Fire Warlocks & Swordfights: An Interview with Melissa Caruso

Last year, we saw tons of great first fantasy series make their debut, and a Girls in Capes favorite was Melissa Caruso’s Venetian fantasy The Tethered Mage, which follows a ducal heiress named Amalia Cornaro who accidentally gets herself tethered to a fire warlock named Zaira in an effort to stop the city from burning down. That situation alone is politically sticky, but that’s just the start of Amalia and Zaira’s adventure.

The Tethered Mage will be the first in a trilogy, with the second book forthcoming in just a month. In the meantime, we sat down with Melissa Caruso to talk about what’s been going on in the meantime and what readers can look forward to in the future.

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Hi Melissa, and thanks for taking some time to talk with us before The Defiant Heir comes out next month! First, tell our readers a little bit about yourself and your writing.

Thanks for having me! I’m a lifelong geek and fantasy reader/writer, and I can be found most days writing in my beat-up comfy chair in my house in Massachusetts, covered in an assortment of cats and chain-drinking tea. (I’m such a stereotype, I know. Maybe when I’m a little old lady I can solve mysteries in the village!) I have two amazing daughters and an awesome video game designer husband. My debut fantasy novel, The Tethered Mage, came out in October, and it’s the first in the Swords & Fire trilogy, which follows the intrigue-ridden adventures of Amalia (a scholar and political heir) and Zaira (an ex-pickpocket fire warlock), unlikely and unwilling partners bound together by magic. As you mentioned, book two, The Defiant Heir, comes out in April, and I’m really excited to show readers more of the world and characters!

The Tethered Mage was our book club read last month, and we had a really lively discussion about the Falcon system, in which a mage gets tethered to someone who can seal and unseal their power. The first book in the series shows how the system defines the relationship that exists between freedom and safety. Can readers look forward to further exploration of the Falcon system in the Raverran Empire?

Definitely. The Defiant Heir takes the story to Vaskandar, a rival nation where mages rule and those without magic are serfs, even as Amalia and Zaira are still trying to figure out their own partnership as Falcon and Falconer. I don’t want to give anything away, but suffice to say that the contrast between the two very different systems leads to some, uh, complicated situations. Then in book three, a political struggle over the fate of the Falcons comes to a head, with that central conflict of safety versus freedom at the core of it.

A while back, you had a really great thread on Twitter about swordfighting in a dress. You mentioned that you’ve been swordfighting in dresses for years – we’d love to hear more about that. And possibly how our readers might be able to get in on some swordfighting-in-dresses action.

So there are a wide range of wonderful geeky hobbies that can allow you to get in on the swordfighting-in-dresses action: historical martial arts, reenactment, the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), and LARP (Live Action Roleplaying), to name a few examples. My own experience comes from LARPing, which I’ve been doing for over twenty years. If you’re unfamiliar with LARPs, think of them as a more hands-on way of experiencing a story, kind of like an escape room meets improv theater: you roleplay your character in costume, along with other players, while storytellers provide plots and characters for you to interact with, adventures to have, and problems to solve. The LARPs I play have live combat with foam weapons. It’s a wonderfully collaborative and immersive form of storytelling, and it gets you some exercise, too!

I’ll never forget the very first time I fought in a dress—my character had just gotten married, and I hadn’t had time to change out of my wedding dress when the forces of evil attacked, as they do. I picked up my sword and shield and jumped into battle, and I was like “Hey, this actually is just fine! I can totally fight in this thing!” (My own real life wedding gown was not nearly so fightable, alas.)

Or you could just attend swanky events with a rapier on your hip and do some light dueling while you’re there. I’m not going to judge you.

Probably our favorite aspect of The Tethered Mage was the fact that it’s a novel populated with a wide variety of women, all of whom wield power and strength in different ways. (I personally aspire to be Amalia’s mother when I grow up.) Was that an active choice on your part, or was it a natural result of your worldbuilding process?

The simplest answer is that my imagination is just full of capable, resourceful, badass women (I’m not gonna lie, it’s a fun place to hang out), and they find their way out onto the page. All my stories tend to feature a wide spread of powerful women. For instance, I was designing a world for a game a few years back and realized I’d made 5 out of the 7 monarchs queens, and asked my friends “Huh, do you think I should have a better gender balance?” and they were basically like “No one would bat an eye if you had five kings and two queens. Don’t worry about it.” And since then I’ve been like yeah, you know what, I am not going to feel bad if I tend to instinctively tip the awesomeness scale toward women in my stories, because that’s still only tipping it back toward the center in the broader picture.

Another answer is that one of my great pleasures in writing The Tethered Mage was setting up a cast of characters with different strengths that complement each other, and letting those different kinds of strength and power have their moments to shine. I used to write stories when I was a kid where the main character always had to be an amazing swordfighter or a powerful mage (or both, because I was a kid and why not). But now I have a deep appreciation for more subtle and nuanced types of strength, and how the ability to silence a room with a word can be more powerful than the ability to efficiently stab someone. (Though don’t get me wrong, efficient stabbing is still fun!) I love letting my characters play to their strengths, and I also love putting them in situations where the kind of strength they have seems useless. (Though in those cases, as La Contessa would say, “Figure out what you ARE good at, and make that the game.”) When you’ve got lots of significant female characters, no one character has to bear the invisible weight of badassery for her entire gender, so you’ve got room for them to have diverse strengths and weaknesses, to succeed and fail.

So I guess the answer is it’s both a natural part of my creative process (the wide assortment of strong women) AND an active choice (the diversity of types of strength)!

Oh, and La Contessa (Amalia’s mom) is one of my favorites, so I approve of your aspirations! Someday I really want to make mugs or little bracelets or something with WWLCD on them (What Would La Contessa Do?).

There’s also a delightful reference to the opening line of Pride and Prejudice in The Tethered Mage during a ball scene when Amalia tells Marcello “It seems a popular belief that the heiress to a large fortune must be eager to marry at the earliest possible opportunity.” Are there any other Easter eggs for readers to keep a careful eye out for?

There’s a nod to Hermione you might notice when they’re in Ardence. Oh, and there’s a historical hat tip to the amazing Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman to earn a doctorate degree, in Amalia’s family name. Those are the ones I remember off the top of my head in The Tethered Mage. (Sometimes I put something like that in and giggle to myself about it and hope people notice and then forget I did it! But I *think* that’s it for Book One.)

What can readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

The second book in the Swords & Fire series, The Defiant Heir, comes out on April 24, and I’m even now working on book three, which comes out in 2019. After that, I can’t say for certain… I have a project on the back burner which I’m hoping to get back to (another mystery-magic-and-intrigue fantasy, but different world and characters), and an idea for something a bit different I’m excited about. I also certainly wouldn’t rule out more books about the world and characters of The Tethered Mage if there’s sufficient reader interest! Suffice to say I fully intend to keep writing lots of fantasy novels for as long as I’m able.

Thanks again for taking some time to chat with us! Where can readers keep up with you online?

I’m @melisscaru on Twitter, where I’m fairly chatty, and I post about once a month on my blog at www.melissacaruso.net (which also has news about my books, events, and that sort of thing). I’m always happy to meet people there!

Thanks very much for the opportunity to talk to you and your awesome readers!

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Pick up The Tethered Mage now at your local independent bookstore or digitally via Kobo, or preorder The Defiant Heir at your local indie or on Kobo.

For previous coverage of Melissa Caruso’s work, you can check out our review of The Tethered Mage and the online book club discussion of The Tethered Mage.

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