Today on the site I’m delighted to welcome Mia V. Moss, author of epic fantasy The Heresy of Thieves, and Justine Lombardi, author of dark fantasy No Man’s Daughter. They’re here to discuss their new books and their shared themes of the dark side of feminine power, righteous revenge, and queer relationships. Both authors are debuts, so congratulations to them on their first books, and let’s learn a little more about them!

Fugitive Kára, the bastard daughter of a legendary hero, builds a new life on the mountain frontier, until bounty hunters find her, shattering her family’s cherished peace. To earn a pardon, she joins a hunting party sent to retrieve a wampus cat’s hide for the High King. It’s a perilous task, as the cat stalks the domain of the fierce and immortal Jotun. To survive, Kára plunders her father’s tomb, tearing Tyrfing, the last arcane weapon, from his undead hands. The rifle can slay any monster, but such strength comes at a terrible price: bloodlust and an unquenchable thirst for power. Immersive, propulsive, and compelling, No Man’s Daughter combines Norse paganism with Appalachian folklore in a darkly magical nineteenth-century world, focusing on a woman’s fight to return to her family.

Buy it: Bookshop | Dark Matter Magazine | Books2Read | Amazon

The Heresy of Thieves by Mia V. Moss

Vael stole magic from the gods for Her people and put an end to centuries of unrest. Now magic is gone, and the battle for the Witchlands’s soul begins

After a millennium of prosperity and magic, one catastrophic night undoes the realm of Yvaelen. Magic has fallen, and prayers to Vael the Giver go unanswered.

Jal Riago knows when it’s time to move on from a con. She can’t maintain her false refugee heiress story forever, and her benefactors grow weary of playing host. Just when she’s about to confess and cut ties, a deadly raid sets Jal’s life on a collision course with a powerful entity reckoning with its own madness.

The young, steadfast King Thealys Vorrine inherited the throne of Dynestra after her parents’ deaths at Spellfall. But sparks of unrest flare all too quickly into the unpredictable wildfire of rebellion, and King Vorrine must forge headlong into unknown territory.

Royal knight and notorious rake Ember Carrado is trying his best to get fired. Instead, when he’s paired with a judgmental paladin and sent on a mission to hunt down a rampaging mythical beast, he finds himself face-to-face with the past he’s been running from since Spellfall.

Beacon Wylda Lorcanthas wields a sharp tongue and the second-highest office in the Church of Vael. When the head of the Faith dies, Wylda must seek out a biddable successor. Unfortunately, the clergy’s clear favorite is a charismatic priest who promises the restoration of magic-for those willing to partake of a bloody cost.

The dark betrayal behind Spellfall, and the very fabric of Yvaelen’s faith, will be hidden no longer. What began with a thief’s touch will end with a reckoning. And salvation for some may be a waking nightmare for others.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | Dark Matter Magazine | Books2Read

And now, please welcome Justine Lombardi and Mia V. Moss!

Justine: It’s great to talk with you again, Mia! I thought we’d get straight to it and start with our pitches?

Mia: I’m so excited to chat, Justine! What a year this has been for the both of us. Okay, so here’s my pitch for The Heresy of Thieves: If you are, or have ever known, a queer train wreck, if you love velvet coats and high fashion with too many buttons, if you wish fantasy realms involved more street food, if you ever found yourself getting resentful when reading a fantasy book where everyone in the worst circumstances possible somehow has their shit together way better than you on your best day. If you sometimes wonder: what if those adorable jumping spiders I see sometimes were the size of cats, and what if I could snuggle one, this is the epic fantasy for you!

Justine: That’s awesome.

Mia: Thanks, that might be the best pitch I’ve ever given for the book. How about you? Tell us about No Man’s Daughter.

Justine: Okay, the short answer is No Man’s Daughter is Norse paganism meets Appalachian folklore in a tale of a fugitive mage and her ancestor’s cursed gun. It’s available in ebook, audio, and paperback.

The slightly longer version is: I’m a complete dork obsessed with Norse sagas, and a little-known one called Heidrek the Wise features his mom for the first third: the shield maiden Hervör. One thing she does on her adventures is visit her undead dad’s tomb, and they get into a medieval rap battle over his cursed sword. And the first time I read that, years ago, I’m like, how is this not a movie, 8 novels, a comic book, and a TV show? This is, like, the best idea ever.

Mia: Yeah. That sounds incredible, actually. I want the Hervörverse, please.

Justine: I decided, like, okay, well, I’m gonna do it. And I have a rural background. Redneck through and through. I know guns, so I’m gonna fast-forward this to the 1800s, and I’m going to make it a cursed gun instead of a sword.

The story follows Kára, a fugitive blood mage; bounty hunters attack her found family, and she’s given a choice by an exiled priest. Hey, you can come join me on this expedition to retrieve a Wampus fur—that’s an Appalachian folk cat—for the High King, and I’ll get you a pardon. The team needs a weapon capable of killing a cat with a bulletproof hide, so they go rob her father’s grave for the last arcane rifle.

Mia: Great pitch. Love it, love it, love it. I enjoyed the hell out of your book cover to cover, and now I’m going to have to find the story of Heidrek the Wise. That sounds incredible on its own merits.

Justine: I wanted to talk to you about the “hot mess queers” vibe of your book, which I adore. You also have a queer normative world; can you tell me a bit about your thinking behind that?

Mia: Yeah. Thank you. That is a really good question. The queerness of the world happened somewhat spontaneously. At the very beginning, way back when I first started writing Heresy of Thieves in 2001, I was very young and let’s just charitably say, very untested in terms of writing my own novel. I was trying to follow along with the patterns that I’d picked up from fantasy novels of the late 90s and early 2000s. So initially, I had outlined that one of my female protagonists, Jal, was going to end up with one of my male protagonists, Galen. I was like, oh, and of course, they get together. That’s just how these things go. But the more that I wrote her chapters, and the more that they were around each other, I realized that Jal was actually making heart eyes at another female character (who I adore).

I got to a point in my draft where she and the male character had no chemistry at all in that romantic way, and that side plot was falling apart. So I leaned into where it felt like the character wanted to go, and said great, let’s run with it! It turned into a whole bunch of delicious secret sapphic longings on Jal’s part. And after that I went, okay! Anyone else have anything they want to share with me? And then I just sort of blacked out, and when I came to, everyone was queer, and that’s how the world is.

There’s no straight characters in the book whatsoever.

I’m curious about your take on your world and the queerness in it. You have a lot of queerness running through a world that seems to have more parallels to our own. I’d love to hear how you were navigating that in your mind with the norms and undercurrents in your world.

Justine: The frontier blends people from different places, and that comes into play in how people react to queerness. There are pagans like Kára, the monotheistic Silver Star followers, and the shamanistic Katan.

Norse culture had a very complicated understanding of gender and sexuality that we shouldn’t conflate with our modern conceptualization. However, my fictional version is queer-okay culture. Unless you’re upper class and need heirs.

Ada, the person Kára yearns for throughout the book, follows the Upright Path of the Silver Star. Ada’s culture prohibits queerness. Because of this, she treats Kára as a sister and co-parent, but there’s definitely love there.

Then there’s Bjorn, who’s in a relationship with Vidar. Bjorn’s mother is from the Katan tribal group. They’re a queer-normative society. Including polyamory, so he thinks nothing of him and Vidar being friends with benefits with Kára, so long as everyone is consenting.

I like the idea of cultures that conflict, and when people can find… like, Ada and Kára have found a way to live together. It’s not quite working, but they’re trying.

Mia: I love the way that you introduced those clashing cultures with none of it being so easily cut and dry. As you say, in the frontier, it’s not often a head-on clashing of wills in battle. It’s more of an environment of passive compromise, and unspoken adjustments, where everyone’s trying to make space for each other and themselves and just get through the day in peace. That was really well done.

Justine: Thank you. The thing is, survival is so tenuous on the frontier that you can’t really waste energy fighting each other.

Mia: Right, you can’t even go outside sometimes. You’ve got to live with the people hunkered down at the tavern next to you.

Justine: Yes. For example, the Silver Star followers believe magic pollutes the soul. But there’s the Killing Frost, a cursed weather phenomenon that freezes anything not native to the Uplands frontier, including people. Without the rune walls, they would die. So they make exceptions. They make exceptions for neighbors of different faith traditions because violating the law of hospitality could mean killing them. And the situation might be reversed someday.

Mia: One hundred percent. I think it’s interesting how both of our books focus on characters who have people trying to tell them how to be: where they should live, how they should live, how they should behave. And in both books our characters are kind of having none of that. Yours more than mine, I think. Some of my characters are actually extremely preoccupied with making sure they fit that mold. At least at first.

Justine: Your choices are your own. Don’t let anyone take them from you. Kára’s mentor raised her to believe this. Also, even though her father was a legendary hero, her mother was a slave. Kára spent the first ten years of her life being systematically denied her choices, and she fears that.

Kára is a girl against the wall, and I feel like many women living in modern society today feel that way. At a certain point, you get pushed so far that you have to push back, which dovetails into one of the other things I wanted to talk about: dark femininity, rage, and righteous revenge.

We don’t quite celebrate it in our work. Like, hold on here, there’s going to be externalities to this; there’s going to be consequences, even if your anger is justified. I was thinking of the manticore character in your book.

Mia: The consequences of our actions! With the manticore… she’s really the combined consequences of two women trying to push out of their boundaries and live as they want to. And it was intentional that the outcome of that is this flame-eyed, poisonous, sharp fanged manticore lady, because I think the more someone tries to live as they are, openly and against the norm in our world, the more people try to convince that person that they are in fact a monster for doing so. And that assignment of monstrosity, being told that you are a monster just for existing, can then have very real negative effects on how that person then presents themselves.

The manticore is also in some ways the embodiment of having holding so much trauma in your body. After so many years of wanting to live your truth and then being kind of slapped down or told no, you must only exist in this way… When you’re told there’s no choice, that this is what your path is, it can spiral out of control to the point where that trauma is just running around doing a lot of damage to yourself and to a lot of people. So yeah, I really wanted to explore the accumulated consequences of trauma and tough choices with this character.

Justine: Can we talk a little bit about the aunts in your book and feminine power?

Mia: Oh my god, I had so much fun writing a gang of meddlesome old rich ladies. In some ways, they are avatars of locking down your own personal human qualities. They see that sort of stuff as a weakness. If you fall in love the wrong person? Too bad, cut that person out of your life. You can’t afford an affair. They were brought up into a world where there was a clear definition of power, and it was that you either had power or you didn’t, hard stop. And they were definitely brought up to believe they needed to be the ones holding that power at all costs. That philosophy has crystallized inside of them over the years to the point where they’re very manipulative even with their own relatives and just about everyone they meet. They’re a strong family unit, but if you go against the goal of absolute power, you’re out.

Justine: The aunts, the powerful political players, are trying to maintain their choices by robbing other people of them. Then there’s Jalara, who basically gets her choices through subterfuge, pretending to be a noble. Feels incredibly guilty about it, though. Let’s talk a little about that character.

Mia: Jalara was really fun to explore as a character, in part as a contrast to the Aunts. Because when it comes down to survival, she, too, does what she needs to. She lies when she needs to, makes up a whole persona for herself, does whatever it takes to reach her goal just like the Aunts do. But as you say, she feels deep guilt about her actions. And then guilt for feeling guilty. She’s probably my most Catholic character.

Justine (laughs): Catholic character, yes!

Mia: And she does these things for reasons the Aunts would find abhorrent. Jal’s not out for absolute power. All she wants is to be comfortable and safe. In fact, Jal at one point gets mad at herself for stopping there at comfortable low stakes life instead of taking advantage of a situation to push for something more.

Jal is a younger adult (21) and is the youngest POV character in the book, so through her eyes we see what it’s like to struggle to come of age in a time when no one has any answers, the world is on fire and upside-down. There’s no more normal. Jal is desperately seeking a place for herself in the world and some steady footing to start from, and she’s also exploring what it’s like to have a crush on someone older and somewhat dangerous.

Speaking of character choices, I thought it was so well done how you presented Kára and her legendary gun, Tyrfing. The more she uses its powers, the more it affects her actions, and people around her take notice. They can see that she’s not behaving quite like herself, but Kára doesn’t see it at all. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Justine: Before Kára takes Tyrfing from her undead dad, he warns her that the consequences of carrying the rifle are losing everyone she loves, and she’ll become like him. And she… basically, she tells him off and says, “What you did for glory and power, I do for love, and that will be my shield.”

But two things about that scene.

One, she’s literally inheriting her rage. She’s claiming it from her father by taking the rifle.

Two, magic has pretty steep physical consequences. The gun gives Kára a way out of that. It pays her spell tolls. She becomes enamored with the weapon and the power it gives her. She enjoys killing people with it. Kára starts out with legitimate reasons for her violence: being robbed of her family and her freedom for things that are beyond her control, because she killed a man in self-defense.

But over time, she manufactures reasons as she shifts from justice to power for power’s sake.

There are negative sides to righteous revenge; at some point, you’re no longer the hero. I wanted to explore where the line is. When it comes down to it, is she going to step over it, or will she step back?

Mia: I think that’s really relatable, too. In the real world, you know, publicly expressing anger or rage almost always feels like a trap. Because if we allow ourselves to indulge in that self-expression, we’re almost immediately shut down. We’re told we’re too loud, we’ve spoken too much, we’ve made our disomfort too public. Last year was the first year I ever heard any celebrity speak openly about the stresses and pains of perimenopause and what happened? Immediately there’s people complaining on the internet about how ‘perimenopause is everywhere’ now and women just won’t shut up about it. Angry women are only publicly acceptable within a narrow set of conditions.

So yeah, I recognized that delicious, cathartic tension with Kara when I was reading your book. Kara’s navigating with that forbidden power that has traditionally belonged to a man in her family, and you can feel how good it has to be for her to wield that ability so effortlessly. And then at the same time, you see her teetering at the edge and there’s so much tension in watching to see where she takes it.

Justine: Awww… Thank you!

Mia: I have one last question for you, speaking of lurking dangers. Both of our books feature a world with a lot of environmental dangers and forbidden areas. I’m curious to know more about how you developed the dangers of your world and the environment. Was the Killing Frost there from the beginning? Or did you add that in later?

Justine: I got the idea for The Killing Frost before I even wrote that novel. My grandparents were farmers. Everything revolves around the first and the last frost. Plant too early, you lose your crops to a spring frost. Plant too late, and they don’t mature enough before the fall frost.

We have this phrase: “hard frost” or “killing frost.” So I always thought, what if you amplified it? I saw it as an ice wind with a deadly, rolling-fog aspect that periodically spreads through the Uplands, claiming whatever non-native life it can. I wanted the Upland frontier to feel almost like space exploration in terms of risk.

Skaut, where Kára hunts the Wampus, is the land of the Jotun, Frost Giants, and they don’t tolerate human trespassers. At the time of the novel, the frontier is closing; they’ve figured out rune walls; the steam engine is on its way. Skaut is one of the last truly wild places. The thing with wild spaces is that they can kill you if you don’t respect them. I’ve been in harsh winter environments; that part of the novel came pretty quickly.

And how about you with Forbidden Places?

Mia: I had a similar thought in terms of frontier land and the vastness of those natural, wild spaces. There’s a whole nation in The Heresy of Thieves called Lloryn that you really don’t get to see. You meet some refugees from Lloryn, like Jal. When magic fell, Lloryn was immediately covered in sort of a fog dome. They call it a miasma. No one’s really sure what it is.

I wanted to play with the worldbuilding idea of spaces where there is no such thing as instantaneous communication like we have today. No one knows what happened to Lloryn or what’s happening inside the miasma currently.

And Lloryn itself, by the way, is very wild. Even before Spellfall. It’s only briefly mentioned in the book, but the cities of Lloryn are not static, they’re not held in place. The witches of Lloryn constructed their cities on moving platforms made of dragon bones from the dragons they’d killed centuries ago. The cities traverse Lloryn on reanimated bones in order to keep ahead of the very wild weather patterns they have in that region. So the place was already wildly dangerous in terms of, if you don’t respect nature it will fuck you up.

Justine: I have given absolutely zero thought to how we were gonna wrap this up, but this seems like a good spot. Thank you for chatting with me. I had a great time.

Mia: Thank you for the conversation! I’m looking forward to seeing where we take our queer babes in our next books.

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Justine Lombardi holds a degree in history and works in the EdTech sector, specializing in accessible online course design. As a lifelong student of myth and folklore, she adores uncovering little-known stories and breathing new life into them through fiction. You can find her on Instagram as author.justine and at justinelombardi.com.

Mia V. Moss (they/them) is a science fiction and fantasy author from the Pacific Northwest, now living in the SF Bay area. When they’re not writing, they enjoy running around feral outdoors, rewilding gardens, building big art, DMing tabletop campaigns, mixing cocktails for friends, and admiring their enormous TBR pile. You can find them at https://www.magicrobotcarnival.com/.