Author's Note

"Where do you get your ideas?" is the question people always ask a writer. In the larger sense, we see story ideas everywhere we look, or we wouldn't be writers. That's just how our minds work.

In the specific sense, though, In Legend Born grew out of the fascination with Sicilian history which I developed when I lived for a year in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, Italy's largest province. 

One of the famous historical figures who particularly intrigued me was Salvatore Giuliano, the bandit king of the western mountains who became a freedom fighter and ardent separatist. Giuliano was active 1943-1950, a very tumultuous period in Sicily's tempestuous history. Corruption and mystery still surround Giuliano's brutal death, just as romance and controversy still surround his violent life. 

For various reasons, I didn't want to write a novel about him (mostly, I just didn't see a way to make it work well). Instead, I decided to take some of the elements of Giuliano's story which most intrigued me and use them as the starting place for a fantasy novel... And thus Josarian and Sileria came into being. Josarian is very different from Giuliano, and this is certainly not Giuliano's life—but there are elements of his legend in this story.

And speaking of where we get our ideas... When I was a kid, I fell in love with a crumbling edition of India's Love Lyrics by Laurence Hope, a Victorian/Edwardian poet. It was full of ardent, bloody, and voluptuous poems about exotic far-away lands. One of my favorites was a dark, tormented lament called "This Month the Almonds Bloom at Kandahar." The poem stayed in my head for years—particularly that lyrical, evocative place-name: Kandahar. 

Years later, when I decided to use "Kandahar" in In Legend Born, I assumed most readers probably didn't even know there was a town in Afghanistan of the same name. No problem. 

However, the world changed a great deal after that, and we were soon regularly reading war news from Afghanistan, including many mentions of the real-life Kandahar. But by then, In Legend Born was already in bookstores, and it was much too late for me to change my mind. Which is why Kiloran's lair is named after a city you saw in the news for several years.

Meanwhile, as mentioned in the foreword, the two maps which Elizabeth Person drew for this book are posted on my website at LauraResnick.com. There's also a cool extra feature there: 

As you may have noticed, the graceful border of the map of Sileria is drawn as a jashar—woven and knotted strands of rope, dotted with beads. Elizabeth actually created a code, and then she used it to include a message in the jashar—exactly as the characters in this book do. The key to the code is on my website, and you can use it to interpret the message in the jashar that borders the map.

Additionally, in the map of Sirkara, which shows the mainland empires that surround Sileria and the Middle Sea, if you take a good look at Valda, you'll notice that it's represented by the Sign of the Three. This was Elizabeth's invention, and a great surprise for me, since—as I admitted to her then—despite having written the phrase many times, I never had any idea what the Sign of the Three looked like. (Hey, I'm a writer. Text is my thing, not abstract symbols.) So now I know! And so do you.

I hope you enjoyed In Legend Born. Sileria's tumultuous story continues in The White Dragon and concludes in The Destroyer Goddess, both of which are also available as ebooks.

—Laura Resnick