I promised in January that I would tell you whereGideon ends up in Book 3, and the answer is one that longtime readers may have guessed: Savannah, Georgia.
I have loved Savannah for a long time. I was a Girl Scout troop leader for seven years, and one of the trips we took was down to the Georgia coast. If you have ever spent a few days there, you already know why it is perfect for urban fantasy. The city is laid out around a grid of squares shaded by live oaks so old and heavy with Spanish moss that the light under them goes green in the middle of the afternoon. The houses are beautiful and slightly too quiet. Every third building has a ghost story attached. It is a city that feels like it is keeping secrets, which is exactly what I needed for a book about a hidden magical society.
So when Gideon gets the call about a missing child from a powerful sorcerer family, a child taken from a house wrapped in wards that should have made it impossible, he gets on a plane to Savannah. And once he is there, I got to play with some real places.
The Old Powder Magazine
On Ogeechee Road, tucked into a scrap of green a little way from the tourist routes, there is a small brick building that most people never notice. It is the Savannah Powder Magazine, built in the 1700s to store gunpowder for the city’s defense, and it is one of the oldest standing structures in town. Thick walls, a crenellated top like a tiny fortress, vines climbing the brick inside the empty doorway.
The moment I read about it I knew it was the front door to the Savannah Conclave. In the book, the Conclave’s regional headquarters sit hidden behind the magazine, reached only through a warded threshold inside the ruin itself. Most of the city has no idea it is there. That felt exactly right.
The Brenner house
The Brenners are Savannah’s old pyromancer family, and they needed a house that could hold generations of fire. I based their home on the Green-Meldrim House on Madison Square, one of the finest Gothic Revival houses in the South, with its ironwork and its oriel windows and its history as General Sherman’s headquarters during the Civil War. I gave it to a family who have lived and burned under one roof for so long that the walls themselves have soaked it in. If you visit the real house, it is much calmer, I promise.
The Conclave’s headquarters
For the building behind the magazine, I borrowed the bones of a very different place: the design of Nottoway, the enormous plantation house in Louisiana. I wanted something grand and old-fashioned and a little unnerving, the kind of building an ancient organization would have raised for itself in the 1850s and never seen a reason to change. I moved it, warded it, and hid it in the trees.
The rest
You will also find the squares, the marsh grass shimmering gold along the Savannah River, the barrier islands, and the long hot summers that a certain dryad in the book draws her power from. And Gideon’s mother has finally gotten her house with the picket fence and the raised garden beds, which is a small thing that meant a great deal to me to write.
I could not put every square and every street in one book. But if you know Savannah, I hope it feels like home. And if you do not, I hope it makes you want to go.
Book 3 is in its final polish now. More news soon, including a title and a cover, and a proper introduction to some of the new Mythicals Gideon meets when he gets off that plane.