Shona Kinsella is joining us today to talk about her novel, Daughters of Nicnevin. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Mairead and Constance, two powerful witches, meet in the early days of the 1745 Jacobite uprising. While the men of the village are away fighting, the villagers face threats from both the Black Watch and raiders, and the women are confronted with their vulnerability. They enlist the help of Nicnevin, fae queen of witches, to bring men made of earth to life to help protect their village. But just who do they need protection from? And what will happen when the village men return?
What’s Shona’s favorite bit?
There were a lot of things that I enjoyed when writing Daughters of Nicnevin. For one thing, of all the books that I’ve written so far, it was the one that came together the easiest, seeming to flow from me in a way none of the others have. For another, it’s all about witches, and I have loved witches ever since I was a child when many stories cast women only as damsels in distress to be saved by the hero, or witches to be defeated.
In the end though, the bit I would have to say was my favourite, was finding ways to limit the witches’ power. You see, having characters with too much power can undermine your story. It’s really hard to create tension if they can just do whatever they want with a wave of their hand, and face no real cost or consequences.
There are several small ways that limit is woven through the story. Mairead is experienced and controlled in her use of magic, but even she overextends herself from time to time, and we see her made ill by using more magic than she can handle. Constance has huge power but no control and needs Mairead to help her learn that. When the two of them have the idea of bringing scarecrows to life to take on some of the responsibilities of the men who have gone to war they learn that this is beyond human magic – though not beyond fae magic.
Nicnevin, the fae queen of witches, comes to their aid, bringing magic of her own to allow them to animate men made of the earth of their home. They call these creatures Albans. The Albans themselves have no magic beyond that which animates them, but even then, there are limits placed on how they are used by the bargain with Nicnevin.
My favourite limitation came when the witches decide to cast a glamour over the Albans, to make them look like human men in case they are spotted by visitors to the village. And here I remembered one of those odd little things that I read somewhere, once upon a time, about how our brains can’t make up new faces, and that a lot of people struggle to visualize even familiar faces. I don’t tend to see faces when I dream, and while I can visualize the face of someone I know well, I tend to see the face from a photo of them, or a still moment, rather than remembering what they look like just going about their day. The details all end up quite fuzzy in my mind.
So, how would that affect the witches’ magic? Could they really visualize ten new faces well enough for them to be convincing to anyone looking on? And if not, how could they work around that? Was there anything they could do to balance out this limitation?
All of this is only really important in one, brief scene, when the redcoats pay the village a visit shortly after Culloden. I thoroughly enjoyed writing that scene, building tension, relieving it a little, building it some more…
Of course, no matter how clever Mairead and Constance are, events do not go according to plan. It would be a boring story if they did.
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BIO:
Shona Kinsella is a Scottish author of mythic fantasy. Her works include Daughters of Nicnevin, The Heart of Winter, Petra MacDonald and the Queen of the Fae, The Flame and the Flood, and non-fiction Outlander and the Real Jacobites: Scotland’s Fight for the Stuarts. Her short fiction can be found in various magazines and anthologies. Shona was the editor of the British Fantasy Society’s fiction publication BFS Horizons for four years and is now the Chair of the Society. She has been shortlisted for four British Fantasy Awards. She lives near Loch Lomond with her husband and children.