What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Coral Bones is out today!

jenqoe:

fozmeadows:

My novella, Coral Bones, the first story in the Shakespearean Monstrous Little Voices anthology from Rebellion Publishing, is out today!

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What’s it about, you ask? Well:

Miranda, daughter to Prospero, the feared sorcerer-Duke of Milan, stifles in her new marriage. Oppressed by her father, unloved by Ferdinand, she seeks freedom; and is granted it, when her childhood friend, the fairy spirit Ariel, returns. Miranda sets out to reach Queen Titania’s court in Illyria, to make a new future…

As much as The Tempest is one of my favourite Shakespearean plays, his treatment of Miranda has always bothered me. Aged sixteen, after being raised alone on an island with only her father and spirits for company, Miranda’s ‘happy ending’ is to marry the first man she ever meets within a day of meeting him. This story is my way of asking: what happens next? Who is Miranda, really? What if Ariel, not Prospero, had the bulk of her raising? What would a girl from an island think of life at court?

What if Ariel had to set her free?

Coral Bones is a story about gender identity, feminism and fairies. I’m hugely honoured that it’s your first chance to explore the Monstrous Little Voices collection, and hope it leaves you eager to read the subsequent stories: The Course of True Love, by Kate Hartfield; The Unkindest Cut, by Emma Newman; Even in the Cannon’s Mouth, by Adrian Tchaikovsky; and On the Twelfth Night, by Jonathan Barnes.

Happy book day, everyone!

Yes! Miranda! I need to read this right now! :-) 

See, Miranda’s part of the story has always annoyed me about The Tempest - first Miranda gets sent to sleep during all the interesting magic, then she gets sold off to the wimpy prince and shoved at the constricting environment of a royal court. So much no.  This is the girl who likely learnt to read with her father’s magic books, had only the spirits as respite from her father’s obsession with revenge, and if you think Sycorax’s ghost wasn’t hanging around to watch over Caliban then you’re seriously underestimating the determination of a powerful witch to protect her family after death… ;-)

My Miranda learnt magic both from her father’s books and from the ghost of Sycorax, balanced the controlled booklore with the wilder power of the elements, wove magics that Prospero would never even dream of.  This girl did not go quietly to the court. 

But she was patient.  She’d had to be with a father like Prospero.  Knew when to stay silent, and smile and nod, knew how to play her expected role.  All the better to keep attention away from her so that when she really wanted to do something, she could quietly do it.  An illusion to make it seem she was somewhere else. A spirit for distraction.  A sleep spell to take care of watching eyes.  (Because her father taught her much, even when he didn’t mean to.  She knew he spelled her to sleep and learnt the means to spirit walk so the time wasn’t wasted.  Turned enchanted sleep back on him.  The right herbs in his evening drink or sprinkled on the fish he ate for dinner, and she was free to wander the night, and oh how the island came to life when Prospero’s attention was off it.)

And so the king’s ship came and Miranda knew her father’s schemes were coming to fruition. Sycorax had warned her many times. But then, Sycorax had never trusted Prospero, from the first moment the bedraggled prideful man had stepped on the island, Sycorax had seen in him the men who had driven her and her son away from Algiers and from the start, had tried to save Miranda from his influence. 

And Miranda had learnt well.

Maybe she played princess until she learnt the ways of the court, turned an annoyance into a triumph and used her magic in small ways to solidify her rule.  Maybe she used her magic more openly to be the witch queen of Naples. Maybe she faked her death and disappeared from the court’s memory to live a life of her own choosing.

Maybe freedom from her father’s schemes started on the island, when she changed bodies with Caliban, the boy her father despised (and her only human friend, despite Prospero’s attempts to say otherwise. Survival meant not arguing. This they’d both learnt at an early age.)  Caliban and Miranda had never had bad blood between them. Had, in fact, played at magic together, learning the trick of switching bodies and spending whole days as each other.  That Prospero often punished Miranda while she was wearing Caliban’s skin, was not something they’d ever mention.  This, too, was the price of survival. 

And so Caliban, who had been wearing Miranda’s skin during the Tempest, married the prince and went to court, enjoyed being spoilt and waited on… at least for a time.  When he tired of it, a fetch and a fake death when Prospero was too far away to examine the body, bought Caliban his freedom. (And later he met up with Miranda and they swapped bodies back, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

Meanwhile Miranda had followed the ship to Italy.  Had stayed in Naples until she was sure Caliban was safe and happy, then travelled north, and bit by bit, made her way to Florence where, as chance would have it, artists and inventors and all manner of interesting folk were emerging.  And maybe she learnt from them, and maybe they learnt from her, and maybe there was a need for a smart girl with a knack for magic in all the family infighting. 

Caterina Sforza certainly thought so, and many secrets about these times were kept, and many great adventures and heroic women left unrecorded.  Though in her dying days, Caterina would tell a monk that ‘If I could write everything, I would shock the world.’

It was a century before Miranda found Caterina’s reported words written on papers from the monastry, and even then they brought a smile to her face as she remembered everything that had inspired them. The women, the men, and those who ascribed to neither or both terms.  The adventures, the love, the magic, the freedom.  Above all else, Miranda remembered the freedom.  To choose her own fate and live her own life, to make her own friends and keep them safe from the venemous tongues and societal expectations that would try and rend them asunder.  Miranda lived, Miranda thrived, and none had the power to take that away from her. 

Reblogging because AWESOME.

(Source: fozmeadows.wordpress.com, via jenqoe)

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