A long time ago, I had a dream. A small group of women stood on a frozen sea, the wind whipping snow across the meager fire they’d lit to keep warm. Behind them was a massive, frost-painted ship. Locked in the ice. Broken by it. A slight young man was with them, teeth chattering from the cold water he’d just escaped. One of the women—the one in charge—looked around at them all with both pity and determination. I heard the voice in her head as if it was my own. Helm to the end.
I don’t know how it is for other authors, but a lot of my stories start this way: I wake up with a scene in my head that’s viscerally real, and I have to figure out just what the hell it is. In this case, I wrote an initial short story about the desperate mission this crew was on to find a secret weapon.
Not long after the publication of my third Shards novel, my then agent was approached by Audible, wanting to know if I’d write a novella for them. As luck would have it, I’d been fiddling with my ship-in-the-ice story for a few years at that point, adding more and more depth to the world and characters. I gave it a final polishing, trimming out some story threads to make it the proper length, and it appeared as the audiobook Black Crow, White Snow.
It did well.
Bestseller-for-a-couple-of-months well.
Audible was pleased enough to ask if I would be interested in writing a trilogy of novels in the world. I answered “Yes”—obviously—because I knew I had a much larger story of these characters in mind. I also had a much larger picture of their world, thanks in part to the inadvertent help of N. K. Jemisin and a creative writing class I was teaching around that time. I talked about this in the acknowledgments of Seaborn, the first book in this series.
Writing Bela’s backstory in Seaborn and then expanding the events of Black Crow, White Snow from a short novella into the larger novel you’ve just finished allowed me to tell a far deeper and richer story of why she and her crew found themselves on that ice and what happened to them there. So Iceborn is, I would say, my preferred truth of these events. But it would not exist if not for Black Crow, White Snow, so my first thanks here go to those who made that prior novella a reality: Paul Stevens, Steve Feldberg, Janina Edwards, and of course the many listeners who gave it a hard push on the charts.
I don’t listen to audiobooks myself, and they’re rather hard to put on the bookshelf. So the fact that the Seaborn Cycle is now available in this beautiful print copy is a dream come true. For this, I am enormously grateful to my agent, Georgina Capel, along with the extraordinary folks at Head of Zeus and Ad Astra: Nicolas Cheetham, Charlie Hiscox, Sophie Whitehead, Zoe Giles, and Simon Michele—the last of whom created the stunning covers for the series.
The support of friends and family is vital to me, so as ever I owe them all thanks. I dedicate Iceborn to my parents specifically, however: Though this is the second book in the Seaborn Cycle, it is in some sense the start of it for the reasons outlined above. It seemed right, then, to dedicate this one to Mom and Dad, who were always unwavering in their support of my dreams—even at the start when I’m sure the stories sucked.