Part I: Pre-event Assignments
1. Story Statement:
Avert the takeover of the country by the illegitimate brother of the king.
2. Sketch of Antagonist:
There are two levels of antagonistic action in this story that interact to develop plot points in this book and the plotline of the projected series as a whole:
Level 1: Internal antagonistic force: Loyalty to The Eye requires Winifred Randall to repeatedly sacrifice relationships, abandon personal goals, and deny the fulfillment of her deepest desires for the sake of exercising her gift in the service of her country.
Level 2: External antagonist: Simonides Halford, illegitimate son of a king, knows that he and not his weaker half-brother, who sits on the throne of Kettering, inherited their father’s acclaimed gifts for war and government. In this first installment, Simonides is jockeying for position, maintaining his façade of loyalty as he strategically gathers popular and military support to launch his country on an imperialistic crusade and realize his ambitions of ruling an empire. Simonides’s core wound is his illegitimacy: he is haunted by the sense that he was from conception a persona non grata, the son who should never have been. He is desperately—fiercely—seeking the validation of his existence.
3. Break-out Title Options:
The Child of the Eye
The Eye’s Child
The Eye of the Ketteringa
The Eye of the King
4. Comparable works: two current works in same genre with similar themes, plots, etc.
Cross R. F. Kuang’s The Poppy War with Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child and you find yourself somewhere in a world straddling the borders of fantasy and magic realism. Winifred Randall, like Kuang’s Rin, is a scrappy female protagonist with a genetic disposition for the supernatural. While Rin fanatically pursues the development of her giftedness as a source of power and self-actualization through military exploits, the exercise of Wini’s gift destroys her hopes of domestic happiness as a wife and mother and forces her into the council rooms and confidences of the rich and powerful. The mute orphan boy Bel, her childhood love, is reminiscent of the snow girl Faina, a mixture of the human and the ‘other.’ The question of his origins is never resolved, and his identity remains a mystery although his presence continues to be felt after his death.
5. Logline:
The future of her country rests on a young girl’s loyalty to a gift that betrayed her parents to their deaths and threatens to take from her all she holds most dear.
6. Secondary conflicts:
Inner Conflict: The drowning of Wini’s younger brother triggers a disintegration of her parents’ personal lives and their marriage. Her mother descends into the manipulative world of substance abuse; her father becomes entangled in an adulterous relationship with an ambitious socialite. Wini is forgotten and left to the care of her spinster aunt until she is discovered to have inherited her father’s gift of the Eye. This revelation brings closure to her parents and results in their reconciliation. Wini experiences a brief interlude of happiness, and then her parents are assassinated. Having witnessed the impending attack (but not her parents’ deaths) in a vision beforehand, Wini feels betrayed, confident that she could have saved their lives had more been revealed to her. The next ten years of her life are spent denying the Eye: an attempt—doomed to failure—to sever her identity from her gift.
Secondary conflict: Kettering is a tiny mountainous country of enormous wealth, the object of annexation by its neighbors and colonization by overseas nations. Because of the strategic importance of the Eye to its stability, continued sovereignty, and control of its wealth, the country’s founders placed strict prohibitions around the marriages of the Randall family, the carriers of the Eye. Children are contracted to eligible mates at birth. Such contracts can be dissolved when the children come of age, but marriage is still restricted to members of the Ancient Three, the only remaining descendants of the country’s original inhabitants, the Elderstar. Wini is contracted to her childhood nemesis, Johnny Haelstrom, but she loves her father’s ward, the mute orphan boy Bel, with whom she communicates telepathically and can share the visions the Eye gives her. Bel’s own peculiar mental gifts suggest that he is descended from an illegitimate branch of the Randall family, but despite compelling evidence, his illegitimate roots would still negate any possibility of their marriage.
7. Setting:
Kettering. The wealth of the tiny country of Kettering is legendary. Situated high in the Grand Torr Mountains, its broad interior plain is surrounded by rugged, forbidding mountain peaks. The Ketteringa River flows southward from the Greater Torrs in Kettering’s northeast corner to empty in the Last Seas, cutting sharply west to the center of the great plain before curving south again. Here it is met by the country’s other major navigable waterway, the Brindle Stryd, which empties into it and divides the country into three distinct regions, shaped roughly like a Y. The northernmost region, called the Brindle Stryd after the river, is the principal source of Kettering’s mining wealth, a mountainous area famous for its deep deposits of gold, tin, and precious gemstones and forests of tall cedars. The northern and eastern Strytheclid, to the right of the Y, are also mountainous and rich in ore and timber, but the Strytheclid embraces a portion of the fertile interior plain on the east banks of the Ketteringa as well. The third region to the west of the Y—the Hlafward—is the breadbasket of Kettering and includes most of Kettering’s interior plain: a fertile, flat to slightly rolling land well-watered by a network of small rivers and famous for its deep black soil and agriculture.
Ketteringas. The capital of Kettering is the ancient city of Ketteringas, situated on the border of the Strytheclid and Hlafward midway between the sea and the mouth of the Brindle Stryd. Here Mount Xhorra towers above the western bank of the Ketteringa, a solitary peak separated from an arm of the Grand Torrs that reaches the river on its east side. The original keep silhouetted on the top of Mount Xhorra is now an archaeological ruin, replaced by the breath-taking Winged Palace with its flying buttresses and gleaming white stone towers, the home of the Ketteringan king Leonidas IV. The stone walls encircling the Old City high on Xhorra’s slopes are a reminder of more barbarous times, but the city has long since burst that seam and spilled down the mountain and into the surrounding plain. The time-worn buildings of the Old City house the poorest of the poor and a criminal element; the city’s working classes live on smallholdings in its southern districts amid the refineries that process the ore shipped from the Brindle Stryd and in the western boroughs, bustling with small businesses and expanding commercial interests. The wealthier residences of Ketteringas’s merchant class sit on the northern slopes of Mount Xhorra, and on both banks of the Ketteringa extending to the north and the south of the city lay the small parks of the landed gentry surrounding large, stately residences. Such aristocratic families typically have large land and commercial holdings in the provinces of the Strytheclid, Hlafward, and Brindle Stryd that are the source of their ancestral wealth.
Windermere House. The residence of the Randall family when in Ketteringas, is relatively recent in architecture (500 years), constructed of warm, weathered red brick and situated on a high bluff to the north of the city, overlooking the Ketteringa.
Marshall-in-the-Fields: A neighboring park and the Ketteringas home of the Haelstroms—along with the Irenii and the Flavellye, a principal line of descent from the Ancient Three—is of even more recent construction, built out of stone and considered by Wini’s father, Lord Henry Randall, to be one of the “most vulgar, most ostentatious houses I have ever set foot in.” The current Lord Haelstrom’s grandfather pulled down the original structure and erected the present building with his initials—RH—carved out of stone and displayed prominently on the four corners of the roof.
Little Eye. The ancestral estate of the Randall family, Little Eye, sits in the foothills of the Lesser Cors, the heart of the Strytheclid to the south and east of Ketteringas. Little Eye is named after a small pond on the estate; an underwater projection of black obsidian in the center of the pond’s floor gives it the uncanny resemblance to an actual eye. Legend claims the pond, although very small in perimeter, is bottomless. It is also the reputed grave of the great Xeiba, a tree worshipped in antiquity by the original inhabitants of Kettering, the Elderstar, a people group who were all but exterminated by the invading Ketteringans and whose descendants survive only in the bloodlines of the Ancient Three and the Randall family. According to ancient records, lightning felled the Xeiba the night before the first wave of the Ketteringan invasion began. A cavern appeared in the ground and swallowed the tree, and the pond Little Eye formed above it.
Garby. The northernmost region of the Strytheclid, an area that features many of the Greater Corrs highest peaks and the source of the Ketteringa. It is an austere, remote landscape of snow-capped mountains, timbered hillsides, and rocky highlands, famous for its gemstones and one of the least populated regions of Kettering, the site of the charred remains of Rainfall, the ancestral home of Wini’s mother, Lady Rowena Flavellus.
Gathersby. A large town at the intersection of the principal crossroads of Kettering south of Ketteringas where the flow of goods and people (including troops) from the country’s three regions meet in their movement to and from the important port of Littlebridge.
Littlebridge. A sprawling, congested mass of warehouses, taverns, brothels, and streets of small market stalls dominated by the merchant class who also typically serve as the stewards of the gentry. To the southwest of Littlebridge, out of view of the mainland, lies an archipelago of small, inhabited islands called the Flown Isles.
Riverview. A small but strategically important military town on the extreme western border of the Hlafward. It overlooks the Gap of Amun where the Poe River, one of the Hlafward’s important rivers, descends from its source high in the Southern Graels to the Ketteringan plain. It guards the most accessible entry into Kettering from the west, a strategic objective of would-be invaders and an ancient migratory route for displaced peoples.
The Grayling—South, West, and North. The area most vulnerable to penetration from the outside and most desirable for settlement, extending from the foothills of the Graels to the heart of the Hlafward centered in the town of Rich Hill.
Leighbourne. Located at the mouth of the Brindle Stryd where it flows into the Ketteringa, is the nerve center of the all-important mining industry. Its skyline is dominated by the billowing smokestacks of refineries, and because of its high elevation, this smoke hangs in the air, blanketing the city. Refineries feature in all the smaller towns that mark the many mining centers of the Brindle Stryd. Little Hay, one of these, lies in the mountains that form the regional border between the Brindle Stryd and the Hlafward where the Gap of Camber is the chief cross country access between them.
Chapter One The Watcher on the Hill Kettering was a small country with big secrets. Wini heard the mutterings in the old oak’s leaves above her, sensed the restlessness when a stray breeze lifted a curl from the nape of her neck, shivered with alarm at the cries of starlings rising in one large murmuration from the trees below. She sat small and still on the hard, cold ground, her back against the oak’s trunk, watching the black cloud of wings as they spun upwards and swooped down again—a swirling, shimmering mist prematurely darkening the sky’s slow fade into night. In the river valley below, where the glistening Ketteringa snaked southward from the Greater Corr Mountains to the sea, shadows gathered into dark shapes beneath the forest’s canopy. Something stirred among them, stirred the starlings, stirred on the borders of Wini’s consciousness. She stared hard at the shapes in the trees. Now and again, she thought she saw a white hooded figure slip between the trunks. Some sixth sense told her they carried the ancient secrets. It was almost, she told herself, as if they were depositing them in the trees. She shivered as the cold and damp of an early spring evening began settling over the hill and pulled the collar of her jacket tightly around her neck. Her father promised he would catch her up. Her resentment toward the stranger who had caused him to dismount his horse and return to the house increased with every minute of his delay. Soon the press of evening would force her return to Windermere House. They had not shared an afternoon ride for many months, and now, instead of her father, Lord Randall, it was the old groom Baxter who kept her company, watching from a respectful distance to her left, holding the reins of her mare Mya in one hand and those of his mount in the other. Her father’s leg had been halfway over his saddle when shouts and the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels in the courtyard stopped him. A green landau pulled by four white horses, gilded in gold and bearing the royal arms on its sides, drew his attention from his horse to the heavyset young man in its back seat. Lord Randall sighed and swung his right foot back to the ground. “Don’t move, Wini. I’ll be right back,” he ordered and turned to meet an approaching footman. Wini watched curiously as her father accompanied the footman back to the carriage. Lord Randall nodded curtly at the young man seated there, who did not return the gesture but stretched a huge arm languidly along the top of the carriage door and studied his massive fingers, one by one, as he talked. Her father half-turned, motioning toward her. The man shrugged and nodded at a woman next to him. Lord Randall hesitated. The man raised his hand from the carriage door and drew tiny circles in the air with his index finger, a fountain of fine white lace cascading from the cuffs of his shirt and swirling in soft folds about his wrist. Then he returned his hand to the top of the carriage door and grew silent. Lord Randall retraced his steps to his daughter’s side, scowling. “Damn!” He rested a hand on Wini’s knee and eyed her speculatively, perched astride Mya and staring down at him. “Today of all days, when I need time with you. We must talk, Wini. It’s urgent. I’ve put this thing off far too long.” He was as taut as a bow, bent to its breaking point. Wini felt his frustration and impatience. They were too much alike for her not to be aware of such things, but the knowledge disturbed her. What had the strange man said to upset him so? She lay her hand lightly over his. “I’ll wait for you, Daddy.” “No.” He shook his head and signaled the old groom. “You go ahead. I’ll have Baxter accompany you, and as soon as I’m rid of Simonides, I’ll catch you up. Wait for me under the old oak.” The footman had helped the couple out of the landau. Wini studied them as her father returned to their side and ushered them to the house. The woman, clothed in flowing blue silk and a flamboyant blue hat with a flat, wide brim, appeared much older than the man at first glance, but she carried a parasol that partially shaded her face and Wini could not be sure of her age. She did not really care. The woman was of little interest. Wini’s attention was riveted on the man beside her. He was thick-muscled and barrel-chested, a massive figure next to Lord Randall. Though not much taller than Wini’s father, he seemed to hover over him, risen like a mountain from the ground on which he stood, possessing, not inhabiting, the space around him, the embodiment and personhood of the primordial elements of the universe—immovable as earth, necessary as air, consuming as fire. The upper arms of his brocaded tailcoat threatened to burst their seams and his breeches clung to him like a second skin, drawing Wini’s attention to the curves of his enormous thighs and calves with a prickle of fear. He turned as he mounted the steps to Windermere House and noticed her. For one terrible moment their eyes locked. Wini felt engulfed in wells of darkness; they swept her into their possession and then, as quickly as they had taken her in, they cast her out again. She did not realize she had been holding her breath until he turned back to the house and she exhaled. “Who was that man?” she asked Baxter as they picked their way along the hillside, headed in the general direction of the gnarled oak. “His name’s Simonides Halford,” Baxter replied. “Though there’s them who calls him by other names, none fit fer yer hearing.” Wini tightened her grip on Mya’s reins. “Simonides Halford,” she murmured. “Well, I don’t trust him.” “You’d be wise not ter, miss. There’s few that do.” “What does he want with my father?” Baxter shrugged. “What does anyone want with the great Eye of the King? There’s fightin’ in the Grayling. He’s an officer. Most likely it’s something ter do with that.” Wini’s eyes widened. “He wasn’t in uniform.” “No,” Baxter agreed. “Maybe callin’ him an officer is more a kind of courtesy. No one trusts him with the real power.” “Why don’t people trust him?” Baxter slowed his mount and faced her sideways. “Because he’s the half-brother of the king.” “The king doesn’t have any brothers. He only has two sisters. Everyone knows that. Cook says when he dies, there’s going to be trouble in Kettering because of it.” “Cook talks too much.” Baxter eyed her in silence. They had come to a full stop and sat facing each other in their saddles. “Simonides don’t have the same mother as the king,” he explained reluctantly. “I said half-brother. If you want ter know more than that, yer’ll have ter ask yer father. I ain’t explainin’ it, miss.” He pressed his horse into a walk. Wini sat and stared after him with a puzzled look. He was fifty feet ahead of her when she kicked Mya in the ribs and bounded to his side. “Was that his mother with him?” Baxter snorted. “She’s old enough ter be. Yer’ll have ter ask yer father about that one, too, Miss Winifred. I can tell you she’s the Countess Nicholai, but more than that is not fer me ter say. Who knows what attracts a man ter a woman? I ain’t never understood it myself. I ain’t never been married.” A sudden look of self-consciousness infused the weathered old eyes and he looked away. Wini saw his neck redden. When she tried to resume the conversation later, he refused to oblige her but kept his gaze trained on the path ahead. They rode the rest of the way to the old oak in silence. Now as she sat in the chill of the early spring, staring at phantoms in the woods below, Wini wondered afresh at the old groom’s embarrassment. Unbidden memories stirred her mind, snatches of overheard conversations between servants about her father and the beautiful Lady Diana, his long absences, her mother’s self-inflicted banishment to her room. She knew well what changes her brother’s death had left in its wake. Two years were almost a lifetime for a girl of eight-going-on-nine, but she remembered in sharp relief the days of picnics and laughter, of her father’s head in her mother’s lap as they rested beneath the shade of a tree while Wini hunted wildflowers in the wood. Every now and then she would catch them kissing, her father winding his arms around her mother’s neck and pulling her head down to search her lips with his. Wini would blush, half-hidden among the trees, fingers squeezing the stems of her flowers so tightly they withered in her hand, knowing she was trespassing on their privacy but washed anyway with a delicious feeling of well-being. Her world then had been firm and unchanging, her happiness secure in the obvious happiness of her parents. Then Diamon drowned in the pool at Little Eye, and her life had spun topsy-turvy upside down. Her parents left the Randall’s country seat and returned to Windermere House in Ketteringas, Kettering’s capital city. Marma grew sick, hiding in her room under her maid Matilda’s watchful care, and the whisperings about Lady Diana began among the servants. Only Aunt Greta had not changed—Aunt Greta, tall and straight and stern and unbending, prematurely gray, her skin lighter than her brother’s but darker than Wini’s, her eyes the same gray as her niece’s but always expressionless, windows whose blinds were permanently closed. Wini sighed. Clouds were gathering in the east, and the wind was rising. The peculiar scent of air before a rain filled her nostrils. It was apparent her father was not coming. Simonides Halford had spoiled her day. She stood and brushed the leaves from her coat and turned to wave for Mya, but Baxter did not see her. His eyes were fixed on a silhouette topping the crest of the hill above them. Wini recognized the outline of her father on his chestnut gelding Knight.