Acknowledgments

What do you say when you reach the end of a path this long and grueling?

You thank the people who helped you along the way.

We’ve been thanking them at the end of each book, of course, but gratitude can survive a little repetition. Adrienne Lipoma, Kyle Niedzwiecki, Wendy Shaffer, and Emily Dare continue to be patient, supportive, and even (dare we say it) enthusiastic about this six-hundred-thousand-word digression from some humble gaming roots. To that set we must add the members of our Carrickmacross Discord, a.k.a. the Screaming Peaches, who have bonded over Discord’s most terrifying “welcome” gif and provided us with a wonderful community as we wrestle this kraken of a plot to its conclusion. The Wailing Plum is for you.

For this particular book, one bit of research assistance stands out. After Marie had the masochistic idea of representing the archaic speech of the Ižranyi with Middle English, she knew right away that she wasn’t going to be able to make that happen with only a dictionary and a reference grammar to help. A Ph.D. candidate in the English department at Harvard University stepped into the breach: Ahmed Seif, who went above and beyond mechanical translation of the original dialogue, navigating the multiple dialects of Middle English to find options that would balance accuracy against something approaching comprehensibility for the modern reader. If you still have difficulty with the Ižranyi speech, blame Marie for having this idea in the first place; she freely admits it’s her fault.

When it comes to the publishing front…do you realize how many people it takes to make a book happen? Even we authors sometimes lose sight of the number, but we’ve done our best this time around to collect the full list. On the editorial side, Jenni Hill, Tiana Coven, and Tim Holman; on the publicity and marketing side, Alex Lencicki, Ellen Wright, Angela Man, Paola Crespo, Natassja Haught, and Nazia Khatun; on the production side, Bryn McDonald shepherded this whole thing through the transition from laptop to bookshelf. Our gorgeous covers are brought to you by Lauren Panepinto, Stephanie Hess, and the wonderful artist Nekro. Nikki Massoud has done a tremendous job with all the shifting accents of the audiobooks—we apologize (again) for the Middle English!—with Tom Mis and Caitlin Davies bringing her work to all our listeners. And we must also thank our tireless agents, Eddie Schneider and Paul Stevens, with Cameron McClure coming in on the home stretch to help carry us through to the conclusion.

Thank you all for coming with us on this journey. May we meet again when the road leads you home, when the river meets the sea.