The return of Caina Kardamnos

Now on Chapter 6 of GHOST IN THE VEILS, the second book of the GHOST ARMOR series.

I have to admit that when I finished GHOST IN THE SUN and the GHOST NIGHT series, I thought I was done with Caina.

I just didn’t have any idea of where to go with the character after GHOST NIGHT. Part of that, I admit, was that Caina had become powerful and influential, and I am cynically suspicious of people like that and wasn’t sure I could write them as a protagonist. Though that was less of a concern as I went on, since writing Ridmark and Tyrcamber in DRAGONTIARNA gave me a good bit of practice.

So I finally had a good enough idea to return to Caina as a protagonist, and I think it was a confluence of four different ideas.

1.) What if Caina had stepchildren? There are lots of different potential story dynamics with stepchildren, but I thought it would be most interesting if Kylon had children he didn’t know about, and the mother Kalliope Agramemnos had kept them secret from him. Except Kylon loves Caina and Kalliope is in awe of Caina, and so Caina becomes the linchpin holding this family together, since neither Kylon nor Kalliope can stand the other. There are a lot of potential character arcs to generate in the inherent tension of that situation.

2.) Medieval nobles.

If you read any histories of medieval Europe, one of the main themes is that men primarily wielded the political and military power…but some women by sheer force of will, charisma, tenacity, and cunning, came to wield great power themselves. There are, in fact, quite a few examples. Probably the most famous one is Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was married to two different kings and the mother to two more (or three, depending on how you count). She kept her son Richard on the throne of England during his captivity after the Third Crusade, and was one of the chief architects of his release. Had Eleanor lived longer and her son John listened to more of her advice, probably King John’s reign would have been more successful and he would not be remembered primarily in the US as the cowardly Prince John from that one animated Disney movie with anthropomorphic animals.

Perhaps the most successful example is Margaret Beaufort, who basically engineered her son Henry VII’s ascension to the English throne and then served as one of his primary advisors for the entirety of his reign. In fact, she even outlived him by a year, and then lived long enough to advise her grandson Henry VIII for the first year after he became king. (A less successful contemporary of Margaret Beaufort would be Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI and mother of his heir. Margaret of Anjou was one of the driving forces behind the Wars of the Roses, but lost everything when her husband and son were killed and she died in poverty in France while her enemy Edward IV ruled England.) Blanche of Castile was her son Louis IX’s regent while he went on crusade. Countess Matilda of Tuscany helped force a settlement in the Investiture Controversy and the Holy Roman Emperor, the southern dukes of the Empire, and the pope all wanted Matilda as an ally.

Perhaps the most striking example would be Sichelgaita of Lombardy, wife of the rapacious Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard. Guiscard started out as a penniless, landless knight and ended up conquering Sicily and a lot of Italy. He was known as greedy, cunning, and ruthless, and his eventual tomb had the epitaph “here lies Guiscard, the terror of the world.”

It seems that Sichelgaita was in every way suited to be the wife of a freebooting warlord like her husband. Guiscard fought a lot of wars, and Sichelgaita usually donned armor and rode to battle alongside him. At the battle of Dyrrhachium in 1081, Guiscard’s troops started to break and run while fighting the soldiers of the Byzantine Empire. Sichelgaita rode after the fleeing troops, berating them for their cowardice, and evidently the prospect of her displeasure was so fearsome that Guiscard’s troops turned around and won the battle. (It should also be noted that at this point in her life, Sichelgaita was in her forties and had borne Guiscard eight children.)

So now that Caina is powerful and influential, maybe historical events like these can provide inspiration for plotlines…though Caina would still occasionally put out a shadow-cloak and go break into places.

3.) Someone must wield power.

I mentioned earlier that I had misgivings about writing a protagonist with power and influence, but I’ve come to realize that is in an incomplete view. The thing about power and influence is that someone is going to be in charge. No matter how something is organized, someone must to be in charge and bear the burden of leadership, and hopefully it will be someone with an eye on the greater good.

I thought about this a lot in 2023.  I know several people in 2023 who after much agonizing left some of the traditional “helping” professions (medicine, education, etc) not because of dislike of the admittedly stressful work but because the leadership was so stupid and so malicious as to create an unsustainable work environment. Like, a leader can be stupid and well-intentioned, and a leader can be malicious but clever and an organization can still function, but stupidity and malice together are unsustainable. (Alas, the contemporary US and UK have no shortage of malicious and stupid leadership, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)

So, in the end, someone is going to have to wield power and influence, and hopefully it is someone who will act in the name of the greater good. (I did some of that with Caina already in GHOST IN THE COUNCIL.) That can make for a compelling protagonist.

4.) Fantasy creatures.

Waaaaaay back in the 2000s when I was originally trying to sell the first Caina novels, all the agents and publishers fulminated on how they didn’t want to see any novels with traditional fantasy creatures like elves and orcs and dwarves and serpent men and so forth. So I wrote the Caina books without any of that, which continued when I moved into self-publishing, though I was always a little sore about that even years later.

But now I can introduce some traditional fantasy creatures into the Caina books, hopefully in a way that makes sense in the context of the world.

So those ideas came together for GHOST IN THE SERPENT, and we shall see hopefully more of them in GHOST IN THE VEILS!

-JM