Rosemary Sutcliff, who wrote historical fiction, much of it set in the late Roman empire or in Britain after Rome had abandoned the province, and Mary Stewart, whose Merlin trilogy is a modern take on the “historical” * stream of “the Matter of Britain” i.e. the Arthurian cycle, were among the authors I read and reread, growing up. Their novels were, and remain, excellent, beautifully-written stories, with a depth and complexity that mean I still read them and fall just as completely into the unfolding tale today as I did when I was fourteen. One aspect of both those writers that has travelled into my own work is the idea of setting as not merely a geography, but a history. That edgeland of place and time between the (western) Roman Empire and the Middle Ages provided a fascinating mood by which a story could be shaped. There was memory of the past everywhere, it seemed, in the world inhabited by Sutcliff’s Aquila, the Romano-British decurion who deserts in order to stay in his own land when the last of the legions sail away and ends up enslaved by Jutish raiders, and by his descendant Owain, who with Regina and Dog wanders from the ruins of Viroconium through lands seized by Saxon tribes (in The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind respectively), before, after enduring much hardship, slavery, and a long separation, they find a place they can make a home. In The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills, Stewart’s Merlin, prince and prophet, travels not only around the British Isles and to Brittany, but as far afield as Rome and Constantinople, through a world still unified by the Latin language among the educated. The lands of the north-west of the empire in both Sutcliff and Stewart are alive for their characters with physical reminders of the past, roads overgrown, abandoned manors, forts claimed for others to hold, ruins repurposed, and in the culture too, memories of conflicting pasts, and past and current religions and traditions, are shown overlapping and growing into something new. The very language holds these layers of time in Merlin’s narrative, a palimpsest of tongues revealed as he tells his story, even in his name itself, Merlinus Ambrosius, Myrddin Emrys, Merlin, a child from Maridunum that he says was even then called Caer-Myrddin, and thus not named for him but for his namesake British god of the hill. This was the mood of a place in time that I wanted to lie under the travels of Hedge and Pony, the sort of world I wanted to evoke.

That the world of Hedge and Pony was a post-imperial world was part of my conception from the beginning. A couple of centuries before Breath and Bone, there was a great continent-spanning empire, centred on the city of Ghedhaynor. It had been founded by colonists from another world, or another plane of the world – even the magi, themselves of the conquering vhalgod people, don’t really know, and some of them are veterans of what is called the Crossing. Many of these invaders perished or went mad during this Crossing, but the survivors conquered, led by the warrior Eksandron, who made himself emperor over much of the human-inhabited world. Eksandron was an exile, even the vhalgod’s own legends admit, though the stories of why he was banished from the vhalgod homeland are so varied as to baffle the most dedicated of historians. The vhalgods are, if not entirely immortal, close enough. They age very slowly once they reach full adulthood, and it takes a lot to kill one, which isn’t to say that the humans of the conquered lands didn’t give it a good go. That story of conquest, and eventually, of the revolt of the conquered, humans and gods of the land alike, and of civil war among the vhalgods, would – maybe someday will – make for an epic fantasy or two, but it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell or the world I wanted to live in just now. I’ve written epic, told the stories of gods and continent- and centuries-spanning wars and the machinations of wizards, demons, and deities, the upheavals of peoples, the revolutions of new faiths, and I’ve written high fantasy, which, though I was telling a story confined to one land and only a few characters, nevertheless centred on upheaval, change, suffering and passion (in the older sense of the word: strong emotions of anger as well as love, intensity of feeling, suffering), and ultimately the renewal of the world the characters inhabited. In Breath and Bone, I wanted a change of pace, to tell the story of a single adventure, focused not on changing the world, but on changing a few lives. I wanted characters who had already lived through their terrible times and perilous adventures, had their wild passions, and settled into maturity and wisdom. (Hedge might sometimes question the wisdom, where Pony is concerned.) Hedge and Pony have lived epic. They’ve brought down the emperor and been instrumental in the destruction of the empire. Being somewhat immortal – Pony is a wild godling, a small god of the land, and Hedge a vhalgod warrior – they have had time to watch the world begin to recover from that destruction. They may claim they just want a quiet life together, but when someone comes looking for their help, they seem eager-enough to set out adventuring again. Pony’s world was always meant to have a definite post-Roman feel; their quest to rescue Arrany’s brother gives Hedge and Pony a chance to explore the new culture that is growing from the chaos and ruin for which they were, in part, responsible.

However, writing in a secondary world frees one from the patterns of the past. In both Sutcliff and Stewart, there is an elegiac air evoked by the characters’ encounters with the physical reminders of history, the sense, particularly in Sutcliff, that much that was good has been lost, and that a long night may be falling. Breath and Bone is a hopeful story, even though for Hedge and Pony the past, with their personal histories of suffering and loss, casts long shadows. There is no “Migration Era” factoring into the fall of the empire; there are no barbarian invaders sweeping in from east and north to change and be changed by the land, no longships – much as I enjoy that sort of setting! Instead, I sent them travelling through a post-imperial world hopeful and healing. Humans are again masters of their own fate with no great empire over them, only a patchwork of small tribal kingdoms and chiefdoms, villages with no higher lord than a few family elders (but if you think that means an idyllic democracy you’ve never lived in a small village or dealt with the disdainful tyranny of a grandmother), surviving and recovering cities governed by guild-masters or councils, or in at least one case a university… and robber-gangs in the wilderness, and would-be tyrants for whom one small tribe is not kingdom enough, and settlements of vhalgods who never knew their ancestral homeland, and vhalbairns of mixed ancestry, human and vhalgod, living among both. There is plenty of scope for struggle and drama in all that. Large areas of wilderness, too, are something I gave this world. There are hints of devastating plagues that swept the land in the darkest years during and after the civil war that ended the empire, and maybe it was never that densely populated to begin with. On the fringes of the settled lands, in that wilderness, European megafauna still roam, but human and vhalgod settlements may be spreading, hunting them into scarcity. Pony the storyteller says, you may never have seen a woolly rhinoceros, though she certainly remembers them.

All this leaves me free to write a sword and sorcery that has plenty of room for conflict and drama, while keeping the story more focused on a single adventure and not straying into 500-page epic territory, despite that being my perennial temptation. The heroes don’t need to defeat gods and tyrants, break the established order and prod a new and hopefully more just one into being – they’ve already done that. They’re tired. (Aren’t we all?) They’ve been resting; they’ve been healing, while their world did likewise. This – a quest to rescue a young man enslaved by a life-devouring witch – is what they do next, though in the course of their journey all sorts of shadows of their past and threads of the empire, which may not be as dead as they hoped, reach out to entangle them.

I hope you’ll want to join them on that journey.

* That is, the story is presented in an historical/pseudo-historical framework rather than in the more timeless fantasy setting of Romance, building on the foundation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Layamon, and Wace as opposed to Chrétien de Troyes and Malory; see Richard J. Moll, Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). Stewart’s The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills sit firmly within this “historical” tradition, while the third book, The Last Enchantment, moves away from Geoffrey and more into the domain of Chrétien and Malory for its source material, while remaining rooted in Stewart’s post-Roman Britain.

The author

K.V. Johansen writes, gardens, and plays classical and rock guitar (doggedly and determinedly, if not well), in New Brunswick, Canada. She is the author of a high fantasy duology beginning with The Wolf and the Wild King as well as the five-book epic fantasy series Gods of the Caravan Road, the first of which, Blackdog, was shortlisted for the 2012 Sunburst Award. She has also written a number of (occasionally award-winning) books for children and teens and two works on the history of children’s fantasy literature. She has an M.A. from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, a second M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, and is a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada. Various of her books have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish. As Kris Jamison, she is the author of the novel Love/Rock/Compost. Her website is at https://www.kvj.ca/ or find her on Bluesky http://@kvjohansen.bsky.social.

The book

From K.V. Johansen, author of the brilliant The Wolf and the Wild King as well as the extraordinary series Gods of the Caravan Roads, comes a gorgeous new fantasy told by a godling-turned-minstrel. Johansen is known for settings that feel steeped in history, where the past always intrudes to complicate the present, and for complex, often conflicted characters struggling to live with the consequences of their own actions, and Breath and Bone is no exception.

Information

Publisher site:             https://www.candlemarkandgleam.com

Genre:                          sword and sorcery, fantasy, LGBT+

Cover artist:                Laura Galli

Publication Date:        May, 2026

ISBN:                             978-1-952456-33-6 (print), 978-1-952456-34-3 (ebook)

Synopsis

Naskanna was the emperor’s vhalgod daughter, and then she became Naskanna Deathdealer, who killed the emperor her father, and disappeared with her lover, the wild godling Thallyn, when that war was over. Now she is known as Hedge, and she and Thallyn, called Pony for one of her favorite shapes, live quietly in the northwestern hills. But a desperate girl has heard their names, and comes seeking their help to rescue her lost brother, and the witch who holds him in thrall is their old enemy…