N. Jemisin: The Broken Kingdoms

YA: Remembering, actually. Many of the Maro stories in my records prominently feature enulai themselves.

NS: Yes, go on…

YA: Every member of the royal family had an enulai. The enulai would educate them, advise them, protect them from danger.

NS: (laughs) Get to the point, boy. I’m not getting any younger.

YA: Protect them, often using strange abilities that the Litaria has designated unlikely or impossible—

NS: Because you scriveners don’t make your own magic. You borrow it, secondhand, using the gods’ language. But if you spoke the magic yourselves—if that didn’t kill you—or, better still, if you could simply will a thing into being, you could do all that the gods do. And more.

YA: Enulai Sarfith, I wish you had not told me this.

NS: (laughs)

YA: You know what I must do.

NS: (more laughter) Ah, boy. What does it matter? I am the last descendant of Enulai—daughter of Enefa, last-born of the mortal gods who chose to spend their brief days among humankind. All the Maro’s kings and queens are dead. All my children and grandchildren are dead. All of us who carried the Gray Mother’s blood—we’re as dead as she is. Why should I bother hiding anymore?

YA: (speaks to a servant, sending for guards)

NS: (while he speaks, softly) All gone, demonkind. All gone. No need to search for more. None left. 5

YA: I’m sorry. (garbled)

NS: Don’t be. (garbled) destroyed the last of demonkind. No need to search for more now.

YA: No need to search for more.

NS: There are no demons left in the world, anywhere.

YA: None left. (garbled, until the guards come) Farewell, Enulai. I’m sorry it had to turn out this way.

NS: (laughing) I’m not. Good-bye, boy.

[Interview ends] 6

Since I thanked everybody and everybody’s sister in the acknowledgments of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms , here I’ll offer some literary/artistic acknowledgments. Fitting, since The Broken Kingdoms is a more, hmm, aesthetic book than its predecessor.

For the vocabulary of encaustic painting, sculpture, and watercolor used herein, I again thank my father, artist Noah Jemisin, who taught me more of his craft than I ever realized, given that I can’t draw a straight line. (No, Dad, fingerpainting when I was five doesn’t count.)

For the city of Shadow, I owe an obvious debt to urban fantasy—both the Miéville kind and the “disaffected hot chick with a weapon” kind (to quote a detractor of the latter, though I’m a fan of both). But a lot of it I owe to a lifetime spent in cities: Shadow’s Art Row is the Union Square farmers’ market in New York, maybe with a bit of New Orleans’s Jackson Square thrown in.

For several of the godlings, particularly Lil, Madding, and Dump, I thank my subconscious, because I had a dream about them (and several godlings you’ll meet in the third book of the Inheritance Trilogy). Lil tried to eat me. Typical.

Oh—and for a taste of how people in a major city might cope with a giant tree looming overhead, I acknowledge my past as an anime fangirl. In this case, the debt is owed to a lovely little shoujo OAV and TV series called Mahou Tsukai Tai , which I highly recommend. The problems caused by the giant tree were handled in a much more lighthearted manner there, but the beauty of the initial image lingers in my mind.