Hello Patrons and general audience members! Welcome to another Books That Burn essay by Robin. Thank you to Case Aiken, who receives a monthly Patron shoutout.
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This is the fourth in a five-part essay series discussing two long-running book series by queer authors: October Daye by Seanan McGuire, and Inheritance by A.K. Faulkner. I chose these series because I love them both, they were intended from the start to be long series, neither of them are finished yet, and the authors have different structural approaches to developing each series across so many volumes. Purely coincidentally, they are both long-running contemporary fantasy series mainly set in California in or near the 2010's, with major characters named Quentin, and whose fast-healing protagonists have a tendency to quasi-adopt a gaggle of magical teenagers. After a brief moment in the 1990's, October Daye begins in earnest in 2009 and has reached 2015 as of the eighteenth book, while Inheritance is ambiguously set in the mid-to-late 2010's. Each of my essays focuses on a particular topic of importance to long series such as these two. They're designed to be intelligible on their own, and can theoretically be read in any order, but most readers will have the best experience if they start with the first essay and proceed linearly.
When a Villain Lives - Recurring Antagonists and Redemption Arcs
This essay spoils major elements of the first ten books of the Inheritance series by A.K. Faulkner, and of the first sixteen books in the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire. It discusses themes of murder and death, as well as fictional depictions of kidnapping, rape, torture, and abuse/murder of children.
Introduction
In a well-constructed series, there's room for some villains to become at least half as complex and narratively important as the heroes they oppose. In long-running series concerned with character growth and development, such as October Daye and Inheritance, characters initially introduced as antagonists can become quite complex over the series, and might not be bound to the alignment of their original appearance. Given enough time and narrative focus, they can be as detailed as any other primary or secondary character. This, of course, assumes that they survive their initial encounter.
When a villain dies in a way where they cannot reenter the story, that's the end of them. This is somewhat obvious and a bit boring, as far as the villain is concerned. But, when a villain lives, a swath of possibilities open up for that character in the rest of the series. The easiest option is to continue to be terrible in a way that forces another encounter with the hero, establishing themselves as a recurring villain. Subtly different in the short term but possibly the same in the long term, they can keep being terrible but become logistically helpful in a way that's hard to replace. In the middle there's my favorite pair: either pretend to be terrible but actually get better, or pretend to get better but actually stay terrible. This might merge into a cycle of starting to get better, not actually making meaningful changes, and continuing to be terrible at intervals. If the conflicted character has lost their sense of alignment, they might be switching allegiances as needed, fickle and untrustworthy, but not quite meaning to lie each time they're sure they've changed once and for all. Finally, they might have a full redemption arc and actually get better, working on themselves as a person and changing to someone good, whether or not they eventually team up with the protagonists.
Over a long enough series, a villainous character might spend several books clearly of one type before changing into another. It's hard to hover in the middle forever, and if they continue to be in play their story will most likely resolve into either unmistakable villainy or genuine reform and redemption. October Daye and Inheritance are still in process, Seanan McGuire having released October Daye books seventeen and eighteen in 2023, and with A.K. Faulkner releasing Inheritance book ten in 2024 plus book eleven forecasted for 2025. None of the villains I'll discuss have necessarily reached their final state, since even those who have solidly landed on a side of the recurring/redeemed dichotomy could have something change before their respective series conclude. That being said, the villains under discussion have spent long enough in their particular states to be worth commentary.
Still Terrible: Countess Evening Winterrose
In her first appearance of the October Daye series, Countess Evening Winterrose appears to have been murdered at the beginning of ROSEMARY AND RUE. In a final phone call to October "Toby" Daye, the series' protagonist, she leaves a message magically binding Toby to find the ones who did this to her. Evening's first actual appearance will not be until several books later, when she shows up, very much alive, and upset at what has happened in her knowe since her apparent death, such as freeing the pixies and installing a mixed-lineage Count. She is upset by these things because she seems to like the idea that pixies trapped in glass will die in the course of serving as lighting fixtures (a fate which serves them right as vermin), and because she is a bigot who is deeply upset by the idea that a Merrow and a Daoine Sidhe would be together romantically, let alone have children from their union. In the course of trying to undo the changes Toby helped implement, Evening reveals herself as Eira Rosenwhyr, the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn. That book ends with a new status quo, where Evening is in a magically induced slumber, hopefully out of the picture for the next hundred years.
The hope that a magical slumber would remove her as a threat was short-lived, however, as she is not done messing with people's lives. The Firstborn of a particular line of Fae is, as a rule, far more powerful than any of their descendants, and Evening/Eira is no exception. She is obsessed with power and is able to control ordinary Daoine Sidhe if she can get in the same room as them. In order to keep this advantage without giving herself away, she was pretending to be just one of them in substance, though very high in status as the Countess Evening Winterrose. Before hiding her identity in a series of similar aliases over the centuries, Eira bade the Daoine Sidhe to amass crowns and children, two kinds of power, for when she eventually returned. Once in an elf-shot slumber after her encounter with Toby, because she is asleep -- not in spite of it -- Evening is free to torment certain people in their dreams, attempting to manipulate and arrange things even though she is not physically present.
Held in distant slumber but still quite powerful, Evening appears in the dreams of Karen, a teenage girl, daughter of one of Toby's best friends. This starts happening right as Karen is exploring her developing power as an onieromancer to walk in people's dreams. At a few key points Evening forces Karen to convey some message to Toby, threatening to plague Karen's dreams if she doesn't pass it on promptly. Evening's involvement is almost always bad for Toby, the only situation which may have been improved by Evening's meddling was one where things went the right way for Toby because no one wanted to be seen as aligned with someone as overtly cruel as Evening. She interferes at various points up through the fifteenth book, and likely will appear again, but the most recent entries shifted to focus on the first official appearance of yet another antagonist in the series, whose identity I will not spoil.
Logistically Important: Hieronymus D'Arcy, Duke of Oxford
One of the most straightforwardly heinous characters in the first season of Inheritance by A.K. Faulkner, Hieronymus D'Arcy is Quentin and Frederick's father, and Quentin's abuser. He has spent his life accumulating power of various kinds, focusing on those which let him manipulate reality to achieve whatever he wants. Sometimes that tool is his title, sometimes it’s money, and, on a casual, daily basis in his sanctum, it’s warlockery. He has no objection to using the most brutal tool at his disposal if it's the one he thinks will achieve his goals. The Duke is, in one of his most important and labor-intensive endeavors, completely mistaken as to whether he will achieve his goals with his chosen method. The goal is to ensure that his title, wealth, and magic are kept in the family for another generation. Since rules around British titles and primogeniture direct the first two items, the method he chooses for the third is to undergo a ritual to give his eldest son magic via thirteen years of rape and torture. This is built on a series of assumptions which ignore the reality that most people operate under. This is somewhat understandable, as the Duke's money and power already let him bend the universe to his will, and he sees magic as one more kind of power that it is his duty to pass on, as it was passed on to him. To the Duke, an unbroken legacy of as many kinds of power as possible is the important thing, and anything or anyone who is broken in the process is irrelevant as long as this goal is achieved. He was, as a child, a victim of this kind of thinking from his own father, but, by the time he has to decide whether to let this power cease or abuse his own son to maintain it, he follows the power, sacrificing his heart and Quentin's well-being. He made the cold calculation that the magic he intended to force upon Quentin would be worth more than the pain he caused in the process.
Once Freddy figures out what their father did to Quentin, he wants Quentin to kill their father, and he tries to manipulate events in PAGE OF TRICKS to force this confrontation to be a lethal one for the Duke. Quentin, however, does not want to be a killer, and has not, at this point, accepted that some people exist who will not be stopped except by death, that they will abuse and murder for their own ends, calling it necessary or good. Quentin, at this point, decides not to kill his father, thinking that living with the guilt will be a greater punishment than ending him would be. Whether or not Quentin is correct, this means that the Duke is still around in Season Two. He has an enormous amount of magical knowledge, and some of it is not based in rape and torture, but in collected works of magic from other schools of thought and other practices. He positions himself to be a resource, waiting for the day that Quentin capitulates and comes home to learn magic and continue the line, two things Quentin has sworn never to do.
The Duke is fascinating as a character because his kind of evil is one which many abusers engage in even without access to magic or anything specific to gain from their abuse. He's awful for having made the cold calculus that what he wanted to achieve was worth specifically abusing his own son, with no abstraction of distance to pretend a lack of culpability. He tortured Quentin directly, with his own body, and freely admits it when eventually confronted. If Quentin had killed his father in their battle in the end of PAGE OF TRICKS, it would be over, but once Quentin let him live it's hard to figure out another time to actually end things. He stands in contrast to a different warlock, Vincent, whose recurring villain status is cut short (probably) after his death in Season Two. Vincent was powerful and sloppy, routinely taking some amount of pleasure in rape, torture, and murder, not bothering to get the blood out of his clothes. He even murders a baby because its presence annoyed him. There was no chance of compromise with Vincent, not as he is presented in WHEEL OF FATE (the tenth book), but that doesn't make the Duke automatically better than him in a meaningful way. Quentin's partner, Laurence, could kill Vincent to put a stop to him without feeling guilty in the slightest, given all he'd done. Having set aside the opportunity to kill the Duke in PAGE OF TRICKS, if Quentin at some point declared that actually he was wrong and the Duke did deserve death, it would feel like execution, not some level of justified revenge. If Vincent was obviously evil and unwilling to stop in a way that justified his death, the Duke is somewhere nearby on that sliding scale of irredeemable villainy, still around because he's not currently murdering and abusing, logistically useful at some key moments, but just deeply unpleasant to interact with.
Staying in the Middle: Frederick D'Arcy
Frederick "Freddy" D'Arcy appears in Inheritance initially as Quentin's well-meaning twin brother, showing up in the second book (KNIGHT OF FLAMES) to check whether Laurence, the commoner his brother has begun dating, is actually "a remarkably successful gold-digger". It transpires that Freddy is secretly a telepath, and in the fourth book (REEVE OF VEILS) we learn what he was up to during the events of the second book. He has been walking a metaphorical tightrope trying to help his brother without getting on their father's bad side, but right before the fifth book (PAGE OF TRICKS) his father forces his hand, coercing him into destroying his brother's partner in order to preserve his own. He is the villain of the fifth book, at least at first. He kidnaps Laurence and tortures him, trying to break him. Eventually Laurence is able to persuade Freddy to turn against the Duke, enough to not break Laurence entirely. By the end of that book, Freddy is definitely not on his father's side, but it's hard to say if he's actually aligned with Quentin and Laurence. As the person Freddy tortured, Laurence is unable to quite accept him back as fully as Quentin seems to (especially since Laurence waits a long time before actually conveying to Quentin how bad it was).
For most people, relationships are a path-dependent process. This means that the way something is achieved matters for the end goal. Not only do the ends not justify the means, but the precise means are a necessary part of achieving the ends. Freddy views relationships as a path-independent process, where only the end result matters. To him, especially in Season One, it doesn’t matter whether he alters someone’s thoughts if it makes the interaction go the way he wants it to. This greatly affects his ability to engage with other people without manipulating them at least as little in order to achieve the end he desires. If Quentin and their father weren't immune to Freddy's telepathy, he would likely have altered them to his own satisfaction long ago. There's a moment towards the end of PAGE OF TRICKS where Freddy tells Laurence he actually had a plan, and Laurence wants to know why he didn't tell him the plan at the start. Freddy says he would have had to remove Laurence's memory of the plan, which would make it like he hadn't asked at all, thus it was simpler to not ask and just get on with the plan to torture Laurence and restore him to a pre-torture save point when it was over.
Freddy's outlook was significantly influenced by some early advice from his mother about telepathy and power. Since, no matter what he does, he will have an immense amount of power in most interactions, he needs to be careful and know his limits so that he doesn’t end up in trouble he can’t fix, but he doesn’t seem to think there’s a moral difference to bribing someone vs adjusting their mind to make them do what he wants. When he picks a method, he focuses mainly on what works in the short term and has the fewest long-term consequences for himself, not what would be preferred by the other person
In Season Two, Freddy seems to be deliberately balancing between practicality and relationship-building. In SIGILS OF SPRING (book six) Quentin is kidnapped and tortured by Katharine Marlowe and her brothers, calling themselves Witchfinders. Freddy is working to avoid any consequences he can't mitigate or undo, because he couldn't be the one to fix it if Quentin were to die, and he can't rewrite Quentin's memories to affect how Quentin thinks of him. Freddy refuses to let go of the idea of making the Marlowes pay for what they did to Quentin and to the many before him they succeeded in killing for the crime of maybe having magic. He's taking steps to make the future he wants possible, even though he knows it's not what Quentin wants. Quentin would rather forgive and heal, at least that's what he says right after the event. Freddy refuses to accept a version of reality where people keep doing horrible things to his brother and then get forgiven and left alone to keep living their lives. First their father, now these Witchfinders... This seems like it will come to a head sometime soon, but, as of the end of Season Two, Freddy has managed to hide from Quentin the fact that he's still keeping tabs on the Marlowes and does not intend to let them get away with what they did.
Stuck in the Middle: Simon Torquill
The earliest named villain of October Daye, caught between the machinations and whims of two Firstborn, Simon Torquill spent over a hundred years burning himself up and corrupting himself to do as Countess Evening Winterrose wished, including allowing himself to be used and abused by her pet assassin, Oleander. Simon put himself in his Lady's hands in exchange for her leaving his best friend alone to marry a mermaid (Merrow) and live in the Undersea without further interference. Once he made that choice, she stripped further choices away from him by the force of her will and her power over him as the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn. However, Evening was not the only Firstborn to have control over Simon's life. His wife, Amandine, pretended to be a Daoine Sidhe, but was actually the Dochas Sidhe Firstborn. Even though Amandine was not Simon's Firstborn, she is very powerful and has a magically-backed force of will which was detrimental for him to be around constantly. By alternating between spending his time with Amandine and working for Evening, Simon wore himself thin until he couldn't see any way out of the pit he'd dug for himself. When their daughter, August, vanished, Amandine cast him out, leaving him no respite from Evening's demands and no room to protect himself from her magic without the protection itself poisoning him. By the time Evening ordered him to kidnap his twin brother's wife and daughter at the start of the main series, Simon had very little room left for his own choices.
In ROSEMARY AND RUE, Simon Torquill turned October Daye into a fish, and the transformation lasted fourteen years. As a pureblood Daoine Sidhe, while being a fish for a decade or two might have been inconvenient, it wouldn't have shattered Simon's life. He didn't understand that Toby, who is a changeling with a human father has a very different sense of time and pace to her life than Simon does. When Simon cursed Toby, she was married to a human and had a (mostly) human child with him. When Toby emerged from the pond, she was unable to give any satisfying answers to her husband and daughter, so they cut her out of their lives. In the early books of the series, the story of what Simon did to Toby is repeated intermittently, as an example of his cruelty and villainy, alongside the way he kidnapped his brother's wife and daughter. Several years after Toby left the pond and has rebuilt a life for herself, Simon appears once more, attempting to transform Toby yet again to get her out of the way of what he perceives to be a greater threat to her life than what he represents. During this second major encounter, Simon tells Toby that he transformed her the first time because his Lady, Evening Winterrose, had commanded him to get Toby out of the way. While he knew Evening meant for him to kill Toby, he had just enough wiggle room in the command to transform her instead. Along with the other kidnappings, at each point he was trying to find the option which would keep Evening from killing him without forcing him to kill someone important to him. Simon spends a long time trapped in this state, having hurt too many people to go home, but rejected by his wife for over a century after their daughter disappeared, with no end in sight.
Redemption Arc: Simon Lorden
Formerly Simon Torquill, Simon Lorden has one of the most satisfying redemption arcs in the series so far. This is made possible because he was not trying to be cruel for its own sake, but to protect the people he loved. Once circumstances changed (largely thanks to Toby), he was able to make choices which were better for everyone except his cruel employer.
After Evening Winterrose, now revealed as Eira Rosenwhyr, Daoine Sidhe Firstborn, was elf-shot and put to sleep for a hundred years during her clash with Toby, Simon had half a chance at getting better. Toby made the other half possible when she fulfilled a quest five hundred years in the making, bringing Simon and his missing daughter, August, home across several books. With his lost daughter found and all necessary parties available for the ceremony, Simon was finally able to divorce his wife, Amandine, Firstborn of the Dochas Sidhe. To the surprise of everyone, both Toby and August declared for Simon's Line in the divorce, and August joined him in the Undersea when Simon wed his longtime friend Patrick and his wife Dianda Lorden, mere minutes after Simon's divorce from Amandine was official. Over a century earlier, it was standing up to Evening on Patrick and Dianda's behalf which put Simon in a position for Evening to use and abuse him. The process of helping Toby on her quest, bringing his daughter home, and making amends for his previous misdeeds has already started to correct the scent of his magic to what it was before he began working for Evening. In the main series, part of his redemption arc is focused on putting him back in a position where what he needs to do to protect the people he loves is reach to them for support and work together for solutions, embracing community instead of trying to solve things alone. When he was caught between two Firstborn, neither of them let him feel like getting help was an option unless it had a price. Now, with Patrick and Dianda, he has people who care about him, and who don't require a payment of fealty or unquestioning devotion in order to give him their love and support.
It matters that Simon ends up on the road to recovery, and anyone who wants to follow that journey can read the short stories to learn the details of Simon's friendship with Patrick, Patrick's courtship of Dianda, and how Simon's life changes after the events of A KILLING FROST. The most important of these moments appear in novellas appended to the main series, but there's more to read for anyone interested. The novellas and short stories give space for Simon to heal, learn, and get better without constantly being in the same space as the people he hurt. By the end of WHEN SORROWS COME, Simon is welcomed at Toby’s wedding, and she accepts the strange twists of circumstance which have left him as her only legal parent, despite being only distant relations by blood. She publicly forgives him for the past in the beginning of BE THE SERPENT, embracing him and rejecting the idea that she should continue to blame him, personally, for past harms done at the behest of someone else. He has other people to help him day to day, and Toby has had room to process her own feelings about the past without burdening him with them as they both recover.
It is not Toby's responsibility to heal Simon, and the short stories allow the reader a view into that process if they wish, without requiring narrative contrivances to keep his redemption arc in Toby's view. At intervals, when he's had time to process and work on getting better with Patrick and Dianda's support, he crosses paths with Toby once again, helping her face an even greater threat in BE THE SERPENT. While it's possible that someone could use magic to force into existence a version of Simon who is once again Toby's enemy, they would be starting from scratch or reverting him to an earlier time when he had been coerced into villainy to save those he loved. A version of this happened already when he was less reformed and still very wounded, but by the time the eighteenth book is complete it seems clear that Simon is firmly among the heroes and a cherished part of Toby's family, though things are often complicated.
What's Next?
Structurally, redemption arcs position antagonists and villains as people who can be understood in some way, with the capacity to make different choices later. With more than half of the Inheritance series to go and some significant but currently unknown portion of October Daye yet to be written, there's room for these antagonists to change a great deal before their respective series conclude. I focused on the path from villain to hero in a redemption arc, but corruption arcs exist to make the other direction possible. As well-written and complex antagonists, there's room to understand and appreciate them as characters, whether they stay villains or transform into something else. Their importance to their respective stories does not require them to be unyielding pillars of malice, and a redemption arc does not remove the consequence of their previous villainy, though it can be part of a restorative process for those they hurt.
Coda: Freddy and Simon
When pondering villains and redemption arcs, Simon from October Daye and Freddy from Inheritance have many parallels between them, but the way they are narrated has a large influence over how they are perceived. Simon, like Freddy, kidnapped his twin's significant other and held them hostage in a way that messed with their perception and was torture, all at the behest of someone more powerful who made capitulating to them seem like the only way to not get destroyed himself, and to save someone he loved. Simon, like Freddy, has a series of encounters with the protagonist where someone helps him to get out from under the person controlling him, and makes it logistically possible for him to make decisions without an enormous threat of magically-backed personal harm hanging over him.
However, Simon, unlike Freddy, has his recovery, healing, and personal growth take place in short stories and novellas which are available, but optional. Simon does his healing away from the people he hurt, but where the reader can witness it. This means that when he returns to the protagonist she can tell he's gotten better. Not only is he happy in his new relationship with Patrick and Dianda, away from people controlling him, but that relationship is not with yet another person who hurt a protagonist, so it feels less complicated to root for his recovery. Freddy, on the other hand, is dating Mikey, Laurence's former drug dealer and abuser. In PAGE OF TRICKS, the two of them work together to kidnap and torture Laurence in order to keep the Duke from destroying Mikey.
By the time I read Freddy's arc, I'd already read Simon's, and that, combined with my love of telepaths, positioned me to positively view the work that Freddy is putting in. I do agree that it's harder to believe when, due to how the series is structured, he doesn't get to have hundreds of pages of short stories of him processing and dealing with things. I'm glad that Laurence's mother makes the framing clearer in an introspective moment from Season Two, when she thinks over who Freddy's community is, and decides that his brother, Quentin is the one who is positioned to help him, not her. She cares about him getting better, but has realized it's not her duty, he has other community who are closer to him. Simon and Freddy are not the same person and their paths may not continue to contain quite so many parallels as they have so far. Regardless, Freddy is currently positioned so that he has a chance at an arc of healing and restoration, whether or not he follows it to the end.
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