Interviews with the characters we all love with a little help from the authors that wrote them.
In this case, the legendary Anna Smith-Spark!
Lidae, a woman of the sword and a mother to two young sons.
She is me. I am her.
Oh, no, wait, wrong kind of links:
Twitter: @queenofgrimdark
Facebook, Instagram: Anna Smith Spark
Website www.courtofbrokenknives.com
A Woman of the Sword.
The Empires of Dust series The Court of Broken Knives, The Tower of Living and Dying and The House of Sacrifice aren’t about me, but are about the world that made me.
A Sword of Bronze and Ashes is about the person I wish I could be.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AAnna+Smith+Spark
To be myself, be fulfilled.
For my children to be happy.
Walking through the fields in the spring dawn to go bird hunting in the high hills, the night’s rain coming rushing down from the highest peaks in streams cold as moonlight, the turf wet under my feet. Above, on the high crags, the snow still lingers, the sheer slopes are greying broken ice. Sea eagles fly there, their feathers and their talons and their beaks are made of grey iron, they are so huge they can carry off a full-grown man. A great sudden rush of starlings, lacing the sky; a curlew, soft white and brown as eggshell, calling with joyous yearning; a tern, calling in a clink of smooth dry round pebbles. From the heights you can see the rooftops of my village, Salith Drylth, and the village beyond it, Baerryn Geiamnei, ‘Burned Field’, where the plough sometimes turns up burned earth and human bones, and beyond that again the new stone walls of the town of Karke in the distance, and beyond even that, the northern sea.
Standing there on the high hillside looking out at the town and the sea beyond that runs away north until the word ends, sea wind in my hair – I can be alone and at peace.
My sword with the red glass in the hilt. The only sword I’ve ever wielded in battle. A demon king had a sword like my sword, once, they say, and he used it to kill everything that lived.
Once, in thick snowfall, struggling in the battle lines, I saw two dragons fighting.
Hunger. Poverty. Fear. Weakness.
Shame. Guilt.
Our house was one room with a courtyard outside that was filled with rubbish, when it rained all the sewage in the street ran in under the door. My sister married a drunkard thirty years older than her, because he had a house and a garden with an almond tree. My father worked sweeping shit from the street. My mother worked washing pots in an inn.
You think you can judge me? Check your privileges.
In the high hills hunting the wild birds.
Watching dragons fight in the snow.
At home with my children.
Who gets to choose anything?
A woman I greatly admire once told me something another woman had told her: “You just do what you can to raise your children as well as you can manage. That’s all you can do. It’s thankless and endless and…a lot of the time it feels bloody hopeless, I’m telling you now, it does.”
If things had been different. If.
But I am so damned good at some things.