Seeking Magic in Wild Spaces for A Treason of Magic 

By Melissa Marr

Twenty years ago, when I sold my very first novel, Wicked Lovely, I made three decisions—go to Ireland, go to Scotland, and start college funds for my then 12- and 7-year-old kids. I’m sure I did practical things, too, but knowledge and wild landscape were my focus. Since then, I’ve written a lot of things, and I’ve meandered a fair bit–in the Yukon Territory, rural Czech Republic, the width of France, the length of Alaska, deserts, coasts, and abandoned places. 

In those two decades, I’ve also been back to Scotland repeatedly. I plan to go elsewhere, but Scotland tugs me like a magnet in my belly. Maybe there is something to the idea that our ancestors still whisper in our bones long after they are consigned to the soil. Almost all the branches of my family immigrated from Irish or Scottish soil and settled in Pennsylvania’s very similar landscape. 

Maybe the feeling of “home” is familiar landscapes.

Or maybe it was a childhood of hearing folklore spoken as if it were fact.

Either way, for A Treason of Magic (and its upcoming companion, A Treachery of Curses), I turned to the same two inspirations as when I wrote my very first novel in 2005: Scotland and folklore. Each chapter starts with a quote from folklore texts.

And I started writing the action of this book in the setting that I know best, the wild woods and the possibilities that something Other lurks there. In real life in my Pennsylvania mountain childhood, that something was a squirrel, a bear, and a few times, a mountain lion. I will admit that I like knowing that the bigger mammals aren’t going to surprise me in Scotland! My sojourns into wild spaces here in the States occasionally include a flutter of panic when I am facing a bear or rattlesnake or coyote. In Scotland, I get all the magic of the wild without the “now what do I do with this animal.” 

However, in A Treason of Magic, I use that feeling as “what do I do with this folkloric creature?” It’s an easy step from real world to fantasy. And in a book about a “creature hunter,” that is a useful mindset to embrace. 

Still, I wanted to immerse in magic, so I bundled my wife, my daughter (now a PhD in archaeology), and my youngest son (13) off on a roadtrip across Scotland and England. Adding England to my travels was new for me, but I was a lit major, enchanted by Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights and Jude the Obscure, so finding the “moody” landscape in England, too, felt like an appropriate addition. We spent weeks trekking wet trails and narrow roads in Scotland and England, mostly steering clear of cities. 

Admittedly, my son asked why “there are no cities here,” so we paused at the British National History Museum, as well as Edinburgh Castle, to prove that there were amazing cultural resources too. Still, aside from a few museum stops, we did as I usually do—we wandered through the Highlands and Islands. We missed Orkney this time. (I tend to hop between Orcadian and Hebridean islands when in Scotland.) Then we headed toward England’s moorland. Along our roaming, we stayed in a property owned once by Lord Byron and spent time strolling along a cold coast in Skye which became the map for where I placed the Maudite Castle in my fantasy world. The queen’s palace in my fantasy city is probably the Natural History Museum if I had to tether it to a physical space. 

Random stops at crumbling ruins and meandering through the moors near England’s Haworth added emphasis to the landscape already on the page. 

The landscape, the magic of it all, is something I believe I’ve been chasing my whole life in arts, nature, and story. The difference, of course, in writing it in A Treason of Magic was that I am trying to invite readers to come along on my ramble. I want to convince them of the magic, and there was no better way to do that than chase that magical feeling with two of my kids and my wife next to me. 

One of my moments is here, in the book, when the characters are seeking the culprit:

The silence of the birds and squirrels creates the illusion that nature is awaiting the answer to the same question. But I still have no answer. The bloodless body and decapitation match nothing in the Hunter journals. I can eliminate a few things. It’s not a cù sìth. The massive doglike beasts are messy eaters. When they eat, the ground is covered with shards of the bones of the dead. White splinters that look like uneven birch branches spot the loam and leaf as if beckoning attention, as if they mark the land as theirs by way of teeth.

If there are magical creatures in our world, I think they must linger in English moors or Scottish highlands, and to write such fantastical beings, I went where they could be in order to remind myself of that magic.  I hope it sparks a sliver of that same wonder for readers. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Melissa Marr is the New York Times bestselling author of the Wicked Lovely series, among many other novels, short stories, and fiction for teens and children. Her books have been translated into twenty-eight languages and have been bestsellers in the US and abroad. If she’s not writing, you can find Melissa in a kayak or on a trail with her wife. For more information, visit www.melissamarrbooks.com.

A TREASON OF MAGIC

In a world where magic, desire, and duty collide, it is beauty who is fated to kill the beast in a lush historical fantasy of secrets and star-crossed love by New York Times bestselling author Melissa Marr.

Two young women. Heirs to altogether different hereditary burdens. Yet bound by a monstrous threat to their village.

Gabrielle is the first woman in Alveus to carry the mantle of Hunter, which comes with an obligation to kill the faery beasts murdering travelers in Brimmond Wood. Wary of the power she wields as guardian of her people, Gabrielle is summoned by her first love, a seductress who shattered her heart into pieces a decade ago.

Isabeau is the rarest of nobility―a lady duke. She is also afflicted by a curse that leaves her in a deep sleep between the gloaming and daylight. How can she begin her tenure as protector when she can’t keep her village safe from whatever stalks its darkest hours? For that, she needs the help of the Hunter.

Against her will, Gabrielle is falling in love all over again. But what new threats will arise when Gabrielle and Isabeau’s star-crossed destinies collide with the beast of Brimmond Wood?

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Category: On Writing