Читать книгу Time Raiders: The Avenger - P.C. Cast - Страница 3

Dear Reader,

One of the many reasons I enjoyed writing The Avenger so much was that the main setting, ancient Britain, 60AD, was a serendipitous research coincidence. Sounds weird, huh? Well, here’s what happened: at around the same time I was contacted about being involved in the RomVets Time Raiders project I was working on the first of my HOUSE OF NIGHT young adult books. In the HoN novels there is a school organisation called the Dark Daughters and this group figures predominately in the plot of the series. It’s supposed to be a club led by the best and the brightest of House of Night vampyre fledglings, young women who were being groomed to become high priestesses of the vampyre goddess, Nyx. So I needed to have a super-cool foundation for the group. I’m of Celtic descent and have always been fascinated by the history of my ancestors. Because of that I decided to give the Dark Daughters Celtic roots, which meant I needed to research exceptional women in the history of the Celts. That research led me to the Iceni queen, Boudicca. From the very beginning I was intrigued by her story – that her husband passed the torque of royalty to her at his death and that she was a well-respected leader. Then a Roman tax collector decided to flex his muscle and show Boudicca who was really in charge of the Iceni. He had her publicly whipped and ordered her two young daughters raped.

The story intrigued as well as horrified me.

I remember not being able to read fast enough to find out what happened to Boudicca and cheering as she united the Celts and actually kicked some Roman ass for a while.

History reports what happened to the queen of the Iceni and I’ll leave that story to my fictionalised, but basically historically accurate, rendering in The Avenger. What history isn’t as clear about is what happened to the queen’s two daughters. I decided they disappeared from human history because they were marked to begin the change that led them to be powerful vampyre high priestesses, so revered that they began an organisation that was to live long after they had passed to their goddess’s verdant meadows, the Dark Daughters.

And just as I decided that, Lindsay McKenna and Merline Lovelace contacted me with an interesting paranormal romance series idea…where military heroines have to go back in time to retrieve lost pieces of a medallion…to save the world…and out of the historical time-period choices I had to send my heroine back to was ancient Britain, 60 AD, and Queen Boudicca.

How could I say anything but yes! Yes! Yes!

Hope you enjoy the ride as much as I did.

Love

P. C. Cast