AUTHOR’S NOTE

Endings are bittersweet. In this case, mostly sweet. Readers of the four volumes of the Copernicus Legacy, of which this is the last, and of the two installments of its associated series, the Copernicus Archives, will find in Crown of Fire the completion of an epic journey that began for me five years ago, and I—and I hope those readers—have come to know its participants like a close and loving family. When Wade, Becca, Darrell, and Lily walked into my life, they stayed, and are here still, walking, talking, joking, running in my heart constantly, enlivening my days, making life larger and more exciting than it might appear from the outside, but I think this is the pleasant fate of all writers.

Readers ask, “Where do your characters come from?” My answer is from the world, certainly, but mainly from the mind and heart and emotional history of the writer. This is true even of the evil characters. So it’s no surprise that I love that trio of very bad folks—Markus Wolff, Ebner von Braun, and, of course, the classy young villainess, Galina Krause, she of the odd and sorrowful past. I am close to them all, and I know some readers are, too, despite the, um, negative things that they do. Nobody’s perfect.

I also have to mention Rosemary Billingham, Simon Tingle, Isabella Mercanti, Archie Doyle, Helmut Bern, and the dozens of supporting personnel who added such quirky color to my interior life through the last five years. Oh, and Nicolaus Copernicus, himself. He and his world (a big one, including Leonardo da Vinci, Lucrezia Borgia, Thomas and Margaret More, Magellan, Barbarossa, Joan Aleyn, Hans Holbein, and a vast array of others) blossomed with life in my mind, too. I do love history, and I’m happy to have sketched some of these remarkable characters on the page.

Maybe I’m most proud of taking readers on a long global journey to different countries and continents, into varied cultures, and through several religions, in the same way that I learned about those things when I was young—by reading about them. Creating an international landscape in these six volumes was a feature impossible to attain, I think, with a shorter sequence of books, and for that I will always thank my gracious editor and the fabulous people at Katherine Tegen Books.