eyes widened with shock. “Who ordered you to kill her?”
“No one,” the kishion replied. Again, that half smile that mocked her. “She needed to be . . . removed. You must persuade your husband to give the lands and manor houses and castles to his firstborn. Maia is to inherit.”
Lady Deorwynn’s trembling increased. A pit of fear stabbed inside of her. “Her estates were already confiscated and given to the new Earl of Forshee and three other men. They will revolt if stripped of those incomes. You are mad.”
“Quite possibly,” the kishion replied, chuckling. Then his eyes turned deadly earnest. “See it done, Lady Deorwynn. You never know when your next drink will be your last.” He picked up her husband’s goblet, saluted her with it, and drained it in a single swallow.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The origin of this story goes back to December 1998. I was a night-shift supervisor at Intel’s R&D factory in Santa Clara, California. After getting home from working a twelve-hour shift, I would promptly go to bed and sleep for a few hours. One day, I had a very vivid dream about an evil father, his daughter, and a skilled protector who was assigned to guard the girl. I awoke from the dream with the thoughts bubbling inside and hurriedly scribbled notes on some paper near my bed and then fell back asleep. When I woke up to my alarm later, I could hardly remember anything about the dream until I looked at the notes. This was the origin of Maia’s tale.
What struck me about the story as I pondered it was that the evil man’s daughter was the heroine and the villain—only she did not know that she was the villain. Her actions and intentions along the way were to help solve a problem, restore an ancient magic, but she seemed to cause havoc and destruction wherever she went.
In 2002, my friends and I started publishing Deep Magic, a fantasy e-zine. We needed stories, so I wrote a novella called Maia for one of the earlier issues. The novella was intended to be the villain’s backstory, and I had planned to write the novel from Jon Tayt’s point of view. I even tried a few chapters with that in mind, many years ago. Later, I came up with the idea for The Wretched of Muirwood and decided to use that as the history to Maia’s story. So even though I wrote the novels about Lia and Colvin first, I already had the novella Maia in hand. That novella became the source material for my graphic novel, The Lost Abbey, which Jet City Comics published, and are the events that precede Banished.
I enjoyed writing from Maia’s point of view, and the story certainly took some twists that I did not expect. One of my all-time favorite books is A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I love the story of Sara Crewe and how she goes from being a rich man’s only child to a destitute pauper and that, even though she lives in squalor in the attic of Miss Minchin’s school, she overcomes by focusing on her thoughts and using her imagination. In The Banished of Muirwood, Maia actually is a princess who loses her station. As you will discover in Book Two, The Ciphers of Muirwood, her troubles have not ended.
I am glad I slept next to a drawer with paper and could capture the raw seeds of this story. You never know when a random dream will blossom into a novel.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to all the staff at 47North and Amazon Publishing for the continuous excellent partnership and collaboration. It has been a life-changing journey for me that led to leaving my twenty-two-year career at Intel to write full time. Also thanks to my early readers for their feedback, input, and encouragement: Gina, Emily, Karen, Robin, Shannon, and Rachelle. I also would like to thank the fabulous Angela Polidoro, whose input and enthusiasm improved the book and made it better. And finally, a shout out to Lisa from Vermont for driving to New York City for my first author signing at Comic Con 2014!