The Iron Witch

by Karen Mahoney

  So, I’m grounded until the hearing. I spend all my time reading and re-reading emails from Xan, since they’ve confiscated my cell phone. He keeps me going, and he signs every letter with a kiss.

  Acknowledgments

  First of all, there would be no published book if it wasn’t for my incredible agent, Miriam Kriss. You’re the glue that holds my career (and sanity!) together—thank you for everything. My thanks also go to Heather Baror Shapiro for being The Iron Witch’s champion overseas.

  Thank you to all of my wonderful publishers and editors. In the U.S.: Brian Farrey for giving new writers a chance and for helping to make this book so much better; Lisa Novak for the amazing cover, which I loved from the very first moment; Sandy Sullivan for her keen eye and sound judgment; Marissa Pederson and all the hardworking booklovers at Flux. Thanks so much to everyone at Random House Children’s Books in the U.K. for giving me such a tremendous opportunity. In particular, I am grateful to Annie Eaton, Clare Argar, Lauren Bennett, Jessica Clarke, Emily van Hest, and Trish De Souza. Thanks also to the super-cool Adiba Oemar at Random House Children’s Books in Australia, as well as the whole team at RHCB “Down Under.”

  To the Deadline Dames, I still find it hard to believe I’m part of such an amazing group of authors. Thanks to each of you: Devon, Jackie, Jenna, Keri, Lili, Rachel, Rinda, and Toni. Dames rock!

  Thank you to my writing BFFs who have been there since Day One: Brian Kell, Chandra Rooney, Tricia Sullivan, and Reneé Sweet. Not only do you keep me going through the tough times and celebrate the good stuff with me, you have each helped me to become a better writer.

  Thanks to ALL of my LiveJournal friends, as well as to the wider online world I’m proud to be a part of. In particular I must thank Ana Grilo, Liz and Mark de Jager, Stacia Kane, Caitlin Kittredge, Tessa Gratton, Richelle Mead, Tiffany Trent, and Ariana Valderrama. Thank you to Trisha Telep for believing in my work early on and encouraging my addiction to coffee. I am especially grateful to Rhona Westbrook and Maria Signorelli, whose early critiques undoubtedly improved The Iron Witch.

  My thanks to Midori Snyder for writing the essay about the “Armless Maiden” tales that provided the initial spark for Donna’s story.

  To Jonathan Carroll: your words inspired me way back when I was “sweet sixteen” just as they do today, so many years later.

  Last, but by no means least, thank you to my family and all of my Real Life friends, who have helped shape the person I’ve become. And especially to Maralyn Mahoney (my lovely mum) and Vijay Rana (my very own Navin): you have supported my dreams and pushed me to tell my stories. I can’t thank you enough.

  The Girl with Silver Hands:

  The Making of The Iron Witch

  by Karen Mahoney

  The Iron Witch is the result of almost four years’ dreaming, researching, and writing. If there were a recipe—or indeed a spell—that I could offer you that would reproduce the final work, it would involve a huge list of ingredients, along with a complex method and an invocation. Even before the long path to publication, there was always a central idea: a girl with silver hands, the friend she loves and is forced to save (loosely based on my own Real Life best friend), and a life of dark secrets that she wants to escape from.

  Okay, so that’s three ideas …

  In 2007, I read a beautiful essay by fantasy author and folklore expert Midori Snyder, called “The Armless Maiden and the Hero’s Journey” (reprinted in the online Journal of Mythic Arts, Winter 2006). This piece inspired me like nothing else had in years, and I immediately started trying to re-imagine how a YA urban fantasy novel might incorporate the powerful themes of the Armless Maiden narratives from around the world. There are many versions of the tale, and I am by no means an authority—but I did spend a lot of time tracking down obscure references and reading translations of the different stories, and I hope to touch on some of that in this essay.

  Even though they all tell a similar story, there are a wide range of titles given to the tales: “The Armless Maiden,” “The Handless Maiden,” “The Girl/Woman/Maiden Without Hands,” “Doña Bernarda, “Rising Water, Talking Bird and Weeping Tree,” “Olive,” “The Girl with Silver Hands,” and many more. The stories share many common elements, including the loss of hands or arms for the girl or woman—in violent circumstances—and the eventual “re-growth” of the limbs as she slowly regains her power and independence. In most versions, there is a halfway point in the story where the maiden meets a prince or a king who falls in love with her despite her disability, ordering a member of his royal court—sometimes a magician—to build a replacement pair of hands for his new bride. These magical hands and arms are usually made of silver.

  Although there is much to discuss about the depth and hidden layers of meaning within the Handless Maiden stories, it was this striking visual element that fired my imagination when I first read about it. I wondered how I could create a modern-day heroine with “silver hands” and the power to transform her own life. How could I make that fit in with a contemporary or urban setting? When I hit upon the notion of having my protagonist’s hands and arms coated with silver tattoos that, when looked at quickly, might make it look as though her hands were made of solid metal, I knew I was onto something. And when I made the leap to realizing that Donna’s tattoos should be made of iron rather than silver, I found the crucial link between the alchemists and the faeries.

  Speaking of the fey…they first made an appearance in one of the crazy dreams I had during an intense two-week period when ideas just wouldn’t stop coming. One of those dreams showed me a young girl—still just a child—running barefoot through a wintering forest, pursued by a pack of screaming monsters. Those monsters became the wood elves of The Iron Witch, and the creature that almost mortally wounded Donna became the Skriker (the “Wood Monster” in her imagination), one of the legendary Black Dogs of English folklore.

  Yes, I admit, I’m guilty of mixing my lore—but I believe if you dare to do so consciously, and you come up with some reasonable justifications for the liberties you take, then you’re kind of okay. Mostly. You also might have noticed that part of The Iron Witch was born out of a DREAM. We will not mention anything more about that, suffice it to say that I can only hope my “dream book” is even a thousandth as successful as a Certain Other Paranormal Book Inspired by a Dream.

  In many versions of the traditional Armless Maiden stories, the girl is a victim of her own family. Sometimes this is due to an outright betrayal, but it can also be caused by a tragic mistake in which the father or brother is tricked by an evil force (often the Devil) into sacrificing the maiden’s hands. In the interpretation I chose to use, we see that Donna’s loss comes as an indirect result of her family’s lifelong affiliation with the alchemists. If she were not a daughter of the Order, it seems unlikely that she would ever have been attacked by the fey in the first place. Of course, we don’t yet know why that happened…though I promise you’ll find out in the next book. (Not that I’m plugging the sequel. *cough*)

  I think that Donna Underwood’s story (and it’s no coincidence that I named her “Underwood,” by the way, with its obvious woodland connotations and subtle play on the word “Underworld”) is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who must grow from childhood to adulthood far too quickly. Yes, she has experienced tragedy, but she doesn’t wallow in it. She is proactive and wants to change her life: transformation, as she tells Navin, is important to the alchemists.

  That theme of transformation is as important to my own “Girl with Silver Hands” story as it is in the folklore I researched. The Handless Maiden is often seen as an outsider—something that Donna truly understands at the start of the book. She has felt like a “freak” for the last ten years of her life, and must learn to look upon her iron tattoos as a gift if she is ever truly to gain the freedom she so desperately desires.

  This theme is taken up in what is perhaps my favorite retelling of the tale, the one recounted by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Es
tés in her seminal work, Women Who Run With the Wolves. Dr. Estés explains that “The Handless Maiden” tale is truly that of the heroine’s “Test of Endurance.” There’s a line in her wonderfully Jungian interpretation that resonates with me and feels very true for The Iron Witch:

  “The story pulls us into a world that lies far below the roots of trees.”

  I didn’t read Dr. Estés’ book until long after I’d written the first draft of my novel, but now that I can carefully examine her version of “The Handless Maiden”—and the many-layered interpretation of the tale that she offers—I see so many parallels. I don’t mean in terms of the events, because those are very different. But Estés equates the tale with a sort of shamanic journey, including the requisite descent into the underworld and the physical transformation of the heroine. Sacrifice is a central theme—and it’s a big theme I plucked out of that mystical melting pot of universal archetypes we writers tune in to from time to time.

  Okay, that’s enough New Age or “woo woo” references for now. The next ingredient that went into my cauldron when I was first stirring up the idea for The Iron Witch was alchemy. I’ve been fascinated by the idea of alchemists for many years, and started seriously researching it about six years ago. I used to work in an occult bookstore and had easy access to some wonderful resources, including antiquarian texts not readily available elsewhere. I’ve always loved that the historical alchemists seem to have taken themselves so seriously. And it’s interesting that many of them operated in secret, afraid of the ridicule that would befall them if it was known how they liked to dabble in one of the more mystical branches of esoteric study.

  Alchemy is an ancient art—centuries old—and there have been branches of it all over the world. There are some pretty far-out theories as to how the alchemists came upon their information, encompassing everything from demons to Egyptian gods to channelled angels and even alien technology. It’s hard to believe that alchemy was actually a precursor to today’s study of chemistry, but there was a lot of method, ritual, and painstaking note-taking involved in their pseudo-scientific experiments, even back in the sixteenth century. I tried to get a flavor of that into The Iron Witch, but it would’ve been easy to overdo it and I had to be careful (there’s just way too much fascinating source material). Also, I really wanted to make the subject my own, for my book, so I created my four alchemical Orders from scratch. I had a great deal of fun doing that.

  All right, then. So far we have the Handless Maiden, wood elves, and the alchemists. The final major ingredient of my story came from a sudden flash of inspiration, the kind that usually hits writers at the worst possible time and has us scrambling for a notebook—or a handy receipt—anything just so long as we get it written down before we forget it! This insight came to me as an image, basically, and whenever that happens I make sure to take it seriously, since I’m not usually that artistic in the visual sense.

  I pictured a teenage boy—or perhaps a young man—with dark blond hair covering his face, sitting bent over and quietly weeping. He was strong and determined, I knew that much, and yet he still couldn’t stop the tears from falling (though perhaps that was part of his strength). He had been physically mutilated, and as a result he’d lost something he felt he couldn’t live without.

  Cheery, huh? My brain is a very strange place to hang out—I don’t recommend it.

  Obviously, this lonely guy with secrets of his own became Xan, and from very early on, I knew almost as much about him as I did about Donna. Alexander Grayson had a lot to tell me, so I made sure to listen and take notes.

  Once I had these major building blocks in place—the folklore, the magic, and the love interest—I merely had to add them to Donna and Navin’s friendship, and to the constant battle Donna fights to fit into Nav’s “normal” world, and I was all set to cause some chaos in my characters’ lives (picture me rubbing my hands together in Authorly Anticipation).

  I hope you’ve enjoyed visiting the world of Ironbridge in my story, and that you’ll come back again soon. There are a lot more secrets to uncover—and it wouldn’t be any fun if I couldn’t share it with you. Thanks for reading!

  Karen Mahoney

  London, 2011

  © Vijay Rana

  About the Author

  Karen Mahoney has been a professional Tarot reader, a college counselor, a dating agency consultant, a bookseller, and a webmistress. Ever since she was six years old, what she really wanted to be was Wonder Woman, but she settled instead for being a writer—the best job of all. Karen (or Kaz, as many of her friends call her) has been published alongside some of her favorite authors in anthologies like The Eternal Kiss and Kiss Me Deadly (both by Running Press). She is British, but hopes you don’t hold this against her. Visit her online at www.kazmahoney.com.

  Donna Underwood’s adventures continue

  in Book II of The Iron Witch Saga,

  coming February 2012.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Contents

  Tattoo_Page

  Title_Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Journal_Entry_1

  One

  Two

  Journal_Entry_2

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Journal_Entry_3

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Journal_Entry_4

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Journal_Entry_5

  Acknowledgments

  The_Making_of_the_Iron_Witch

  About_the_Author

  Tattoo_Page_2