|
A word from the author, Ana Jorges
This story was begun many years ago, while I was living in Denver, working at a job I rather liked, but for people I rather feared. That was a really difficult time, and I kept daydreaming of a kinder world. But I couldn't imagine how that could happen. What would it take to transcend our loneliness and our fears? How could we ease that burden of love we all carry with us — the unanswerable love we can't seem to give away . . . because nobody seems to want it. The only way it would work would be to see the truth that lies in another person's heart. What a fantasy!
But what a theme for a fantasy novel.
I was no writer, and the idea would not come. But then I had a sort of waking dream about a young man, a bakersboy, walking in the forest. He sees a falcon trapped in a holly bush, struggling to free itself. Its long jesses, the bindings of its slavery, had tangled in the branches. It had worn itself out, and its feathers were broken in the struggle, but its heart was still beating, so the bakersboy took it out from among the leaves and set it free. And it flew away. For a long time, that was all I knew, except that the falcon was, somehow, really a woman. As I said, I was not really a writer, but I wanted — I really wanted — to know what happened next. So now, long years later, and after literally thousands of revisions and re-editings . . . this is what came out of that dream. It's not the whole story, of course. Or even a true story, of course. And it's certainly not the all I dreamed about then, but it's been decades in the writing. So — what happened next was . . .
|
BookStore