My editor has asked me if I would be interested in submitting a piece for a new Drollerie Press anthology set during the years of the Civil War. I’ve told her yes, and am playing with an idea set in the same universe as Faerie Blood, with a working summary that goes something like this:
A young slave woman who’s gifted with healing magic and who’s on the run on the Underground Railroad comes across a Warder who’s been driven off his territory by the war (possibly due to being forcibly conscripted into either army, but more due to battle on his Warded ground tainting his connection to the land and driving him around the bend); she’s trying to escape slavery, he’s fleeing from the army as well as his own madness. They are driven out onto Roanoke Island, which has been haunted ever since the disappearance of the colony there nearly three hundred years ago–by the ghost of its last Warder, who has been lingering there ever since the colony was wiped out. My hero and heroine have to join forces to not only cleanse the island, but also to defend it against a resurgence of whatever nasty supernatural thing wiped out the colony–and my heroine has to choose between continuing her flight north, and accepting her own magic and helping the Warder soldier establish a new bond to the island so that both he and the ghost can find some peace.
I’m going to look forward to writing this out.
