Can I make you believe in magic?

As I wrote last year, there’s nothing like a magic system in Southern Discomfort. There’s no explanation for how things works, which drives the newbies discovering magic nuts. Why does turning your clothes inside out counter the spell of the stray sod (a fae trick that works like a D&D Lose the Path spell)? Why does chopping off a hanged murderer’s hand create a magical talisman? Olwen McAlister, though she’s magical herself, has no idea. It works; that’s what matters right? She honestly doesn’t understand human curiosity — things work, why are the children of men so obsessed with the why?

That doesn’t mean “anything can happen,” the standard critique of fantasy from SF fans (those fantasy authors, they don’t write as rigorously and logically as science fiction, no sirree bob!). There are rules and I use them consistently. As one character says, healing magic can cure an ear infection or a pulled muscle, it can’t get rid of cancer.

(As I don’t have any relevant illustrations, here’s Trixie at her absolute fluffiest. You’re welcome).

I started figuring out the magic by leafing through Katharine Briggs’ Encyclopedia of Fairies, an exhaustive and fascinating guide to British fairies. From that I got ideas such as the stray sod, elf-shot, elven glamor that lets them deceive the eyes — Olwen looks to most people like an attractive woman in her forties, not the inhumanly beautiful daoine sidhe she really is — and their vulnerability to cold iron.

Then I started to work out the details. Is cold iron the same as industrial steel alloys? Nope: steel is a non-starter and doesn’t burn them the way iron does. Does making the hand of glory require the hand of someone hung for murder or would someone who’s taken a life but isn’t a murderer qualify? What exactly are elves?

Then I began to add stuff. Healing magic, which isn’t a sidhe gift, because it helped the plot a lot. Influenced by a character in the Mabinogion (a collection of Welsh legends, though Christianized) who can race along the tops of grass blades so swiftly and lightly the grass doesn’t bend, I made elves uncannily swift, though not (I think) feeling like conventional Flash-style super-speed.

In the Mabinogion, King Math, old and wise, can listen to the winds to learn secrets. I added that to Olwen’s repertoire too. Beyond that there’s an element of “the ruler and the land are one” — after 300 years in Pharisee, Olwen and her late husband Aubric are deeply plugged into the forces of nature. Which raises the question how Gwalchmai managed to reach their mansion and murder Aubric before the start of the book. It will be answered.

And then I had to write it and (I hope) make it feel believable. That impossible things have intruded into Pharisee Georgia and growing increasingly impossible as the story progresses.

If all goes well (getting the cover done, for instance), you’ll be able to see what you think in a couple of months.

#SFWApro. Flash cover by Carmine Infantino, all rights to images remain with current holders.