“A warrior fighting for her sister’s freedom must choose between saving her sister or their tribe when the chief’s betrayal runs deeper than she imagined.”
As you can tell from reading almost any post in this blog, Fie Eoin is my baby. I started working on it during the summer of 2002 while I was bored in a work meeting. I had been reading about the Ottawa Indians and how they would torture the victims they captured from other tribes, and the meeting was so boring I thought I would rather be tortured too. At which point I had a vision of a woman being whipped against a rock. I didn’t know who she was or why she was being whipped, but I was interested enough to learn more. And so, on the hour long drives to and from work I watched as Fie Eoin’s storyline played out in my head. I have learned a lot about Fie Eoin since that first summer (in fact, some people who read the first draft would barely recognize Fie Eoin now!) and I’m still learning about it, as evidenced by all of the recent sticky notes for Fie Eoin.
Fie Eoin is a story about twin girls who are trying to find their place in the world. Kindra in Fie Eoin as the first woman warrior, and Kaye in Gaerlom and Aleda as a failed priestess. At the beginning of the book they each think they know who they are and where they fit in with their world, but things happen very quickly to put them in doubt and scare them from discovering the truth about themselves. And that is really what it’s all about – overcoming fear and becoming who you are meant to be.
Of course, the plot is a little more interesting than that. There are enemies to fight, friends to gain, love to make and lose. There are secrets and betrayals and death and pain. There’s a wedding interrupted by vengeance. Actually, there’s two weddings interrupted by vengeance. And there are demon horses and the fairy-like Faye. Kindra and Kaye keep getting pushed together and pulled apart, and it’s difficult for either of them to learn anything during all this hubbub, which is what makes it fun!
Fie Eoin is also the first book in what I envision to be a series with about 4 or 5 books. Pike’s Revenge, the second in series, was my NaNo 2007 project and currently only half-written (I stopped because I kept changing FE, which would then change PR). PR focuses on Kindra’s daughter, Karigan, and Pike’s son, Barracuda. There is a possible third book about Karigan, although I’m not sure if it’s fair to give her two books and her mother only one. And somewhere down the line will be a book about Karigan’s twin sons (Karigan has a twin brother, as well, so the books would be twin girls, twin brother and sister, and twin boys). The series would be rounded about by a book that takes place well in the past with Ian Odion, the founder of Fie Eoin and ancestor of Kindra and Kaye (and Karigan and her boys). Ian was known in his lifetime as “Ian the Twin” because of his two-faced nature, thus rounding out the twin theme in the series.