Barb and JC Hendee are the authors of the fantastic Noble Dead saga. Through Stone and Sea releases next month from Roc Books.
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What can you tell us about your upcoming release, Through Stone and Sea?
Barb: This is the “fattest” book our publisher has let us get away with to date. Hah! It’s an exciting tale. Wynn, Chane, and Shade travel to Dhredze Seatt, the mountain stronghold of the dwarves, looking for the ancient texts that Wynn’s superiors confiscated. Unexpected threats and mysteries quickly arise.
JC: Along the way, the readers will be introduced to a new race as well as a new culture, with a long history that most of the world doesn’t know about. In addition some characters who appeared briefly in the first book play some startling, more active roles. There is lot more going on in Wynn’s world than even she ever knew about, and perhaps the royal city of Calm Seatt isn’t as calm as everyone thought.
How did your ideas/thought process for Magiere and Leesil come about?
Barb: One night, we were researching another project when we came across an interesting entry in a book called The Vampire Encyclopedia by Mathew Bunson. It related information regarding the origins of the “dhampir,” a name given by Slavonic gypsies to the child of a vampire. In medieval Serbia and Yugoslavia, charlatans took advantage of this myth by pretending to be dhampirs. They would convince a troubled village that it was beset by a vampire, and that only a dhampir could see the undead creature. Then they would stage elaborate “battles” and claim they had destroyed the vampire—and charge the village quite a fee. This is what sparked the original idea, and the story of Magiere and Leesil began to grow.
JC: From there, we considered the fantastical possibilities. We asked ourselves “what if one charlatan had to face the concept that vampires were indeed real—and that she was a true dhampir?
Our aim was always to write fantasy, not vampire fiction, and we wanted to write a female protagonist living the more active side of action fantasy in a role most often reserved for male characters. And so Magiere came into being. Leesil followed quickly, first shown only to the reader as a sidekick, but it wasn’t long before everyone (including the readers) saw how he would shape – and perhaps had always shaped – the story and Magiere’s world in new ways.
Magiere, the dhampir, has such a complex back-story. Did you plan it out ahead of time, or was it a gradual process?